ancients [he] writ no language"has often been considered their antagonist. The generational difference between them corresponds to a difference in historical and cultural circumstances.
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Whereas Sidney and Spenser were Elizabethans (in the fullest sense, since their careers in several ways involved the queen herself), Jonson was a Jacobean writer: he was the main writer of court masques for James I, and, more broadly, his works reflect the world, both city and court, of early seventeenth-century London. Moreover, he was a man of the theater, where his greatest and most distinctive achievements were comedies. These, unlike Shakespeare's, bore out the traditional idea of stage comedy as a realistic, urban form. Although, like Sidney and Spenser, Jonson modeled his poems on traditional types of European poetry, they were distinctly different types. Where Spenser and Sidney emulated the epic and pastoral, among ancient genres, and the grander forms of the Italian love lyric (canzones, hymns, sonnet sequences), Jonson eschewed the love-centered forms of modern lyric and imitated the ironic and realistic types of classical poetry, like epigrams and epistles.
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How do these differences manifest themselves in actual poems? For a useful comparison, we do not want the extremes of, say, idealizing in Spenser or Sidney and satiric coarseness in Jonson. The following two short poems by Sidney and Jonson seem genuinely comparable. Each takes as its point of departurewhat the Renaissance would call its "invention," or seed ideathe correction of a cliché about love.
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 | | Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot
Love gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed:
But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw and liked, I liked but loved not,
I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed:
At length to Love's decrees, I forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
Now even that footstep of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite,
I call it praise to suffer tyranny.
And now employ the remnant of my wit,
To make my selfe believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
(Astrophel and Stella, 2)
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