SOURCE: Weidhorn, Manfred. “Reputation and Achievement.” In Richard Lovelace, pp. 160-71. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970.

[In the essay that folllows, Weidhorn discusses Richard Lovelace's critical reputation and considers his body of work as a whole.]

I. REPUTATION

Lovelace's reputation as a poet begins early indeed—in his twenty-first year. Though he had left Oxford two years earlier, his lines on the Princess Katherine were inserted into copies of a volume of elegies by Oxford students. Similarly, when Fletcher's Wild Goose Chase appeared in 1652, Lovelace's prefatory verses were printed in larger type than the others' and given the place of honor among them. He was evidently prominent in his time.

Another interesting sidelight is the recent discovery, amid sober entries for 1643-44 in an ordnance notebook, of doodles of the first stanza of “The Scrutiny.” It is amusing to think of an ordnance officer or clerk passing the tedious hours by attempting to jot down the stanzas of a brash new poem by a fashionable young poet. Judging from the numerous reprintings this poem underwent in various collections during the rest of the century, “The Scrutiny” became one of Lovelace's most popular. But the best known of his poems was, of course, “To Althea,” referred to as early as 1644-45 and continually reprinted.¹

Before Lucasta came out in 1649, Marvell wrote introductory lines which, after decrying the decline in culture, spoke of “insects” who rose against Lovelace, partly because of his role in the Kentish Petition. The implication is that the volume had not yet been licensed but was being scrutinized in accordance with the Printing Ordinance. Politically innocuous as the poems seem to us, their publication may well have been delayed for a while.

The rest of Marvell's poem sketches a different sort of Lovelace fame—as a ladies' man. John Tatham makes similar remarks in his prefatory lines, which suggest that Lovelace also enjoyed repute as poet: the lasses, he says, in Lovelace's absence “do only sigh thy Airs,” and the swains “deny to write a line / And do only talk of thine”; he urges Lovelace “by sweet Athea's voice” to return. This passage indicates that Lovelace was known around 1644 as the poet of Althea rather than of Lucasta and that the prison poem, the only one to Althea, was popular before the 1649 confinement and publication of the book. Praised by friends, Lovelace's poetry was set to music by such eminent composers of the day as Henry Lawes and John Wilson. In Cotgrave's Wit's Interpreter (1655), the leading mid-seventeenth-century anthology, one and a half of his poems appeared.

Though Lovelace received brief honorific mention in Joshua Poole's 1657 English Parnassus, in Edward Phillips's 1675 Theatrum Poetarum, and in William Winstanley's 1687 Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, his popularity during the next century and a half was not equal to that of Suckling, Randolph, Cartwright, Habington, Cleveland. Indeed his friend Suckling, in presenting a critique of major and minor contemporary poets, including himself, in “A Session of Poets,” makes no mention of Lovelace.

A curious indication that Lovelace had, nevertheless, become the archetypal Cavalier very early was brought to light not too long ago. In his edition of Lovelace, C. H. Wilkinson, at the suggestion of G. Thorn-Drury, pointed out that in Sir Charles Sedley's Restoration play, The Mulberry Garden, there are—besides paraphrases of and allusions to famous Lovelace lyrics like “Wars,” “Althea,” “To Lucasta. From Prison”—numerous parallels with the poet's putative life: his loss of property to the wars and of his beloved to another man; his part in Royalist activities; his being arrested over an incriminating paper and as a by-product of the search for someone else; the unusual name Althea. The ending is happy in the play, as not in life; but, even so, a character's gallant surrender of the lady may perhaps be a picture of some similar action on Lovelace's part and thus give renewed life to Wood's story of Lucasta. If the identification is correct, Sedley's play is an interesting sign of how Lovelace's career and poetry captured the imagination of his age.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Neo-Classical Augustan period, Lovelace was not referred to anywhere. He seemed not to have existed at all. He reappeared on the poetic scene in 1765, or just a little over a hundred years after his death, with the publication of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which contained “Wars” and “Althea.” The first attempt at a critical appreciation was made in The Gentleman's Magazine of 1791-92, over the pseudonym of Cliffordiensis, generally presumed to have been Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges. The period 1817-18 saw the publication, by S. W. Singer, of all of Lovelace's poems, but with expurgations and deletions. Both Lucastas came out in 1864 in one volume edited by W. Carew Hazlitt, who segregated the poems by topic. Thus in Part I (1649) all verses addressed to Lucasta (and Aramantha) were gathered, followed by the ones to Ellinda, and rounded off by miscellaneous works and commendatory poems. Hazlitt's notes were good, but his biographical material was superseded by A. E. Waite, who in 1884 brought new documents to light.

