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 />
the “high dialect” of heroic poetry, Anacreon with the amatory muse, and<br />
Horace with a “mixed kinde”—they were alike in Jonson’s mind in one regard.<br />
They represented a notion of the lyric as elevated, highly wrought, and bold, a<br />
celebration of significance; a celebration, that is, not only of a significant<br />
occasion but of a signifying presence as well:<br />
Leave things so prostitute,<br />
And take the Alcaic lute,<br />
Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon’s lyre;<br />
Warm thee by Pindar’s fire:<br />
And though thy nerves be shrunk and blood be cold<br />
Ere years have made thee old,<br />
Strike that disdainful heat<br />
Throughout, to their defeat:<br />
As curious fools, and envious of thy strain,<br />
May, blushing, swear no palsy’s in thy brain.<br />
(“Come, leave the loathed stage,” ll. 41–50.)<br />
The ode on the failure of The New Inn, however, may well be one of the most<br />
painfully embarrassing poems in English and not just because, in blaming<br />
everyone but himself for the debacle, Jonson committed a lapse in taste and<br />
caused a scandal among the Sons of Ben. It is painful for the same reason that<br />
Lear’s “Reason not the need” speech is; for its sputtering helplessness. Jonson<br />
might have helped here to inaugurate a loyalist association of the ode with<br />
Charles that was to become the hallmark of later Cavaliers like Lovelace, but<br />
his pledge to reinvest himself as the king’s poet by “tuning forth the acts of his<br />
sweet reign:/And raising Charles’s chariot ’bove his wain” was so much whistling<br />
in the dark. As far as revenge was concerned, Jonson might just as well have<br />
said with Lear “I’ll do such things—/What they are yet I know not, but they shall<br />
be the terrors of the Earth.”<br />
Except, of course, for the revenge to be won from art. In the Cary-Morison<br />
ode, Jonson converted or turned the “simple fury” and “disdainful heat” of<br />
“Come, leave the loathed stage” into a profound act of imitation, into a<br />
profound act of reconfirming his significance as a poet (literally spelled out in<br />
the enjambment, “Ben/Jonson”); and he did so in the full classicizing sense<br />
rather than as a poet only of Charles’s reign. “Observe how the best writers have<br />
imitated, and follow them,” Jonson wrote in Discoveries in a key discussion of<br />
the requisites of a poet: “how Virgil and Statius have imitated Homer, how<br />
Horace, Archilochus; how Alcaeus, and the other lyrics; and so of the rest.” 34<br />
And to this line, one is tempted to say, add Pindar and Jonson. Although the<br />
poem might not be, technically speaking, the first attempt to imitate Pindar in<br />
English, Jonson’s thorough assimilation of specifically Pindaric features involving<br />
form and subject has made other candidates for this laurel a matter of academic<br />
debate. As has been observed of Jonson’s immediate audience, “even those who<br />
49