Ben Jonson : (1572-1637), Elizabethan poet & dramatist, & critic.
... reminiscent in general of Catullus's famous Soles occiders et redire possum. Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetua una dormienda. Da mi basia mille, which Ben Jonson has woven into a couple of "songs" in the same metre as Sri Aurobindo, thus anticipating him in general: Come, my Celia, let us prove, While we may, the sports of love; Time will... The cri du coeur The sunset's dying ray Has its returning, But fires of our brief day Shall end their burning 1 The Forest, V 2 Ibid., VI. 3 Ben Jonson, edited by C H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1925). 4 A Book of Airs, 1601, 1. Page 332 In night where joy and pain Are past recalling— So kiss me, kiss again— ...
... competitors: Francis Davison and Samuel Daniel. The major competitor - contrary to the beliefs of almost all scholars but in consonance with several literary traditions of a general order - was Ben Jonson. In connection with the third result we may touch once more on the theme of Auden's preamble, the end 11 of which runs: "Let... us forget all about Shakespeare as a man and consider... "the Rival's own clique of versifiers" and "a boon companion". Evidently, much will hang on who the chief 'rival poet" actually was, face to face with "Shakespeare as a man". And, if he was Ben Jonson of all people, the meaning must receive quite an unexpected illumination. The present book endeavours to disclose no less than four layers of Jonsonian significance, each covering the whole main ...
... Hence so very few create each time a living form of the highest radiance - a moulded flame without one flaw. Even Homer has his proverbial "nods", Shakespeare the "unblot-ted" roughnesses bewailed by Ben Jonson, and Milton the wooden sublimities he puts into the mouth of his Jehovah -yes, even Milton the arch-artist, for unfortunately his sense of art often proved stronger than his sense of inspiration ...
... come into being. At any rate the predestined creator, if he is to come, is not yet among us. Page 82 × Ben Jonson is an exception. He has the idea of construction, but his execution is heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist. ...
... was sufficiently developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant development ...
... many expressions, particularly in poets inclined to be continually forceful, are found scattered with failures to make striking images poetic or else with images * We may make an exception of Ben Jonson and grant that he has the idea of construction, but, as Sri Aurobindo points out, "his execution is heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist" ...
... again a plenary blaze. No other critic has been so acute as Sri Aurobindo in analyses and distinctions. But several have recognised Eliza-bethan poetry as Romantic. Thus Scott-James 26 speaks of Ben Jonson resisting the "unruly Romanticism of his time" be-cause, though he appreciated the fire that burned in his contemporaries, he saw that the very greatness of what Scott-James calls the "romantic ...
... Earl of Pembroke. Sethna sees in the Dark Lady, the other love of the 'two loves' in the Sonnets , a continental lady with the name he conjectures to be Anastasia Guglielma. Sethna would identify Ben Jonson as the major 'Rival Poet', and Samuel Daniel and Francis Davison as the minor rival poets shadowed in the Sonnets. Sethna would seem to put rather too high stakes on the inference that the name ...
... which that country was shipping home from its South American colonies. Elizabeth’s reign became England’s Golden Age. It was the age of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; of the poets John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Georges Chapman; of the musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; of the seafarers and explorers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher ...
... Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet of the necessary pentameter, and Shakespeare by omitting the clause would have got an obvious climax. We know from Ben Jonson's famous dictum that Shakespeare never blotted a word he had once written. But he never blotted anything because mostly he wrote the perfect, the inevitable poetry which called for no correction or ...
... in especial nor, in any distinguishable way, derivative, I should like to protest in the first 1 C.R.M's use of Ben Jonson's expression "this side idolatry" is, as sometimes seen elsewhere too in modern literature, a misapplication of what the original context meant. Jonson, writing of Shakespeare, connoted by it that though he did honour Shakespeare he stopped short of making a god of him. ...
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