Critic: G. A. E. Parfitt

Source: Essays in Criticism Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1968, pp. 18-31. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17

[In the following essay, Parfitt interprets Jonson's poems in light of the chief functions of his best verse, "energy, assuredness, and rhythmical alertness," contrasting their tendency to simplify and exaggerate.]

Although there is enough of it to occupy the bulk of a volume of the Oxford edition of his works, Ben Jonson's poetry does not receive much primarily critical attention. Part of this neglect comes from the fact that the plays are Jonson's main achievement (and even these live in the deep shadow of Shakespeare) but one must also take account of the doubts critics have expressed concerning the intrinsic merits of the poetry. These doubts usually take the form of equating Jonson's 'classicism'--that most protean of qualities--with dulness and alienation from any English tradition of language and thought, or of the belief that he lacked inspiration and was, in Coleridge's sense, a poet of fancy. The first of these reservations has had some recent attention and I cannot now take the discussion further, except to remark in passing that there is little in Jonson's thought or use of language which lacks English antecedents and that where he is distinctively classical (mainly in the lack of supernatural emphasis in his ethical thought and in the non-resonance and unusual directness of his use of language) it is in a way which does not make him an isolated figure. The second point is, however, the one I wish to take up here.

The suggestion that Jonson lacked inspiration is clear in Gregory Smith's remark that his poetry is without 'that spiritual suggestion which in master-verse lies behind the magic of phrase and rhythm' and again in Swinburne's comment that we can expect 'no casual inspiration, no fortuitous impulse' [Ben Jonson, 1919]. The Romantic background is clear enough--Arnold gone to seed--but, although outdated, these remarks have not really been displaced, as anyone who has read J. B. Bamborough's British Council booklet will appreciate. Dr. Leavis speaks well of Jonson's poetry and Yvor Winters sees his verse as the culmination of 16th century plain-style poetry. In addition one or two recent anthologies have included a larger and more intelligent selection of his work, but there is still little evidence that Jonson is being read more widely or more wisely than he was 40 years ago; mainly, I think, because he does not fit very well into the framework of metaphysical poetry, lacking the more striking qualities of that mode. Jonson, in fact, loses two ways: if we are critics or critically-influenced readers of poetry we are likely to look for, and most appreciate, density of texture displayed in such forms as irony, paradox and ambiguity; if we are more occasional readers of poetry or reactionaries we are liable to be close to the Romantic critical tradition. In neither case will Jonson be an obvious poet for us to read--and, yet, if we will read him, as we should, with as much attention and as few preconceptions as possible, we can see that he offers a great deal. An attempt to demonstrate this will need to take further account of the possible objections to Jonson, but it will be best to begin by asking what qualities Jonson's poetry has and whether they amount to anything very much.

It is important, first of all, to be aware of what acts as the basic impulse in Jonson's poetry. Part of Shakespeare's fascination is that the particular area of experience he is examining seems to suggest and define the moral values relevant to it. There is a remarkable lack of preconception in Shakespeare which makes him perhaps the most non-didactic poet in English, but it is a quality which appears in most great poetry and is, I think, almost part of any adequate definition of the term. Jonson, on the other hand, works largely from values to experience, for his a priori belief in certain ethical tenets governs his selection, analysis and expression of material. This is strength, in the consistency, weight and conviction it lends to his poetry, but also potential weakness in that it can lead to inflexibility and one-sidedness. But this feature of Jonson's poems does not make him that near-contradiction in terms, a purely cerebral poet. His intellect is usually less obtrusive than Donne's, acting mainly to keep the development of his poems clear and to focus them on the topic in hand, and the wrongheadedness of seeing him as a mainly intellectual writer can be demonstrated in most of his major poems (which, apart from 'To Penshurst', are not those most widely known). 'An Epistle to a Friend, to persuade him to the Warres' [The Under-wood XV] contains a mass of satirical detail which has obviously been selected to give a peculiar emotional slant to the poem: very little attempt is made to convince us by discursive reasoning of the alleged decadence of the society being examined, and instead Jonson overwhelms us with the sheer emotional weight of detail. In 'To Sir Robert Worth' [The Forrest III] there is a clear antithesis between town and country life and our intellectual reaction must be that the matter is more complex than Jonson pretends. If we give assent to the poem's vision it may partly be because our minds suggest an element of truth in Jonson's simplification, but it is mainly because his belief in this vision is made emotionally convincing by the pressure of the chosen details and by the impact of the confident rhythms. Although frigidity is a reasonable charge against some of the lyrics, a general reputation for intellectual pedantry is not justified in Jonson's poems and is an unnecessary blockage to appreciation.

