A review by jennykeery
The Complete Poems by Ben Jonson

4.0

My favourite poems by Jonson are 'On my First Sonne' and 'To the memory of my beloved Shakespeare...', which are also probably his most well-known. They are both elegies, but somehow the writer's entire personality jumps out of both of them; his ego and the importance of self-presentation, though still present (he represents himself as a king and a judge in the Shakespeare elegy etc.) are humbly and touchingly set aside.