Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here). His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. 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 predeceased him had the same first name. Benjamin, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."
Of all the poets born on June 11th, Ben Jonson is unquestionably the most accomplished. An astrological proifile of this Gemini all-star is long overdue.
Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. Many of them have added an aitch to their last name perhaps to honor their forerunner or to bless Ha-shem.
In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben Johnson was Warren Oates's brother.
Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) Ben Johnson is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous 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).
PS. On a separate but related note from the department of onomastics, a double of the late Philip Levine is the former mayor of Miami.
-- DL
Note: Under the title "Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music," we aired this post on August 10, 2022 but a glitch made it unintelligible to readers, so here it is with a new title and a new postscript. It is also worth noting that Philip Larkin is the corpse in an early Perry Mason (1958 or '59) and that yoiu'll meet Jim Tate and Bill Mathews in high-grade noir fiction of the 1950s.
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