The many twentieth-century students of Donne's influence, emphasizing Lovelace's greater proximity to the Metaphysicals than to the “Sons of Ben,” found him, vis-à-vis the master, sorely wanting. Amateur and gentleman, he seemed, though modeling his work on Donne's, to be working in a style uncongenial to him. Some of his best things, like “To … Sea,” are most memorable when most Metaphysical, yet Lovelace remained on the fringes of the Donne tradition. A piece like “La Bella Bona Roba” is static next to Donne's not because of a lack of “wit” or ingenuity but because to Donne “wit” was a means of expressing complex states of mind and achieving intellectual self-mastery; to the Cavalier, “wit” was exercised and enjoyed for its own sake. The “Grasshopper” shows that he should have followed the simplicity and clarity of Horace rather than the abstruseness of Donne, but he was unable to approach Herrick's grace and too indifferent, too “witty” to move from Metaphysical to the rising Neo-Classical vein. His effort in preserving the courtly stance of polished detachment nevertheless foreshadowed the elegant social wit of the Augustans.²

The greatest year in Lovelace's posthumous fame, 1925, saw the publication of the definitive edition of his poems and of the only book-length study of his work. In a lavishly annotated and illustrated edition, bringing together all the biographical material, C. H. Wilkinson furnished the best account yet of the poet's life. Issued in a limited printing, the edition reappeared in one volume, shorn of its illustrations, in 1930; and it is not likely to be superseded for some time.

As a scholar who lived with Lovelace's work more than any other person, Wilkinson also provided the lengthiest, most detailed and considered evaluation of it. Two or three of the poems, he notes, are everywhere anthologized and given a “high place among the lyrics of an age supreme in the art of song”; but they have overshadowed his other lyrics. Wilkinson is aware that this neglect is partly justified: one of the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” Lovelace, following the Cavalier imitation of devices made fashionable by Donne, wrought “slender conceits and labored particularities.” His many obvious faults—obscurity, discontinuity, frigidity, slovenliness, striving after effect, lack of the light touch—add up to a case of (as Douglas Bush later put it) “the pernicious anemia of the secular Metaphysical muse, with its dwindling from cosmic audacities into labored and eccentric artifice.” Lovelace writes reams of dull verse, minor poems of a minor poet; and, despite incidental attractions, his superlative achievements remain a handful of poems. On the other hand, these successes are the product of an informed sense of art, not mere luck; and a considerable portion of his work is better than is generally believed. Though he sometimes carries a conceit off with the best of them, he does not, when most effective, depend on Metaphysical effects; he is not sufficiently profound or clever to take naturally to this mode of writing. At his best, he exhibits a grace and ease, spontaneity and elegance in the manner of Wyatt. Lovelace is, in short, a worthy representative of the Cavalier class of amateur poets; “he writes very well for a gentleman,” but, as a reviewer put it, “he can write worse than any other poet in England who can write as well.”³

The other event of 1925, C. H. Hartmann's book on Lovelace, proved disappointing. Utilizing a faded nineteenth-century approach, it assumed that every lyric is a “sincere” autobiographical expression and therefore usable as a document. Neither did this study, being limited in its survey of the culture of the age, have much new to say about the “Cavalier spirit.” Hartmann's conclusions are predictable: Lovelace writes much that is fashionable, complimentary, occasional, trivial, and only when inspired by love (Lucasta) and honor (Charles I) is he a real Cavalier and a fine poet.