But if Jonson's basic impulse is didactic in the way just suggested, what are the chief features of his best verse? The qualities I should stress are energy, assurance and rhythmical alertness, all of which can be found in the 'Epistle to a Friend' already mentioned:

Wake, friend, from forth thy Lethargie; the Drum

Beates brave, and loude in Europe, and bids come

All that dare rowse: or are not loth to quit

Their vitious ease, and be o'erwhelm'd with it.

It is a call to keepe the spirits alive

That gaspe for action, and would yet revive

Mans buried honour, in his sleepie life:

Quickening dead Nature, to her noblest strife.

Energy here is present in the clarity and immediate impact of the basic conception, and also in the concentrated power of such words as 'dare', 'vitious', 'o'erwhelm'd', 'gaspe' and 'sleepie', while assurance is the conviction that this (to our eyes) unusual attitude is reasonable in this context and the weight with which this conviction is pressed home. The rhythmical alertness is the way in which the stresses and sense-units are varied so that a strong emotional appeal and an impression of reasoned argument can co-exist with a kind of idiomatic directness appropriate to the topic.

It would be misleading, however, to expect from Jonson energy in an obviously striking form: he is not normally a coiner of instantly memorable phrases, but he has a remarkable fundamental strength which makes itself felt in almost any extended passage, and, as we become familiar with his poems, we sense also the unobtrusive local energy. The opening lines of 'To Heaven' [The Forrest XV] make their first impact because of their poise rather than of anything striking in the language:

Good, and great God, can I not thinke of thee,

But it must straight, my melancholy bee?

Is it interpreted in me disease,

That, laden with my sinnes, I seeke for ease?

O, be thou witnesse, that the reynes dost know,

And hearts of all, if I be sad for show,

And judge me after....

The words are self-effacing, passing one through to the overall meaning without asking to be examined minutely. But--and here another Jonsonian quality, precision of word-choice, needs emphasis--they can stand up to such examination, for while it will reveal few deep-seated associations and fewer ambiguities, it increases respect for the essential rightness of 'reynes' and 'interpreted' and understanding of how the conventional adjectives 'good' and 'great', and the standard image in 'laden', gain weight and point from the confident rhythms, from careful placing, and ultimately from the wider context of Jonson's thought.

The same process, whereby we slowly come to feel the strength of detail in Jonson's poetry, is evident in 'An Epistle Mendicant' [The Under-wood LXXI] where, rarely, there is a single formative image. The poem begins:

Poore wretched states, prest by extremities,

Are faine to seeke for succours, and supplies

Of Princes aides, or good mens Charities.

Disease, the Enemie, and his Ingineeres,

Wants, with the rest of his conceal'd compeeres,

Have cast a trench about mee, now five yeares.

The immediate appeal is emotional (sympathy for the bedridden old poet and admiration for the dignity of his request for help) but what is particularly impressive is how Jonson controls and defines his situation, almost objectively and without self-pity.

This is achieved by the use of a single image with no immediately obvious conceptual or emotional contact with his plight, and by the careful description of this 'external' image rather than of the plight. It is applied to himself in 'cast a trench about me' and 'block'd up, and straightened, narrow'd in, Fix'd to the bed, and boords....', and the application is an imaginative one, but Jonson makes no attempt to strike logical sparks from it and there is nothing startling in the choice of descriptive language. Yet its exactness is clear, perhaps most in the simple adjectives of the very first phrase: poverty and misery are the two aspects of a besieged town which most demand humane attention, and they apply with equal force to Jonson himself. Again, the poem's assurance is marked by the easy movement between abstract and concrete: 'Disease' and 'Wants' 'cast a trench', and the image continues the description of siege while applying metaphorically to the poet's isolation and incapacitation. 'An Epistle Mendicant' is a small-scale achievement but it is still impressive and the reasons why this is so provide a more general summary of Jonson's qualities as a poet. The technical achievement is one of economy, energy and exactness, together with control and rhythmical alertness. Behind this lie an ability to see the relevant experience in a wider context, and an ability to place it and to give it just the amount of emphasis and development it will bear, and no more. The achievement is a real one partly because it is small: Jonson will not inflate himself.

This discussion of Jonson's characteristics as a poet may have suggested how well his style is fitted to the demands made on it by the nature of his interest in the communication of an ethical attitude. A suitable style for this purpose must convince us of the validity of his ethical analysis, both by allowing direct and forceful comment upon the society being analysed and equally impressive description of that society. It must also seem serious without becoming so elevated that, in relation to the very ordinary people and activities under examination, it seems absurd. The style of Jonson's best poetry fits such a prescription well. It has the range for satirical detail:

Some alderman has power

Or cos'ning farmer of the customes so,

T'advance his doubtful issue, and ore-flow

A Princes fortune....

