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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, 30 Dec 2001
By A Customer
Deciding how to rate this book means deciding what reader it's aimed at. If you're reading as someone who wants to study Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, then this is the standard anthology, and has to be rated highly. If you're reading away from academia, then this book is perhaps less covetable.The reason for this lies in the very notion of "the Cavalier Poets". These were writers who, explicitly following Ben Jonson's poetic, wrote poetry that valued language that was colloquial (to a degree), simple and plain, and who were especially taken with the idea of writing perfect lyrics. Some of them wrote poems that were pleasing: Lovelace, for instance, wrote some interesting poems; and Herrick was very popular in the nineteenth century (see the amount of pages he gets in old anthologies). But I'm inclined to think that considering Jonson in relation to "the Cavalier Poets" greatly undervalues him, and perhaps misrepresents Jonson's true influence. "The Cavalier Poets" are all minor poets: and although it's interesting to see that all these poets took their lead from him, there is a tendency (which this anthology shares in) to not lay enough stress on the difference between Jonson, a major poet, and his quite interesting but minor admirers. Our underappreciation of Jonson the poet is quite similar to the nineteenth century underappreciation of Donne -- who was, as far as they were concerned, no more than one of "the Metaphysical Poets". While not disputing that poetry is often a business of fads and fashions, Jonson's poetry, as with Donne's, deserves to be read at length -- and needs to be read like this if it is to be appreciated for what it alone has as well as what it shares with lesser writing. Jonson's inheritors are perhaps not to be found in Herrick or Carew or Suckling, but in Pope, the Yeats of the middle- and late-period poems, and perhaps in the Milton whose shorter poems can sometimes be called Jonsonian in their clarity.
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by M Ferguson
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