Rare poems, rare friends: the Epigrams

In conversation with the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden over the winter of 1618-19, Ben Jonson gloomily predicted that the work of his friend John Donne, “for not being understood, would perish” (Conv. Dr. 158). Writing to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, just a couple of years earlier, however, Jonson had imagined his own poems being studied with attention by “posterity” - that ideal readership to which, on more than one occasion, he had confidently commended his work (Epig. Ded. 15). Neither of these predictions has proved to be exact. Donne's poetry, though relatively neglected throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has scarcely perished; admired and mediated by Eliot, it spoke powerfully to modernist sensibilities and proponents of the new criticism, and is familiar today to readers throughout the Englishspeaking world. Jonson's poems, on the other hand, are less well known and perhaps (ironically) less well understood. It is not that they have lacked discerning admirers such as James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Yvor Winters, and Thorn Gunn, but the band of witnesses has always been small in number. In Epig. 17, addressed “To the Learned Critic,” Jonson declared that it was the opinion of the single judicious person that he esteemed, not that of a wider public: “And but a sprig of bays, given by thee, / Shall outlive garlands stolen from the chaste tree.” In recent times Jonson has had his sprig of bays, perhaps, but hardly his garlands.