Ben Jonson (Oxford Poetry Library)

Ben Jonson was one of the world's greatest literary minds. During the reign of James I his literary prestige was at its height, and, during his lifetime, Jonson's contemporary literary reputation rivalled, and perhaps surpassed, that of Shakespeare. Among his completed surviving works are seventeen plays, more than thirty court masques and entertainments, an English Grammar, a commonplace book (Discoveries), and a large and varied corpus of poetry. His character is seemingly present in much of his poetry, and yet his literary persona is carefully constructed, and carefully layered--a product of subtlety and art. This collection includes many of Jonson's best-known poems such as "To Penshurst" and "A Speech According to Horace," as well as various epigrams and poems from "The Forest" and "The Underwood."