When I am down at Hackney Brook

The poetry of friendship

In a recent interview with Henry Oliver, he asked me about why I love Ben Jonson. I do love Ben Jonson — on whom I wrote my doctoral thesis — but I didn’t choose to work on him for my PhD because I loved him. I didn’t know Jonson’s poetry that well when I wrote the proposal for my MPhil, in which I first sketched out the project; but my undergraduate tu…