Various reviews greeted the Wilkinson edition but none by a major critic or poet. The most stimulating, in the Times Literary Supplement, forwarded the thesis that Lovelace is, in such works as “Aramantha,” not at all Cavalier but Elizabethan; that he has more in common with Wyatt, Surrey, Raleigh, and the “miniature grace” of Campion than with Suckling, Carew, and Stanley. So too, a generation later, David Daiches, relating the chivalric and Royalist ideal to Sidney, Raleigh, and the older Renaissance tradition of courtesy, associated Lovelace's poems, at their best, with the strengths of Wyatt. The anachronistic Neo-Platonic Sidneyan and Spenserian values of ideal love, beauty, honor were given one last expression by Lovelace. Mario Praz, on the other hand, found Lovelace, despite his slender contribution and derivativeness, not only of his time but the most picturesque and striking Caroline poet—an important index of seventeenth-century customs and predilections, of the complexity of the age's poetic development.⁴

Though we speak nowadays of Lovelace, Suckling, Carew in one breath, the earlier centuries did not. Often ignoring Lovelace, they lumped Carew with Suckling. The two indeed share a libertine strain, but it is found in Lovelace also. Moreover, neither Suckling nor Lovelace approaches Carew at his best; they share his urbanity, not his artistic devotion and consistency. To F. R. Leavis, Carew, as the bearer, with Marvell, of the line of wit from Jonson and Donne to Pope, deserves better than to be bracketed with Suckling and Lovelace.

The consensus of modern criticism regards Lovelace more unequal as an artist but also more serious at his best than Suckling. As craftsman, Lovelace is closer to Carew; but his art is not so rewarding because his grotesque ingenuity, beyond Carew's, defeats him. Of the three poets, Lovelace is sometimes the least naturally, at other times the most naturally, a Metaphysical poet. Possessed of a curious mind, he has a wider range of interests, themes, and images. But lacking Donne's erudition and insight, he points the way to the dead end of John Cleveland's artificial, contorted style in wandering beyond the limits set by his subject and by the capacity of words. He could sing as sweetly as Carew or Suckling, yet not be as polished as the one or as natural as the other. In an age of dilettantism, he was more uneven than they.

Some find Lovelace quite unlike Suckling or Carew. He uniquely has a rare strain of sensuousness and tenderness. He seems more of a dreamer than the other two, but he also observes nature more closely—whether recording the ubiquity of conflict in it or (in the pastoral) its repose and beauty. Above all, Lovelace expresses a sense of honor and chivalry that is alien to the others. Suckling and Carew dramatize the Cavalier's worldliness; Lovelace presents the Cavalier ideal. His gentility was so strong as to make his attempts at Sucklingesque cynicism seem to some unconvincing, as though he were trying to prove he was no prig. To Albert Baugh, he belongs rather with Godolphin and Montrose as the “noblest and most hapless of the Cavaliers,” poets of slender performance but fragrant memory. In the two famous exalted lyrics, Lovelace, expressing the “sense of honor in manly alliance with his love,” is, therefore, the exemplary Cavalier spirit.⁵

The postwar years produced several essays with fresh insights. In Velvet Studies, C. V. Wedgwood speaks (like an earlier reviewer) of the anachronistic, escapist aspect of Lovelace. She stresses a certain self-mockery; many a conceit of his is a piece of bravura, of deliberate showing off, as though the poet were to turn to us admiringly and say, “Now isn't that a quaint conceit I've got!” Lovelace deliberately marries the sublime to the ridiculous in order to raise a smile. Geoffrey Walton in “The Cavalier Poets,” finds Lovelace a courtier and soldier of European culture expressing with clarity and sophistication “the surviving code of chivalry and the public values of the seventeenth-century country gentleman” and, in the insect poems, the “private interests of the Kentish squire and the rural roots of the Cavalier.” Not a “Son of Ben,” Lovelace lacked the discipline that would have controlled somewhat “the suns and flowers that burst forth a little too brightly in this poetry.”

Robin Skelton notes, in his Cavalier Poets, a contrast in Lovelace's work between the polite, social, formal poetry and the celebration of food, wine, music, women; between the pretentious, ornate compliments and the insect fables, the charming drink and prison poems. Even the latter kind, though vigorous, passionate, and conversational, do not put us into familiar relationship with the speaker, do not convey a presence. Without emotional involvement, the poet seems to be playing with words and ideas, enjoying his virtuosity and providing “well-mannered and graceful diversion for the cultured reader.” His wit has an impersonal withdrawn air that is unlike the animal spirits of Carew and Suckling in pursuit of women. Not a questioning soul, Lovelace accepts at face value fashionable compliment, cosmic similitude, pastoral language. He presents moral sentiments in lucid lines of restrained rhythm reinforced with parallelism, antithesis, paradox. This “poetry of ceremony rather than spontaneity” furnishes, adds Skelton, a “sense of inner dignity of humanity … lacking in Carew and Suckling.” Lovelace's lines have a sweetness, even his humor has more gentleness than raillery; without genius, he has his own radiance. His Cavalier poems are, however, his least typical; the strength, control, gaiety, courage, personal touch of “To Althea” are rare.

