ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
of James’s son, Charles, he had all but stopped writing for the theater. Between
1614, the date of his last large-scale performance (Bartholomew Fair, played both
in the public theater and at court) and 1629, when he tried disastrously to renew
his fortunes on the stage with The New Inn, Jonson wrote only two plays. In
1629, he also suffered a partially paralyzing stroke from which he never fully
recovered.
Wherever critics have traditionally located the zenith of Jonson’s dramatic
career—Carew identified it with The Alchemist in 1611, and Dryden, in a
phrase with which modern critics of the dramatic Jonson have since been
wrestling, pronounced all the later plays “dotages”—few have felt compelled to
chart a similar line of descent with the poetry, despite Jonson’s own wish to
characterize his final collection of verse entitled The Underwood as “lesser
poems of later growth.” That critics have not is owing in part to the sheer
generic diversity of the volume, its resourceful mix of old and new. Three
poems of devotion, suggesting a productive reading of Herbert’s The Temple
(1633), mark the entrance. Then appear, in only approximate order, a number
of elegies, both Ovidian and funerary, perhaps the earliest “suite” in the
language, as Hugh Kenner aptly called the ten amatory lyrics entitled “A
Celebration of Charis”; 32 one pastoral dialogue; a handful of courtly love lyrics
of the witty, Donnean kind (several read as if they were “answer” poems); “An
Execration, Upon Vulcan”; “A Speech according to Horace”; “A Fit of Rhyme
against Rhyme”; one sonnet, a handful of odes (Anacreontic, Horatian, and
Pindaric), one epitaph, several eulogies, an epithalamion, several birthday
poems, back-to-back verses on the theme of the poet versus the painter, some
satirical squibs and occasional epigrams, one funeral sequence lamenting the
death of Venetia Digby, and a few translations including Horace’s second
epode, “The Praises of a Country Life,” and the brilliant fragment
misattributed in the Renaissance to Petronius, “Doing a filthy pleasure is, and
short.” Last of all, and appropriately last because it seems to sum up almost
everything missing from Jonson’s later years and poems, is a translation of
Martial’s famous epigram “Vitam quae faciunt beatiorem,” or in Jonson’s
rendition of the opening line, “The things that make the happier life are
these.” Most of the genres and subjects represented here were to be of major
concern to the generation of poets immediately following Jonson.
There is also nothing lesser about some of the individual performances. The
epitaph on Vincent Corbet and the Epistle to John Selden are fully persuasive
poems, characteristically Jonsonian in sounding the depths of male friendship;
and “A Celebration of Charis,” along with being the most adeptly self-indulgent
and the funniest poem Jonson ever wrote, includes one of the most serious and
elegant distillations in English of current Neoplatonic views of love in the
section marking Charis’s “Triumph”:
See the chariot at hand here of Love,
Wherein my lady rideth!
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