ABSTRACT
I would like to enlist Walter Benjamin to be my guide in this brief tour through Ben Jonson’s country-house panegyric “To Penshurst.” In his early study The Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin describes the spatialization of history in baroque arts as follows:
Benjamin’s account of the “spatial latency” of baroque aesthetic production serves equally well to describe the English country-house poem as for the German trauerspiel.2 In these pastoral landscapes, “chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image.” From Jonson’s portrait of Penshurst to Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” the English baroque poetry of place mourns the loss of Eden by projecting secular history onto a verse Arcadia in which the antagonisms and contradictions of history have been magically replaced with an aesthetically manicured topography-a sort of poetic topiary-that retains the traces of that erasure in emblems of social and ideological antagonism dispersed throughout text. As Benjamin puts it, “history merges into the setting,” an apt if unwitting description of Jonson’s strategy of poetic cartography in “To Penshurst,” an elaborate verse compliment to the Kent estate of Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle,
first published in “The Forest” as part of Jonson’s 1616 Workes. As we shall see, work, or more specifically labor and those who do it, haunt the poem.
