Poetics and criticism

I've been digging around in the 17th century lately, and am just falling in love with the poetry. I particularly can't get enough of Ben Jonson. His verse (to say nothing of his drama) is so experimental, which is perhaps a different thing than the inventiveness we rightly admire in Elizabethans like Spenser (who is just unmatched in ingenuity and originality). Of course, we think everything Jonson touches is different because Jonson wants to seem different, but there is an insistence behind his constant revival and readjustment of certain forms that does more than just demand the usual flattering comparison. It suggests that word, experimentation, as if invention (the inventio so insisted upon in the late Elizabethan age) were really something about thoroughness. Perhaps a new poetics can also be created by the connections it makes to the previous paradigm, or the general plausibility that the changes it makes are merely substitutions.

Such, I think, is sometimes the aim of the amazing Discoveries when it comes to outline this poetics.

Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius.

The ease with which Jonson makes this famous pronouncement, along with its brevity (striking even for Jonson, literary pioneer of the concise style), might actually distract us from what it is doing, which is not so much securing Spenser's place as working up the plausibility of Jonson's system of rules and values. We are not supposed to assent to this proposition, but are encouraged to pick it up. And it is then, and only then, that the system demonstrates its superiority. Something of this, I think, is understood by Samuel Johnson, when he indeed picks up Jonson in his Life of Milton:

Milton's style was not modified by his subject: what is shown with greater extent in Paradise Lost may be found in Comus. One source of his peculiarity was his familiarity with the Tuscan poets: the disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian; perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues. Of him, at last, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that "he wrote no language," but has formed what Butler calls "a Babylonish Dialect," in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity.

For Johnson, "he wrote no language" has an affinity to his own judgment of taste. But it is only an affinity, since in the Discoveries, it never is quite so condensed into a maxim that it would seem to need elaboration via Butler--or indeed, Johnson's two preceding paragraphs:

Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer, and which is so far removed from common use that an unlearned reader when he first opens his book finds himself surprised by a new language.

This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing wrong in Milton, imputed to his laborious endeavours after words suitable to the grandeur of his ideas. "Our language," says Addison, "sunk under him." But the truth is, that both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned, for there judgement operates freely, neither softened by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration.

Johnson comes to the same point as Jonson by giving us what is essentially an unbelievably excellent gloss or extrapolation of Jonson's point, by picking up and elaborating what is essentially Jonson's system (though he does so, of course, with his own inimitable perspicacity and with his own very nuanced--though Miltonists and "those who can find nothing wrong in Milton" won't always give him the credit of this--aim). In doing this, Johnson has also given up that aim of connecting to other systems which keeps the Discoveries closer to a poetics than a work of criticism. That said, the space opened up by the shift allows Johnson more space than even the incidental and private commonplace-book form of the Discoveries for connecting the judgments to a personal image and moral vision.