SOURCE: "All About Jonson's Poetry," in ELH, Vol. 39, No. 2, June, 1972, pp. 208-37.

In the following essay, Marotti reads Jonson's dramatic verse and masques along with his non-dramatic poetry in order to demonstrate the poet's stylistic virtuosity and his range between the extremes of copiousness and restraint.

When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that, in order to enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament, and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary.

[T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed., 1958]

It is only recently that Ben Jonson's poetry has begun to receive the kind of attention it truly deserves. Yet critics have usually segregated the non-dramatic poetry from the rest of...