'The Most Perfect Conspiracy of Approval'

T.S. Eliot begins his 1919 essay “Ben Jonson” with these words: “The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet.” Eliot explains: 

“To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.”

 

A happy confluence of factors spurred me in 2010-11 to read and come to appreciate and enjoy Jonson’s poetry: immersion in the poems and criticism of Yvor Winters; my friendship with the late Helen Pinkerton, a former student of Winters’; publication of Ben Jonson: A Life (2011) by Ian Donaldson.

 

Jonson perfected the plain style of verse and became the master of epigrams in English (followed closely by J.V. Cunningham). Unlike his contemporary John Donne, Jonson’s poems are notably un-“metaphysical.” They are models of clarity and offer little fashionable grist for the academic mill. With a few footnotes identifying the people named by Jonson, any intelligent reader can appreciate his poems. Take “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” and “On My First Son.”

 

Jonson isn’t the only writer to be so embalmed. Think of others who are “universally accepted” (sometimes for the wrong reasons) and yet go unread. Among poets, Housman comes first to mind, and I don’t include efforts to read him exclusively through the lens of his homosexuality. Like Jonson, his verses are simultaneously transparent and profound. Larkin called him “the poet of unhappiness,” which tells me he has something to say to any mature adult. We ought to consider as well his enormous popularity during World War I, in the trenches and on the home front. Housman, like Jonson, passes the inexhaustibility test. Kingsley Amis writes of him in  The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988):

 

“Of course I think it ungrateful and wrong that Housman should never have been conventionally admitted as a great English poet, one of the greatest since Arnold, but not so surprising when you consider some of the people who have been so admitted. What are the objections to him? . . . His themes are restricted: I started to make a list of them until it occurred to me that the same objection would exclude from the canon Milton, Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats. . . . He turns his back on the modern world: next question. He made no technical innovations: get out of my sight.”