The latest essay, one of the best, is by Bruce King. Stimulating, even if wrong-headed, it logically extends random suggestions of earlier writers and constructs a portrait of Lovelace as a modern Angst-ridden Existentialist. King begins with the assertion, first made by Empson and Holland, that Lovelace's famous two “Cavalier” poems really are about the flight from the demands of love and the beloved—an analysis resting on the assumption that what the poems say literally is not what they mean. King's approach was anticipated as well by Walton's remark that Lovelace, though not often vulgar like Suckling, exhibits a surprising vein of deeper cynicism; by Skelton's contrast between the animal spirits of Carew and Suckling and the withdrawn air of Lovelace; by Alvarez' complaint at Lovelace's posturing.⁶

King finds the image of Lovelace as a gay, debonair Cavalier spirit mainly Restoration and Victorian propaganda. Most readers, who have missed the deep streak of skepticism and cynicism in Lovelace, accept the affirmative poems at face value instead of seeing them for what they are: examples of a disillusioned mind desperately trying to hang on to anything in the world. Exploiting venerable ideals, the poems are not affirmations of the chivalric code but a turning inwards. The ideals celebrated are mere postures, defensive masks—psychological necessities to ward off reality. Lovelace's confidence continually falters, for demoralization lies behind the affirmation.

The cynicism is not merely political but affects his whole sensibility, as is seen from the way references to prison appear in all sorts of unlikely places. Not only defeat in war but a complete spiritual and physical insecurity is intimated by “Advice”; all activity, on land as well as on sea, leads to disaster, as do even inactivity and the “golden mean.” “The Grasshopper” gives a medieval picture of mutability in all things and dismisses conviviality as an external crutch that is doomed like the insect.

Without the values arbitrarily and blindly imposed on a disintegrating society, Lovelace's sentiments turn coarse. The lesser poems are more completely disillusioned and offer only the crudest sort of protection or none at all. In the “Loose Saraband [1659]” the carefree Cavalier attitude suddenly appears a desperate reaction to brutal reality, and the withdrawal into drink and gross sensuality is made in a manner more aggressive than that found in other libertine poets. Lovelace's libertinism, lacking the balance of Carew's, suggests a total disillusionment with experience; it stems from hatred of life rather than love of the senses. The 1659 volume, especially, seems to King distrustful, violent, paranoiac in its reaction to society. It fills the natural world with emblems of distasteful reality—ant, fly, snail. The law of animal life is the law of man; life itself is insecure and empty. With such an interpretation, Lovelace may be truly said to have been made currently relevant.

II. ACHIEVEMENT

In arriving at a final evaluation of Lovelace's poetry, we cannot ignore his limitations. His tastes are simple; his mind bare of complex ideas. His unquestioning commitments to lady and king are childlike and, though intensely asserted, of but passing interest. He has no theory of politics, love, or indeed anything. Unless it be the epicurean flourish in the face of a lowering night, he has no central vision, no abiding emotion. The Cavalier posture for which he is so well known is but a glimmer in a few poems. The courtly amatory, like the drinking and cynical seduction poems, are sometimes amusing but heavily derivative. The insect and creature poems are peculiar to him and affecting in a limited way. He is not haunted by time, death, or history; by loss of prosperity or rise of Cromwell; by carpe diem thoughts. Nor is he moved to towering rejection or acceptance of love or regicide. Except for the problems of liberty and confinement and of the conflict in nature, which are at the heart of his best things, many great themes and issues pass by him—despite his living through a dramatic epoch.

It is undeniable that Lovelace wrote numerous poems which remain, after all explication, bad; that even his good poems are often static and two-dimensional; that his style is marred by all the things earlier critics listed; that he is, in short, a minor poet. Yet, in spite of all, Lovelace's successes, as this study has attempted to show, have not been limited to the two well-known poems. His work contains a substantial number of beautiful lines and images, most of which we have examined.

