Ben Jonson, England’s first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerfuly feeling. Consider “My Picture Left in Scotland”) about which I have written this little essay) His poetry, his plays. his great influence has overcome its one-time state He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, “child of my right hand, and joy.” Ben and the son who prer-deceased him had the sdame first name; Benjamin, in Hebrew, meanm “son of my right hand.”
Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben was Warren Oates’s brother.
Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger’s) he is head of global ETF research atr Morningside, and he has this to say to worried investors. Worry “is part of the price of admission. If it’s too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets.” Note the simile’s elegant allusion to Ben Jonson’s book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).
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Author: The Best American Poetry
