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Tag Archives: Ben Jonson
“My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He looked at his own Soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed to be beautiful Constellations: and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks It’s his birthday today. I’ll … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Andrew Marvell, Anne Fadiman, Ben Jonson, Camille Paglia, Charles Lamb, Derek Mahon, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Jane Langton, John Donne, John Dryden, John Keats, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stevie Smith, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth
29 Comments
“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson
“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey It’s his birthday today. Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes … Continue reading
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, / Hath put a spirit of youth in everything …
Today is (supposedly, roughly) the birthday of William Shakespeare. April 23, 1564. (Title of the post from Sonnet 98.) One of the things I think about when I think about Shakespeare, is my late great teacher Doug Moston, who died … Continue reading
Posted in On This Day, Theatre, writers
Tagged Ben Jonson, Ford Madox Ford, George Bernard Shaw, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Shakespeare, W.H. Auden
9 Comments
“For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth…” — Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine
Maybe this is him. I’m armed with more than complete steel, The justice of my quarrel. — Christopher Marlowe, Lust’s Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4. Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty’s secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born … Continue reading
“The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse.” — John Donne
“So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.” — first publisher of the work of John Donne It’s his birthday today. John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet and an Anglican priest (born a … Continue reading
The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats: Ben Jonson
Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine “O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey Rare, indeed. … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Ben Jonson, England, poetry, Shakespeare, Six Centuries of Great Poetry
1 Comment
National Poetry Month: Ben Jonson
On My First Son Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years wert thou leant to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the … Continue reading
Passion Slept
From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till declamation roar’d, while passion slept. — Ben Jonson
Admiration
“I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.” — John Dryden on Ben Jonson