He evinces virtuosity in several kinds of poetry. We saw that in the Carolingian period octosyllabic verse became the vogue. While Lovelace offers no poem of quality comparable to Marvell's “Coy Mistress” or Milton's twin poems, he manages quite a few successful couplets. Many of the good, limpid octosyllabics are in his pastoral. Some of them have satiric thrust to them; and indeed, the satiric pentameter couplet, is also an area of the poet's proficiency too little noticed. Another forte of Lovelace's is his conclusion. Though incapable of the Miltonic resolution—for lack of supreme mastery in the body of the poem—he yet can achieve fine lines at the end of stanza or lyric.

Besides the stereotyped image of Lovelace the Cavalier, we have seen the cynical seducer as well as the wailing, unrequited lover; the biting satirist of the social scene, alongside the bemused observer of insects; the celebrator of the arts no less than the man haunted by conflict and prison; the recorder of small incidents and of a great dilemma. The important Lovelace themes are: in the microcosmic life of insects and small beasts, combat and entrapment; in the dissolving social structure, imprisonment; in amatory matters, separation. These adversities can be overcome by a renewed dedication to transcendent lover and honor, or by Epicurean conviviality and retirement, or by hedonistic abandonment to drink and sex.

In the insect poems, confinement, unrelieved by spiritual self-mastery, means ignominious, painful death. For man, on the other hand, blessed or cursed with consciousness, incarceration can be redoubled because, “grief too can manacle the mind” and physical constraint may not be so severe as the emotional subjection to the lady. But that same human consciousness provides liberation: in one poem, through wine, song, and self-abandonment; in another, through honor, by renewal of allegiance to the king amidst general dissolution. In “To Althea” and “The Guiltless Lady,” physical confinement is transcended by love, wine, the certainty of one's own integrity, or by one's personal magnetism. In “The Scrutiny” and in “Wars,” the confinement is entirely spiritual, stemming from possession by woman, love; freedom is found by turning to other sexual liaisons, or by renewed devotion to the ideal of honor.

In the last analysis, the haunting sense of universal conflict and entrapment, and the problem of liberty and confinement, are part of his one recurring motif or major theme—“Honor.” He is of two minds about honor: giving himself with equal zest to deriding it in drink or erotic lyric or to lauding it, with reference to king or lady, in poems on prison, camp, or court. Whether writing of mute insect or Renaissance gentleman, Lovelace has sketched the range of responses to the universal predicament of confinement—from passive death to active choice of pleasure or something “higher.” His basic contribution to English literature, therefore, is his dramatization of the two ways of acting in the face of disaster—by self-abandonment or by self-discipline; or, as a moral relativist might describe it, by two different modes of self-abandonment.

Evaluating his total output, we can say that Lovelace is least inspired in his occasional and Petrarchan love poetry, better in his jaunty erotica and sociopolitical stuff, best at the juncture of courtly, amatory, and political which he made peculiarly his own area. His insect poems likewise constitute a contribution to the age. Hardly anything of his poetry is original; but the same can be said of Shakespeare, and not originality but aptness in expressing what oft was thought is the criterion. Lovelace manages to give genre pieces like “The Grasshopper” or “The Fair Beggar” a touch of his own. The existence of twin poems on the same subjects—on the snail, the fly caught, the patch on the lady's face, Lucasta at the bath, himself in prison, Lely's painting—suggests a tentativeness on the part of the poet or, more likely, a certain open-mindedness: a willingness to experiment, to re-examine appearances from varying perspectives.

But—besides individual lines, images, octosyllabics, conclusions, satiric couplets; besides beautiful fragments from flawed poems like “Aramantha” and “On Sannazar”; besides a recurring theme or two—does Lovelace present more substantial, complete achievement; any self-contained, finished works of art, however brief, any “well-wrought sonnets”?

From his collection of a hundred and three poems we can salvage about forty, or two-fifths. While this may not be a high percentage compared with Donne, Herbert, Marvell, it is substantial. Of these forty, some fifteen to twenty are effective and readable; repay study; change our view of life ever so little; leave us wiser, amused, or moved. Each has its flaws, to be sure, but none is incapacitated by them. This list of poems certainly would include “A Paradox,” “Gratiana singing and dancing,” “To Ellinda … written,” “The Vintage to the Dungeon,” “A Guiltless Lady,” “The Apostacy,” “La Bella Bona Roba,” “In Allusion,” “The Duel,” “Dialogue. Lute and Voice,” “An Anniversary,” “Painture,” “Valiant Love,” “A Fly … Cobweb,” “To Lucasta. From Prison,” “You Are Deceived,” “The Advice.”

