Thom Gunn argues, in a 1985 essay, that Ben Jonson's poetry has been neglected because

Ben Jonson lies outside the scope of this book – he died in 1637. Occasional poetry, however, is central to eighteenth-century poetic practice. Most of the poems from the previous chapter fall into this category, and the British Library catalogue features over one hundred eighteenth-century books with variations of the title ‘Poems on Several Occasions’. This includes work by such influential writers as John Gay, Matthew Prior, and Christopher Smart. Moreover several seventeenth- and eighteenth- century editions describe Shakespeare's sonnets as ‘occasional’ works. However, the number of new volumes with this title falls dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter will argue, not just for the validity of occasional writing, but also for its importance to ongoing poetic traditions. First, I will try to define occasional poetry. (This is not as easy as it sounds.) I will then ask why occasional poetry remains undertheorized and undervalued. This will involve relating occasional poetry to another eighteenth-century discourse, the sublime, as well as to insights from postmodernism, New Criticism and Marxist literary criticism. A recurring preoccupation will be the tension between materialist and immanent approaches to occasional poetry; the tension, that is, between readings that place poems inside or outside an historical trajectory. In particular, I mean to extend the insights of the previous chapter by using pre-romantic occasional poetry as a defamiliarizing device through which we might become newly aware of how romantic ideologies dominate current attitudes to poetry, culture and identity. I want to begin, though, by asking what occasional poetry actually is, and why its status is unstable.

DEFINING OCCASIONAL POETRY

Irrespective of the object of analysis, generic definitions usually oscillate between an impulse to universalize and an impulse to minoritize. That is, we define genres either by making everything fit into them, or by allowing only a few, rigidly-described works to make the grade.