The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson

by William Bridges Hunter

494 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Jack Crouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

now i can be pretty sure that when jonson was shitting on contemporary poets in his conversations with william drummond, he was doing so out of envy. i saw someone write that “to penshurst” was probably his best poem and wanted to see how that was possible, since it’s a rather boring poem. well, a large proportion of his poems were written to flatter nobles for very predictable virtues, and jonson’s style is annoying in several ways. sometimes his expressions are needlessly obscure, and you have to look in the oed for the right sense of a word you thought you knew, if you care enough to find out what he meant, which i often didn’t. his syntax is often confusing and you sometimes have to reread a few lines several times to figure out what he might be saying. his verse is usually not smooth and you would have to stress words in strange ways to make it sound right. a few poems by john donne found their way into jonson’s underwood, and i thought that they really showed jonson’s defects as a poet, because they were so much more fun to read. his plays are much better. nevertheless, jonson’s style in his poems is still interesting for its difficulty and his satirical epigrams are sometimes witty. i give him credit for not caring about politeness and writing about stuff like shit. for anyone that wants to read jonson’s poems, i wouldn’t recommend this edition, which is old and has insufficient notes. instead i would advise reading them in the cambridge works of ben jonson online