Clout and Astrophel, are figures cast in specific literary roles; they thus gain representative force by a certain distancing from the writer's own person. Jonson, by contrast, claims literary and human authority in his own name. Hence of the two allied forms of discursive poetry practiced by his master Horace, he eschews satirewhich, he must have felt, too much depends on casting the first-person speaker in a rigid literary roleand turns repeatedly to the epistle, of which the central idea is a relation, potentially wide-ranging and untrammeled, between speaker and addressee. The beginning of the epistle to his friend John Selden, the great antiquary, brings out the assumptions of the genre:
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 | | I know to whom I write. Here, I am sure,
Though I am short [i.e., brief], I cannot be obscure.
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Just as the names of those he admired were of the essence of the stature attributed to themsince names both vouch for human actuality and serve to inscribe their bearers in discourse and printso the poet's own name registers some of his deepest effects. His epitaph "On My First Son" (epigram 45) calls the dead child "Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry" (because "poet" means ''maker"). At the close of the Cary and Morison ode, the poet addresses the surviving friend and says:
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| | think, nay know, thy Morison's not dead.
He leaped the present age,
Possessed with holy rage
To see that bright eternal day,
Of which we priests and poets say
Such truths as we expect for happy men;
And there he lives with memory, and Ben
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| | Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went
Himself to rest, . . . etc.
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The sobriety and exactitude of statement here, the fact that memory is not in the least mythologized but exists solely in the minds of those who knew and valued Morison and who read and value this poem, shows why Jonson has been praised as a poet of the plain style. And yet the poem still "sings high and aloof." The division of the poet's name over the stanza break expresses the separation the poem addresses: the loss of a friend is as a loss of self. But the vocal energy that connects first and last names and thus bridges the stanzas suggests the power of poet-
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