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Title: Epigrams and the Forest (Fyfield Books) by Ben Jonson, Richard Dutton ISBN: 0-415-96749-X Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

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Summary: Ben Jonson's 'Epigrams' and 'The Forest'
Comment: Ben Jonson might with some justice be called the forgotten master of 17th century literature. Bearing in mind the degree to which not just English poetry but English culture is saturated in Shakespeare, this is understandable. But ignorance of Jonson does him an injustice, and our poetry a disservice.

Jonson, although remembered as a dramatist, thought of himself as a poet. (The contemporary term for a playwright was "poet". Indeed Jonson may have been the person who invented the word "playwright" -- as a term of scorn for those who made plays with no more art than a wheelwright makes wheels.) Fantastically ambitious, he had the unheard-of audacity to include his plays -- considered a disreputable form of writing -- in a large book of his 'Works' (the very title audaciously claiming for his writing a respect due, in contemporary thought, only to more valued genres).

A modern theatregoer might be surprised to find out that what Jonson introduced as "the ripest of my studies" were not his plays, but a collection of poems called 'Epigrams' (printed along with the plays and 'The Forest' in his 'Works'). If Jonson is the forgotten master, 'Epigrams' could be called his forgotten masterpiece. Saturated with the poetry of Martial, Horace and Catullus ("for a good poet's made as well as born," as he wrote wrote of Shakespeare) Jonson's epigrams self-consciously and stringently set themselves the task of rebuking and praising the age.

'Epigrams' is full of the variety of Elizabethan and Stuart London (Jonson is a thoroughly urban poet): its charlatans, hypocritical creatures, would-be ladies, bad poets, braggarts and moneylenders; but also of its King (James I), genuine poets (two epigrams are addressed to John Donne), and cultured lords and ladies. Both in 'Epigrams' and 'The Forest' (a collection of poems ranging from lyrics to odes to long poems dealing with the "virtuous and noble") Johnson is keenly aware of, and interested in, problems of authorship and readership. His first epigram implores the reader who holds the book "to read it well", and there are a number of poems that warn off readers who misread -- who laugh at the wrong point, out of sheer stupidity, or in an attempt to pretend that the poet's satire doesn't apply to them.

Jonson's classical style -- free of ornament and wilful obscurity -- isn't immediately appealing. (Shakespeare is both, for instance, and Donne has a famous delight in obscurity.) His poetry, perhaps like Goethe's, isn't great because it of brilliance, but because of its strength, something that becomes apparent only when the poetry has been fully absorbed by a reader. The moral weight behind his deliberate and scrupulous art is embodied in the attentiveness of his poetry to words and syntax. (His syntax, by the way, is one of the most enjoyable and sophisticated features of his poetry.) Perhaps what T.S. Eliot wrote of Landor -- another patently classical poet, but much more limited in his ambitions and achievements -- could be, with greater justice, applied to Jonson: "He is ... a poet for those who want poetry and not something else, a stay for their own vanity."