                       [The Forrest XIII 11. 38-41]

and for impressive statement of what is praiseworthy:

   Where comes no guest, but is allowed to eate,

Without his feare, and of the lordes owne meate:

Where the same beere, and bread, and selfe-same wine,

That is his Lordships, shall be also mine.

                              [The Forrest II 11. 61-4]

It can condemn directly with conviction:

'Tis growne almost a danger to speake true

Of any good minde now: There are so few,

The bad, by number, are so fortified,

As what th'have lost t'expect, they dare deride.

                            [The Forrest XIII 11. 1-4]

and can give advice with equal assurance:

Thy morning's and thy evening's vow

Be thankes to him, and earnest prayer, to finde

A body sound, with sounder minde;

To doe thy countrey service, thy selfe right;

                        [The Forrest III 11. 100-03]

The style and what it communicates should not too easily be set aside as trivial because, on the one hand, it shows little sign of inspired insights, or, on the other, because it yields little of the density of texture which we tend to admire so much. Not only is the style a fit vehicle for the content (I am aware of the oversimplification) but it often makes the sort of imaginative demand that we seek in poetry. Here is a passage of natural description from 'To Sir Robert Wroth':

The mowed meddowes, with the fleeced sheepe,

  And feasts, that either shearers keepe;

The ripened eares, yet humble in their height,

  And furrowes laden with their weight,

The apple-harvest, that doth longer last;

  The hogs return'd home fat from mast;

The trees cut out in log; and those boughs made

  A fire now, that lent a shade!

                                           [11. 39-46]

The corn, although ripe and high, is humble because its weight makes it bow and because it functions to feed Man, while the trees provide him with first shade and later heat. Jonson is trying to convey a sense of a satisfying Man-Nature relationship and he does this through smooth and balanced rhythms. The sensuousness of the passage from which this extract is taken is as apt here as it would be inapt in most of Jonson's work and is far more important than any intellectual perception we may have about the relationship in question. We are made to feel, as well as to perceive, that the relationship exists and matters. Later in the same poem there is another kind of imaginative demand:

Goe enter breaches, meet the cannons rage,

  That they may sleepe with scarres in age.

And shew their feathers shot, and cullors torne,

  And brag, that they were therefore borne.

Let this man sweat, and wrangle at the barre,

  For every price, in every jarre,

And change possessions, oftner with his breath,

  Then either money, warre, or death....

                                       [11. 69-76]

More by the rhythms than by direct statement Jonson reinvokes the folly and confusion of the life described at the beginning of the poem, and the even movement of the nature-passage just mentioned is replaced by a more disjointed motion, which brings out strongly the erratic nature of this kind of life and the contrast between energy expended and result obtained. Here again, the verse is embodying the imagined experience.

What does all this amount to? As already hinted it amounts to an attempt at the convincing communication of an ethical viewpoint, one which is not original but nevertheless coherent and consistently held and which has validity. The validity springs from its humanity and emphasis upon man as a social creature with social responsibilities: the fact that the strands which make up Jonson's ethical viewpoint are largely derivative, commonplaces of English, Roman or Greek thought, increases the validity because they represent centuries of thought and experience. We have seen that the ethical viewpoint is communicated less by discursive reasoning than by exactness of description and accumulation of detail, to which we must add restriction of the associative potential of words. The result is a kind of verse which is active and concrete, with a life which comes from simplification and restricted resonance. It is verse which makes no attempt to embody the fully variety and uncertainty of experience, and hence has little use for such devices as irony, paradox and ambiguity. Eliot rightly argued that Jonson's is a genuine created world, but L. C. Knights's remark that 'Exclusion was the condition of Jonson's achievement' [A Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, II, 1956] makes the vital point--to create an imagined world Jonson had to simplify. I am inclined to see the reason for this less in some deficiency in Jonson than as an inevitable consequence of having an ethical system regulating his selection and treatment of material. Simplification is a condition of his achievement, and in case too much should be made of this it may be as well to remember that Jonson's simplification is only an extreme form of any artistic attempt.

