Motions and Spaces: What Collides in Ben Jonson's Epigrams

“Motions and Spaces: What Collides in Ben Jonson's Epigrams,” reads Jonson's epigrams in terms of the distinct ways they manage fluid social forms. Drawing on the new formalist theory of Caroline Levine, the essay defines Jonson's epigrams as short poems that transform collisions, turning the rhythms and motions of social forms into whole and still literary forms. Jonson's epigrams are – despite his demurrals – narratives, telling stories of how figures of shame or praise were instituted out of conflict. Movements of social forms are transformed into poetic and whole forms. The critical heritage on the epigrams can be mapped in terms of an emphasis upon movement or stillness, and the essay proceeds through a range of poems in order to see how movement produces stillness; process and structure, or motion and space, become co-constitutive of the poems. Reading several satiric epigrams and several epigrams of praise, the essay attempts to shift understanding of the epigrams from thinking about people and social relations as they are toward thinking about people and social relations as they become. Jonson's translation of Horace's The Art of Poetry stakes out poetry's purpose: “Things sacred from profane to separate; / The public from the private,” and this essay explores how that process works in Jonson's epigrams.