ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION<br />
of James’s son, Charles, he had all but stopped writing for the theater. Between<br />
1614, the date of his last large-scale performance (Bartholomew Fair, played both<br />
in the public theater and at court) and 1629, when he tried disastrously to renew<br />
his fortunes on the stage with The New Inn, Jonson wrote only two plays. In<br />
1629, he also suffered a partially paralyzing stroke from which he never fully<br />
recovered.<br />
Wherever critics have traditionally located the zenith of Jonson’s dramatic<br />
career—Carew identified it with The Alchemist in 1611, and Dryden, in a<br />
phrase with which modern critics of the dramatic Jonson have since been<br />
wrestling, pronounced all the later plays “dotages”—few have felt compelled to<br />
chart a similar line of descent with the poetry, despite Jonson’s own wish to<br />
characterize his final collection of verse entitled The Underwood as “lesser<br />
poems of later growth.” That critics have not is owing in part to the sheer<br />
generic diversity of the volume, its resourceful mix of old and new. Three<br />
poems of devotion, suggesting a productive reading of Herbert’s The Temple<br />
(1633), mark the entrance. Then appear, in only approximate order, a number<br />
of elegies, both Ovidian and funerary, perhaps the earliest “suite” in the<br />
language, as Hugh Kenner aptly called the ten amatory lyrics entitled “A<br />
Celebration of Charis”; 32 one pastoral dialogue; a handful of courtly love lyrics<br />
of the witty, Donnean kind (several read as if they were “answer” poems); “An<br />
Execration, Upon Vulcan”; “A Speech according to Horace”; “A Fit of Rhyme<br />
against Rhyme”; one sonnet, a handful of odes (Anacreontic, Horatian, and<br />
Pindaric), one epitaph, several eulogies, an epithalamion, several birthday<br />
poems, back-to-back verses on the theme of the poet versus the painter, some<br />
satirical squibs and occasional epigrams, one funeral sequence lamenting the<br />
death of Venetia Digby, and a few translations including Horace’s second<br />
epode, “The Praises of a Country Life,” and the brilliant fragment<br />
misattributed in the Renaissance to Petronius, “Doing a filthy pleasure is, and<br />
short.” Last of all, and appropriately last because it seems to sum up almost<br />
everything missing from Jonson’s later years and poems, is a translation of<br />
Martial’s famous epigram “Vitam quae faciunt beatiorem,” or in Jonson’s<br />
rendition of the opening line, “The things that make the happier life are<br />
these.” Most of the genres and subjects represented here were to be of major<br />
concern to the generation of poets immediately following Jonson.<br />
There is also nothing lesser about some of the individual performances. The<br />
epitaph on Vincent Corbet and the Epistle to John Selden are fully persuasive<br />
poems, characteristically Jonsonian in sounding the depths of male friendship;<br />
and “A Celebration of Charis,” along with being the most adeptly self-indulgent<br />
and the funniest poem Jonson ever wrote, includes one of the most serious and<br />
elegant distillations in English of current Neoplatonic views of love in the<br />
section marking Charis’s “Triumph”:<br />
See the chariot at hand here of Love,<br />
Wherein my lady rideth!<br />
46