ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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