Description
Book SynopsisAt the heart of all Ben Jonson’s nondramatic poetry, argues Michael McCanles, lies the concept of true nobility. Jonson sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of England into an aristocracy of humanist virtue in which he could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility by the merits of his own intellectual labours. In this survey of all Jonson’s non-dramatic poetry, McCanles identifies a range of dialectical and contrastive forms through which this concern was rendered poetically.
He analyses the contrastive forms in discussion of Jonson’s prosody, his uses of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term ‘contrastivity’ to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonson’s use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the reader’s process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poem’s statement by recreating the process of selection/rejection that we