In the satirical poems this simplification is obvious enough, for selection and exaggeration is basic in satire, where all things must be black or white, with the black stressed, for if satire admitted the moral complexity of life it would cease to shock. But Jonson is not only a satirist, for he pays considerable attention to what he considers morally good, using similar simplification to describe this:

And such a force the faire example had,

As they that saw

The good, and durst not practise it, were glad

That such a Law

Was left yet to Mankind:

                  [The Under-wood LXX, II. 117-21]

What Jonson speaks of in his poetry constitutes a created world because of the consistency and coherence already mentioned. Considering the bulk of his verse this is a remarkable fact, but it is more important to realise that the creation and sustaining of this world depends largely upon the restriction of the emotive and associational power of words. Such power leads naturally to complexity and this would introduce doubts and questions to a world which only exists by their exclusion. This in turn means that, almost by definition, Jonson is involved in a kind of poetry which must severely restrict the use of some of the poetic attributes most emphasized by modern critics. What is lost is the complexity and ambiguity of Shakespeare's world, and even of Donne's, where more of the full range of human experience is present (both in total and at any given moment) than in Jonson's world. But it is tempting to draw an obvious conclusion too readily, because the Jonsonian world illuminates certain areas of the real one more intensely because of the narrow focus and more emphatically because of the distortions. The best illustration is from the plays. Of course Volpone is inhuman, but his inhumanity depends upon the exaggeration of some human traits and the omission of others. A comparison of Volpone and Shylock which concludes that the latter is the greater creation because more human would be both correct and beside the point, because if Shylock is more human it is also true that Volpone shows us more of Man's capacity to exploit Man and is the more striking example of what happens when the humane virtues are ignored. If Volpone ever made the appeal to our sympathy which Shylock does in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice the impact of Jonson's play would be diminished at once. It is only because the greed of Voltore, Corvino and Corbacchio is so absolute, and Volpone and Mosca are so faithless, selfish and ruthless, that the play is such a terrifying parable.

But the poems also illustrate that the simplification in Jonson serves a purpose. At its simplest this is evident in the brutality of the epigram 'On Spies':

Spies, you are lights in State, but of base stuffe,

Who, when you have burnt yourselves down to

  snuffe,

Stinke, and are throwne away. End faire enough.

[Epigrammes LIX]

We have heard enough about the modern spy to imagine that his Elizabethan counterpart was probably the same sad mixture of twisted idealism and greed, but Jonson allows us to see only the sordidness and expendability. The candle-image is made brutally one-sided but it illustrates certain aspects of the Spy's business with a degree of force which springs directly from the suppression of other aspects. We might also consider whether the impact of 'Stinke' (depending so much on placing), the contempt of 'End faire enough' (depending so much on the rhyme), the compressed irony of 'lights in state', and the manner in which the potential associations of the candle-image are restricted (for candles give a pleasing light and rich shadows) do not constitute a real poetic achievement.

In a more complex way the selection and compression of detail in the satirical epistles evokes with great power, the frenzied futility of a life lived only on the surface:

As if a Brize were gotten i' their tayle,

And firke, and jerke, and for the Coach-man raile,

And jealous each of other, yet thinke long

To be abroad chanting some baudie song,

And laugh, and measure thighes, then squeake,

  spring, itch,

Do all the tricks of a saut Lady Bitch....

                       [The Under-wood XV, 11. 71-6]

Although this is a far from fair picture of humanity, or of any individual, the unfairness--mainly through accumulation of active belittling verbs--makes it a very effective expression of how crudely mechanical and inhuman our life can be. The poem, as a whole, extends our experience of ourselves in the manner of Juvenal or Breughel, or as Gillary does with the brutality of his cartoons.

I have suggested that there is a similar kind of valid simplification in Jonson's description of what he sees as morally good. This description often occurs in his complimentary poems, a genre in which we do not expect measured criticism, but Jonson is unusual in that the qualities he celebrates are always those which belong to his own ethical position: he never praises one man for qualities condemned in another and never praises actions or attributes which, on other evidence, he would normally condemn. This consistency, together with the deep personal feeling for a set of ethical beliefs, gives Jonson's complimentary verse a sense of conviction which it would otherwise lack. Nevertheless, the convention of the genre whereby only the good is mentioned, and the fact that the good celebrated refers outside the individual concerned to an ethical code which is by definition generalised, means that human material is simplified and idealised, so that morally good qualities stand out, like caricature in reverse:

Jephson, thou man of men, to whose lov'd name

All gentrie, yet, owe part of their best flame!

So did thy vertue enforme, thy wit sustaine

That age, when thou stood'st up the master-braine:

Thou wert the first, mad'st merit know her strength,

And those that lack'd it, to suspect at length,

'Twas not entayl'd on title.

