Editing Ben Jonson (section)

===Poetry===
[[File:Houghton MS Lowell Autograph File 185, Jonson.jpg|thumb|"Epitaph for Cecilia Bulstrode" manuscript, 1609]]
Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his better-known poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the [[Renaissance humanism|humanist]] manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as [[Thomas Campion]] and [[Gabriel Harvey]]. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint and precision.

"Epigrams" (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among late-Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers and spies abound. The condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson's epigrams of praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific individuals. Although it is included among the epigrams, "[[On My First Sonne]]" is neither satirical nor very short; the poem, intensely personal and deeply felt, typifies a genre that would come to be called "lyric poetry." It is possible that the spelling of 'son' as 'Sonne' is meant to allude to the [[sonnet]] form, with which it shares some features. A few other so-called epigrams share this quality. Jonson's poems of "The Forest" also appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson's aristocratic supporters, but the most famous are his [[Country house poem|country-house poem]] "To Penshurst" and the poem "[[To Celia]]" ("Come, my Celia, let us prove") that appears also in ''[[Volpone]]''.

''Underwood'', published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains ''[[A Celebration of Charis]]'', Jonson's most extended effort at love poetry; various religious pieces; [[Encomium|encomiastic poems]] including the poem to Shakespeare and a sonnet on [[Mary Wroth]]; the ''Execration against Vulcan''<ref>Rickard, Jane. "Jonson's Imaginary Library: "An Execration upon Vulcan" and Its Intertexts." ''Huntington Library Quarterly'' 85, no. 3 (2022): 447-470.</ref> and others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne's posthumous collected poems).