ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
English to use a title with both a thematic and generic focus. (After Jonson, it
became common for lyric poets like Herbert and Herrick to signal major
organizing concerns through their choice of title.) In the context of the claims
being made about art by the poet, both his own and the high Jacobean culture
that supposedly helped to produce it, it seems only right that the folio should
conclude with a masque entitled The Golden Age Restored. Or rather, Jonson
made it seem only right by departing, on this one occasion, from the normal
chronological scheme in order to place this masque last. The volume might now
be read without a hitch as progressing from low to high, “from public forum,
through select private readership to the aristocratic patrons, Court and King,” 13
where it could finally end by embracing the age. It could also be read as a new
kind of epic, with “The Poet”—the high fashioner of opima spolia—its hero.
Poetry, marked off and near the center: 1616
Were Jonson merely an antiquarian with a large ego and some polish, it might
be possible to get around him as Suckling and others have tried to do: by turning
him into a caricature of ambition, a kind of sotted Sejanus, or into one of his
own humor characters, as Edmund Wilson did in a famous essay entitled
“Morose Ben Jonson.” If there is an element of truth in both responses—and
Wilson’s is drawn almost exclusively from the drama—the exaggeration seems
inevitably the result of the gentleman amateur or “man of letters” (or now
Foucauldian critic) sizing up the thoroughly entrenched and frequently
embattled professional. 14 But Jonson is also too significantly craggy, too variously
and deeply shaded, as his picture in the National Portrait Gallery suggests,
indeed too unpredictably hospitable to be routed from the canon with ease; and
if as a poet he does not quite stand with Milton, “Like Teneriff or Atlas
unremov’d,” neither does he sit with other poetasters of the period in the shadow
of Apollo’s tree. Although Jonson’s verse, of particular interest to us here, forms
only a small part of his output, it is an essential part, as the placement of the
two volumes between the plays and the masques and near the center of the
Workes indicates; as too does the fact that writing verse was a lifelong habit. And
it continues to make its mark, partly for the same reasons that Jonson turned to
his muse increasingly in later age when, after the death of James in 1625, his
fortunes at court declined: not because of its polish alone—how it embodies
convictions Jonson set down in his Discoveries valuing a perspicacious style—
but because of the grain underlying the polish, the kind of measured resilience
that makes ancients and moderns seem, at times, as if they were tracking him.
Few have ever taken poetry more seriously, in the best sense of that word. Even
fewer have had Jonson’s effect on the course of poetry.
With the exception of the songs from the plays and masques, Jonson’s poetry
falls into three kinds, all rooted in the classics: the epigram, with its resources in
Martial and the Greek Anthology; the epistle, especially as practiced by Horace;
and the ode, whether Anacreontic, Horatian, or Pindaric. There were
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