ABSTRACT
As in the Epigram to Ferrabosco, Ben Jonson declares he has parted with his rights in the work by giving it to the world; but what actually registers, of course, is the familiar tension between professed indifference and actual concern. As in the Epigram to Ferrabosco, Jonson declares he has parted with his rights in the work by giving it to the world; but what actually registers, of course, is the familiar tension between professed indifference and actual concern. In this cycle Jonson gives us a series of poems whose vision includes the subjects of those poems, independent of the stylization of art; it also includes the poet who writes them, and the audience who listens to them. The result is a paradoxical double vision, in which the image of perfect order is placed against an acknowledgement of the real world, a world that both gives the lie to the vision and makes it doubly necessary.