There are, moreover, a dozen poems which are very good; in these the flaws are nearly effaced by striking images or lines, by effective rhetoric, or by a sense of humor. This group, containing no masterpieces, is typical of that great age of lyric poetry when so many men were able to write beautiful poems with little apparent effort. It includes “To … Hair,” “Depose,” “The Rose,” “The Scrutiny,” “Loose Saraband [1659],” “Cupid Far Gone,” “The Ant,” “On Sannazar,” “The Snail,” “A Fly … Claret,” “Love … First Age,” “Strive Not.” And there are the half-dozen perfect poems, the masterpieces from Lovelace's pen which take their place with the finer lyrics of the age and which are in all the anthologies: “To … Sea,” “To … Wars,” “The Grasshopper,” “Ellinda's Glove,” “To Althea,” “The Fair Beggar.” Of these, “Ellinda's Glove” and “The Fair Beggar” have hardly been noticed until lately; “To … Sea” and “The Grasshopper” have been coming into prominence in the twentieth century; and, of course, “To … Wars” and “To Althea” have been acknowledged for the last two hundred years as supreme utterances of the heroic temperament in duress; as the swan song of the old order seen in its noblest moment; as, in Grierson's famous words, the “only poems which suggest what ‘Cavalier’ came to mean when glorified by defeat.”⁷

What is Lovelace's place in seventeenth-century English literature? If we put Shakespeare and Milton in the first rank, the peers of other world geniuses; Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Dryden in the second rank of consistently very fine to excellent poets; Vaughan, Crashaw, Carew, Herrick in the third rank, of good to very good talents; then Lovelace no doubt belongs with Suckling, Lord Herbert, Cowley, Waller in a fourth category of sporadically good poets who are certainly superior to Stanley, Denham, Habington, Traherne. Fourth class does not sound very exalted, but it is no mean achievement to be accounted among the leading dozen poets in a century of very great poetry.

Notes

1. C. H. Wilkinson, ed. The Poems of Lovelace (Oxford, 1930), pp. lxii ff., 260; Herbert Berry and E. K. Timmings, “Lovelace at Court,” Modern Language Notes, LXIX (1954), 396-98.

2. George Williamson, The Donne Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 208-9; R. C. Bald, Donne's Influence in English Literature (Gloucester, Mass., 1932), p. 20; R. L. Sharp, From Donne to Dryden (Chapel Hill, 1940), pp. 106-8; Alvarez, p. 73.

3. Wilkinson, pp. lxvi-lxxi; Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2nd ed., 1962), p. 123; Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 1926, p. 41.

4. Cyril H. Hartmann, The Cavalier Spirit and Its Influence on the Life and Works of Richard Lovelace (London, 1925), pp. 116-19; David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature (New York, 1960), I, 382; Mario Praz, Review of Wilinson's 1925 edition, Modern Language Review, XXI (1926), 319-22.

5. The last few paragraphs are an amalgam of observations by the following: R. A. Blansard, “Carew and the Cavaliers,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, XLIII (1954), 97-101; Thomas Seccomb in Dictionary of National Biography (1937-38), XII, 171; Bush, pp. 122-23; A. C. Baugh, A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), pp. 660-61; Legouis and Cazamian, A History of English Literature (New York, rev. ed., 1935), p. 563; F. R. Leavis, Revaluations (New York, 1947), pp. 15, 37; Hugh Kenner, ed., Seventeenth Century Poetry (New York, 1964), p. 371; Philip Lindsay, For King or Parliament (London, 1949), p. 178.

6. C. V. Wedgwood, Velvet Studies (London, 1946), pp. 23, 27-28; Seventeenth-Century Literature, p. 72; Geoffrey Walton, “The Cavalier Poets,” in From Donne to Marvell, ed. Boris Ford (London, 1956), pp. 169-72; Robin Skelton, The Cavalier Poets (London, 1960), pp. 26-34; Bruce King, “Green Ice and a Breast of Proof,” College English, XXVI (1964), 511-15; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 2nd ed., 1947), p. 210; Norman Holland, “Literary Value: A Psychoanalytic Approach,” Literature and Psychology, XIV (1964), 43-55; Alvarez, pp. 72-73.

7. Grierson and Bullough, The Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse (Oxford, 1934), p. viii.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Lovelace, Richard. Lucasta. London: Thomas Harper, 1649.

