In the introduction to his selection of Jonson's poems, Thom Gunn remarks of UW 12 (‘An Epitaph on Master Vincent Corbet’): ‘Whatever its source (and ‘sources’ are sometimes a bit like ‘occasions’) it emerges as a kind of discovery, the product of an exploration performed with a quietness and pertinacity suitable to its subject matter.’ If this book has been concerned with the range of textual interactions and strategies that can be encompassed by Gunn's term ‘sources’, it has also dealt with the wide variety of ‘occasions’ to which odes, epigrams, epistles, dedicatory poems, plays, masques and translations respond. All of these genres are concerned with an encounter or an address, but in each case that is accompanied by the further ‘occasion’ of an encounter between the contemporary world and the ancient: above all, an encounter with Horace. What Gunn terms a ‘source’ itself creates an ‘occasion’.

Jonson himself wrote of the role of ‘occasions’ in his art in the well-known preface to Hymenaei (1606):