                                  [Epigrammes CXVI]

This is very ordinary Jonson, and in praise of an almost-forgotten man: it would be easy to leave it at that, except that the exaggerations contribute to a statement of one of Jonson's firmest beliefs (that merit and title are not synonymous) and that the assurance of the rhythms and weight of the language (entail, inform, sustain) communicate a seriousness which goes beyond mere flattery.

In a more ambitious poem like 'To Penshurst' simplification operates in a less obvious way. The poem is Jonson's most successful attempt to create in verse his belief in moral good attained and sustained in society, but he makes no effort to convey a total impression of life at Penshurst. Instead he idealizes it. There is, of course, a firm grasp of physical detail, but the result is a firmly realized ideal, for Jonson presents no reservations and the only hints of anything non-ideal are there for contrast. There is exaggeration (especially in the description of the fish), while the attitude of the country people to the great house and the account of the Sidneys' hospitality are both clearly simplified. In the same way, the descriptions of the family-life at Penshurst and of the children's education are miniatures of Elizabethan ideals. It could be demonstrated that each of the aspects of Penshurst which Jonson emphasizes relates to a contemporary belief or problem: the poem's greatness is largely in the way in which Jonson has presented the ideal in active and precise detail. We see the ideal in operation and are almost convinced of its practicability, but the achievement is, of necessity perhaps, one of exclusion.

If my discussion of the qualities of Jonson's poetry, and of how these are used, is accepted, it follows that to demand a different kind of poetry, and to censure Jonson for not providing it, involves rejection of what his poetry, with its characteristic features of simplification and exaggeration, achieves. We cannot--as I hope I have made clear--distinguish between Jonson's style and his concerns, for the former is a condition of the latter. To say that Jonson's verse is poor poetry because it lacks 'inspiration', or because it is without that particular density of texture which we indicate by such words as 'ambiguity' and 'association' is to say that what is achieved as a result of these limitations is not sufficient to compensate for them.

At this point I begin to think of babies and bathwater, but let us put the 'inspiration' and 'ambiguity et al.' views as strongly as possible, before setting Jonson's achievement against them. For present purposes we may, I think, link them. Both point to a type of language which can and does communicate insights which impress us as true, but which are incapable of scientific proof, by a subtle, supremely delicate, use of words and rhythm. This use of language is able to give some degree of expression to the ineffable by exploiting facets of language (ambiguity, irony, paradox, association, rhythmical linking) which are usually seen as weaknesses in discursive usage. The theory of inspiration stresses the actual apprehension of non-scientific truth, while the modern critic of poetic texture emphasizes the embodying of such apprehension in word and rhythm. In neither case is Jonson an obvious poet to illustrate the relevant activity: he makes few apparent attempts to raid the unconscious or to achieve the startling but convincing insight, and the texture of his verse does not respond very much to searches for paradox, association, etc. The latter fact, in particular, suggests that Jonson is not after the sudden break-through or the moment of vision. Instead he makes a constant effort to embody in verse a coherent view of life based on ethical distinctions, and the result is a created world, simplified from the actual, but seldom untrue to aspects of it and therefore always relevant to it. The relevance is of a valuable kind because the simplification and exaggeration of Jonson's poetic world highlights and probes aspects of the actual, leading to insights which spring directly from the application of a firmly-held ethical view to the society in which Jonson lived. Again, these insights are only possible because of the simplification: they do not occur in spite of it. Much of Shakespeare's appeal may lie in his extraordinary ability to set ethical values against individuals and situations, but this does not alter Man's need to accept some standards as conditionally true, and to guide his life by the analysis of it in accordance with these standards, Jonson's achievement is to show this process in action, by embodying the standards in concrete terms and by evoking a sense of their absence.

The achievement is an important one, but it may not be clearly poetic, and our view of this point will depend on how we define that word. I should prefer to put the matter negatively. If the type of textual density of which I have spoken is an essential criterion of the poetic Jonson is only a poet occasionally, and the same is true if the poetic must include the faculty of the starting insight. But the inspiration theory is notoriously difficult to be exact about and textual density is too exclusive a standard. I am happier with the remarks of T. E. Hulme:

There are two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them.... Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Wherever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art [Speculations, 1949].

Jonson certainly has this 'fundamental quality': his integrity to the experience he is trying to communicate, the honesty of the matter-and-manner relationship in his verse, and his notable sense of linguistic appropriateness make him an important poet, more so than is commonly realised and more so than some more fashionable writers.

Source: G. A. E. Parfitt, "The Poetry of Ben Jonson" in Essays in Criticism Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1968, pp. 18-31. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17.