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The reputation of Ben Jonson’s poetry has had its ups and downs. To his contemporaries and immediate successors he was ‘Saint Ben’, one of the greatest English poets, who, with his friend John Donne, dominated English poetry until the end of the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century readers were finding his style crabbed and unnatural; and by the nineteenth he was known chiefly as the author of plays and of a handful of charming lyrics which were extracted from them. His three major collections of verse – Epigrams , The Forest , and The Underwood – not to mention his uncollected dedicatory poems, were rarely read, and, if read, were often abused. The poet A. C. Swinburne said of the Epigrams ‘the worst are so bad, so foul if not so dull, so stupid if not so filthy, that the student stands aghast with astonishment’. Jonson’s verse began its slow revival in the later twentieth century, but still was often praised in ways which were either grudging or a touch offputting. He was commended as a master of the plain style, as an artful imitator of classical verse, and as the advocate of a ‘centred self’, which resists the distractions of passion and roots itself in a larger community of the virtuous. The terms of praise which came to be applied to his verse all suggest that there is something, in a pejorative sense, monumental about him – a vast classical corpus of a poet, who tells his readers just what they should find in what he writes. The suspicion that Jonson is just a little too controlled comes through very strongly in Stanley Fish’s extremely influential essay on the poetry.
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