———. Lucasta: Posthume Poems. Ed. Dudley Posthumus Lovelace and Eldred Revett. London: William Godbid, 1659.

———. Works in Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. R. G. Howarth. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931.

Secondary Sources

Allen, Don Cameron. “Lovelace: The Grasshopper.” Seventeenth Century English Poetry. Ed. W. R. Keast. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Learned analysis of the Classical and medieval background of the grasshopper, poem and symbol.

Evans, Willa M. “Lawes' and Lovelace's ‘Loose Saraband.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LIV (1939), 764-67.

———. “To Amathea.” Philological Quarterly, XXIII (1944), 129-34.

———. “Lovelace's ‘Mock Song.’” Philological Quarterly, XXIV (1945), 317-28.

———. “An Early Lovelace Text.” Publications of the Modern Language Association, LX (1945), 382-85.

———. “‘The Rose’: A Song by Wilson and Lovelace.” Modern Language Quarterly, VII (1946), 269-78.

———. “Lovelace's Concept of Prison Life in ‘The Vintage to the Dungeon.’” Philological Quarterly, XXVI (1947), 62-68.

———. “Tormenting Fires.” Modern Language Quarterly, IX (1948), 11-16.

A series of brief studies by an expert on the manuscripts of the period. Despite a propensity for assigning anonymous lyrics to Lovelace on tenuous grounds, Evans is good on the “Loose Saraband,” “Mock Song,” “Rose,” “Vintage.”

Fletcher, J. B. “Précieuses at the Court of Charles I.” Journal of Comparative Literature, I (1903), 120-53. Background material for the genteel aspect of Lovelace's poetry.

Hartmann, Cyril H. The Cavalier Spirit and Its Influence on the Life and Work of Richard Lovelace. London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1925. Adds nothing to the documentation of Waite and Wilkinson and only a little to the understanding of the “Cavalier Spirit” or of the poetry.

Henderson, F. O. “Traditions of Précieux and Libertin in Suckling's Poetry.” English Literary History, IV (1937), 274-96. Background material for the libertine and French aspects of Lovelace's poetry.

Holland, Norman. “Literary Value: A Psychoanalytic Approach.” Literature and Psychology, XIV (1964), 43-55, 116-27. Excellent analysis of “The Scrutiny” and “To … Wars.”

Jones, G. F. “Lov'd I Not Honour More: The Durability of a Literary Motif.” Comparative Literature, XI (1959), 131-43. Thorough examination of the meaning of “honor” in earlier Western literature, as background material to “To … Wars.”

King, Bruce. “Green Ice and a Breast of Proof.” College English, XXVI (1964), 511-15. Stimulating if somewhat wrong-headed survey of Lovelace's Weltanschauung which turns him into a despairing, Angst-ridden modern.

O'Regan, M. J. “The Fair Beggar—Decline of a Baroque Theme.” Modern Language Review, IV (1960), 186-99. Scholarly and critical tracing of the various earlier, continental versions of the poem.

Pearson, N. H. “Lovelace's ‘To Lucasta … Wars.’” Explicator, VII (1949), 8, item 58. Fine brief explication of the poem.

Praz, Mario. Review of Wilkinson's 1925 edition. Modern Language Review, XXI (1926), 319-22. Evaluation by a scholar acquainted with the continental background to seventeenth-century currents.

Review of Wilkinson's edition. Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 1926, p. 41. Presents Lovelace as a belated, misplaced Elizabethan in a time out of joint.

Skelton, Robin. The Cavalier Poets. “Writers and their Work,” No. 117. London: Longmans, Green, 1960. Sympathetic appreciation of Lovelace's strengths.

Van Doren, Mark. Introduction to Poetry. New York: Sloane, 1951. Brilliant brief analysis of “To … Wars.”

Wall, L. N. “Some Notes on Marvell's Sources.” Notes and Queries, CCII (1957), 70-73. Discusses Lovelace's influence on Marvell and lists parallels.

Walton, Geoffrey. “The Cavalier Poets.” From Donne to Marvell. Ed. Boris Ford. London: Penguin Books, 1956. Good appraisal of Lovelace's sensibility.

Wedgwood, C. V. “Cavalier Poetry and Cavalier Politics.” Velvet Studies. London: J. Cape, 1946. Fine evocation of Cavalier and court milieux.