On Poet-Ape / Ben Jonson
George Dance
Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
To a little wealth and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own,
And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose 'twas first, and after times
May judge it to be his as well as ours.
Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.
---
Ben Jonson (1616)
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/benbib.htm
Jonson and Shakespeare
http://www.sourcetext.com/greenwood/jands/04.htm
matt
yeah...i've gotta read this mans work...esp
his poetry...coeval shakespeare..? they
probably hung out...way awesome...excuse
my exuberance...plus, he was recognized
by the literary community and the establishment
which is even more intriguing. thanks for
posting this...i'm learning a lot here.
matt
Will Dockery
> On Poet-Ape
>
> Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
> Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
> From brokage is become so bold a thief,
> As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it.
> At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
> Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
> To a little wealth and credit in the scene,
> He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own,
> And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
> The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
> He marks not whose 'twas first, and after times
> May judge it to be his as well as ours.
> Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece
> From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.
>
> ---
>
> Jonson and Shakespearehttp://www.sourcetext.com/greenwood/jands/04.htm
While Googling for some good statements from Kerouac on Jonson, which
I haven't done during my years with internet access, all the
references I recall are in those strange quaint things we called
"books", I found a superb essay on poetry and poets, which gives the
stance of those on my side of the fence, which ahs had me butting
heads here for years, some excerpts, although the entire piece is
informative and riot of Sunday morning reading:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html
"...Now what is a poet? A poet is someone who writes poems. They don't
have to be good poems. There are many ways to write poems, but it
would probably be more preferable to say a poet is someone who makes
poems. What is a poem? A poem is anything that anybody wants to call a
poem. Basically because we don't want to bother with that kind of
question. It's a stupid, ridiculous question, and one does not want to
get into those kinds of definitions. If you think you'll be a poet,
you'll know what a poem is. Because you'll recognize it when you see
them. And some poems, you see them, and they're good, and that's
great. And some poems, you see them, and they're not so good, but both
those are poems. Some things are called poems, and you see them, and
they're not poems, but they're good to read. If a person wants to call
them a poem, that's fine. Some things that you see are writings; you
look at them, and they're called poems, and they're not good to read,
and they're not poems, and so you just forget, you just ignore them,
because everything that's no good will disappear of its own accord in
time. You don't have to really worry about that. It's like bad poets,
you don't have to worry about who's a bad poet; you know you don't
have to go around thinking, god there are fifty bad poets in the world
- I hate Robert Lowell, Bill Merwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Berrigan
and all those poets; why doesn't everybody just love Gary Snyder.
Given the passage of a few years and a few more years and a few years,
everything finds - in the cultural world in the arts - generally
everything finds its own level. And we're left with it. It might take
a hundred . . . For a hundred years everybody might think that
Shakespeare was reasonably good and Ben Jonson was totally great, but
actually in that hundred years, most people probably didn't really
think that, but some scholars wrote down that that was true. But in
any case, by now everybody knows that Ben Jonson was pretty damn good;
he was even more than that, and Shakespeare was wonderful. Everybody
knows that so much that everybody thinks that they've read
Shakespeare. Which is very funny, actually, because most people
haven't read Shakespeare hardly at all..." -Ted Berrigan
Anyway, back to Google...
--
"She Sleeps Tight" by Dockery & Mallard (video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uGY157cpiU