SOURCE: "Ben Jonson's Poetry: Pastoral, Géorgie, Epigram," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 111–36.

In the following essay, Friedberg analyzes Jonson's poems in terms of the classical literary tradition.

Like Donne, Jonson began his poetic career with the epigram. For a man like Jonson who believed that "it is onely the disease of the vnskilfull, to thinke rude things greater then polish'd: or scatter'd more numerous then compos'd," the epigram remains the perfect form, one that convinces by its point rather than its logic, and Jonson's Epigrams contain some of his most "polish'd" and effective writing. Many of the Epigrams provided subjects for his plays: there are epigrams "To Alchymists," "On Lieutenant Shift," "On Court-worme," "On Don Surly," "To Fine Lady Would-bee," poems which combine Jonson's considerable talent for lighting on the abuses of the town with a skeptical, almost metaphysical, wit. Yet mixed with these...