Ben Jonson strived to imitate the style of the classical Roman and Greek poets, finding himself a major figure in the Neoclassical Literature style. One of his more famous poems was “To Penshurst,” a country house poem written for the Sidney family, of Sir Robert Sidney and his son Sir Philip Sidney, who owned the Penshurst estate. According to “The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,” the definition of a country house poem is a poem that “celebrates the home of a patron, friend, or model of the poet, treating the house and its landscape as an instance of civility and culture” (Hibbard). There are many other notable poems from this sub-genre of Renaissance literature, such as Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cookeham” and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” but the most famous is probably Jonson’s “To Penshurst.” “To Penshurst” was originally a part of a group of nonepigrammatic poems entitled “The Forest.” It is a 102 lined poem consisting of rhyming couplets that seem to be influenced by the poems of the Roman poets Horace (65-8 b.c.e.) and Martial (40-103 c.e.) (Budra). However, even though the poem is a great example of the country house poem sub-genre, it also doubles as a satirical poem. My argument is that “To Penshurst” is Jonson’s way of slyly offering his social criticism of the state of England’s social order in the 1600’s by disguising it within what is typically just a poem of praise and embellishment.
