The poem that praises a poet's permanence is itself anonymous — attributed to no one, tucked into Jonson's own book as prefatory matter. The prophecy of lasting fame is made by a voice that didn't bother to last.

"Thy Poetry shall keepe its owne old rent" — Jonson. Rent as income, rent as tear. The poem holds value by not spending itself. But rent is also what time does to a building. The line knows both.

Ben Jonson, “To Mr. Ionson.”

The stanza promises to obey Aristotle while the rhyme of "rules" with "fools" is already disobeying him. Byron's trick: announce the machinery so openly that the announcement becomes the machinery. The poem disguised as a blueprint for a poem it will never build.

"Good workmen never quarrel with their tools" — Byron

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto the First”

The line that catches is the one that shouldn't work: "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." It defines wit as recognition — not invention. But the definition itself is the best example of what it describes. The couplet performs its own thesis and in doing so makes originality indistinguishable from precision.

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" — Pope

Alexander Pope, “Poetical Works (non-Homer)”

Herrick lays his thyrsus at the patron's threshold and calls it freedom. Wordsworth calls poets "vain men in their mood" and gives the poem to a cottager who never asked for it. The disagreement is about who the poem needs. Herrick says: someone must pay for this. Wordsworth says: the poem that knows it's paid for is already dead.

"Before thy Threshold, we'll lay downe / Our Thyrse, for Scepter" — Herrick. The surrender is so ornate it becomes a seizure. Wordsworth's cottager "stirs little out of doors" and wants nothing from poetry at all. One poet dressed as a courtier, one dressed as nobody. Both costumes. Only Herrick admits the costume.

Robert Herrick, “To the Patron of Poets, M.”

Browning's dying rabbi considers becoming a horse. The offer is serious. And the refusal — "Better remain a Poet" — is not triumph but resignation: the poet is the one who stays human by failing to become anything more useful.

"Cribful of corn for me! and, as for work— / Adequate rumination o'er my food!" — Browning. The pun on rumination is the whole problem. Chewing cud and chewing thought use the same word because the body's repetition and the mind's are, at some level, the same operation.

Robert Browning, “JOCHANAN HAKKADOSH”

Cavendish frames originality as biological and imitation as theft — but the poem arguing this is in triplet couplets, one of the most imitative forms available. The claim to Nature over Art is made entirely through Art. She knows this. The title names theft; the form commits it.

"What lmitation makes, are naught." — Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, “Of Poets, and their Theft.”

The dream-maid speaks his own thoughts back to him and he falls in love with the echo. Shelley knows this is a trap — the whole poem is the punishment for it — but the passage itself is seduced by what it diagnoses. The web of "many-coloured woof" is Shelley caught in his own loom.

"Her voice was like the voice of his own soul / Heard in the calm of thought" — Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude”

Byron lists his machinery — Aristotle's rules, the sublime, rhyme, supernatural scenery — the way a magician shows you the deck before the trick. The disclosure is not honesty. It is the final layer of technique: making the audience believe that what's visible is all there is.

"Good workmen never quarrel with their tools" — Byron. The proverb performs competence so smoothly you almost miss that he's calling the sublime a tool. Not a destination. A tool. And then he picks it up and uses it.

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto I”