SOURCE: Clayton, Thomas. Introduction to Cavalier Poets: Selected Poems, edited by Thomas Clayton, pp. xiii-xxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

[In this essay, Clayton presents an overview of the four major Cavalier poets: Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace.]

Herrick, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace share a continuing appeal that continues also to change as the times change. They are ‘for all time’, as Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, but they are also much more ‘of an age’; hence their varying critical fortunes with ages and audiences like and unlike theirs. They have always found most favour with those who prefer their poetry first to be poetry (‘creation through words of orders of meaning and sound’, as the late Reuben Brower once put it), and who recognize ‘high seriousness’ as not necessarily to be demanded everywhere in the same measure, kind, and character. Not that these poets don't speak to the human condition. They do. But heirs of the opposing puritans have difficulties with the Cavalier perspective, for reasons suggested by Hume in his assessment of relations between art and society: ‘in a republic, the candidates for office must look downwards, to gain the suffrages of the people; in a monarchy, they must turn their attention upwards, to court the good graces and favour of the great. To be successful in the former way, it is necessary for a man to make himself useful, by his industry, capacity, or knowledge; to be prosperous in the latter way, it is requisite for him to render himself agreeable, by his wit, complaisance, and civility. A strong genius succeeds best in republics, a refined taste in monarchies. And consequently the sciences are the more natural growth of the one, the polite arts of the other’ (‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, 1742).

For better as well as for worse ‘the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’ have given us much of the modern West, but it is still not for nothing that the puritans have also given their name to stern-faced repression in the parsimonious interests of a theocratic millennium. And it was the puritans who closed the theatres, restricted sports and pastimes, took the land by force and violence, and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King—a course of national and international events that brought about Suckling's death in 1641 and possibly Carew's in 1640, and that Lovelace and Herrick saw most feelingly, Lovelace on occasion as a political prisoner and Herrick by expulsion from his parish living in Devon. Herrick expresses a keen sense of the times' universal upheaval in ‘Farewell Frost, or Welcome the Spring’: rejoicing over the turn of the greening season, he hopes that,

… when this war (which tempest-like doth spoil
Our salt, our corn, our honey, wine, and oil)
Falls to a temper, and doth mildly cast
His inconsiderate frenzy off at last,
The gentle dove may, when these turmoils cease,
Bring in her bill, once more, the Branch of Peace.

Here Herrick speaks plaintively and forcefully for the free-from-party-coloured heart, although the cast of his allegiance is clearly in evidence when ‘the palms put forth their gems, and every tree / Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.’

Carew and Suckling were close friends, and they were certainly acquainted with their younger contemporary, Lovelace. All three served in the first Bishops' War in 1639, and Suckling and Lovelace served in the second, in 1640. And all three were closely associated with a Court in which the King was as much a connoisseur of the arts as he was a perennial innocent in matters of politics and society at large. Their Cavalier commitment may be said to have been total, as it was also for Herrick, though in different ways, as one would expect of an Anglican clergyman—but not so different as all that. Herrick was educated at Cambridge, as Suckling was (Carew and Lovelace were Oxford men); he clearly had his years in London, too, if a lesser day in Court, and he fondly recollects the good old days in apostrophes to Ben Jonson.

Jonson himself has helped a suggestible posterity to see the so-called ‘Sons of Ben’ as a sort of masonic lodge of classically inclined Court poets. Holding lordly court in such congenial quarters as the Devil Tavern's ‘Apollo Room’ (which Jonson named), remarking that ‘my son Cartwright writes all like a man’, and writing ‘An Epistle to One That Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben’, with its ringing allusion to Revelation 7: 8 (‘Of the tribe of Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand’), Jonson lent lofty countenance and even conviction to those who have sought a tribe or family that is the classical, secular, social, mannerly, and lucid counterpart of the strongly vernacular, divine, private, self-assertive, and often obscure Metaphysical ‘school’ of Donne and others, itself accredited by convenience more than by credentials. There is something to be said for the Sons of Ben as a historical grouping of well educated and convivial tavern wits bowing to Jonson's poetical majority and commanding presence, but Herrick is almost the only certain as well as No. 1 Son, and even he found his own way, though he walked in his poetical father's footsteps to get there. Suckling's dislike of Jonson is abundantly apparent in ‘The Wits’, which lampoons him; Lovelace was too young to have known him well, if at all; and Carew seems to have been an ambivalent and occasional ‘cousin’ in the indeterminate sense. In short, there is no real Tribe of Ben, so far as these Cavalier poets are concerned. Many poets of the period have varied orders of poetical expression, and Carew, for example, can sound very like Jonson in his epitaphs and like Donne in his great elegy on the Dean of Paul's. This is not surprising, for an age eminently conscious of decorum as a principle of total integration—something quite beyond what ‘decorous’ implies.

What, then, is ‘Cavalier poetry’? By tradition it is precisely the corpus of poems by these four ‘Cavalier Lyrists’,¹ and by that measure it is a composite of the qualities abstracted from their collected works. The other way of defining the poetry is by attending to the senses and applications of the term ‘Cavalier’, which derives ultimately from late Latin caballarius ‘horseman’, and yields in the seventeenth century such pertinent senses as (OED): ‘a horseman; esp. a horse-soldier; a knight’; ‘a gentleman trained to arms, “a gay sprightly military man”’, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, or ‘a courtly gentleman, a gallant’; and ‘a name given to those who fought on the side of Charles I in the war between him and Parliament: a 17th c. Royalist’. In attributive or adjectival use, ‘gallant’ (citing Suckling: ‘The people are naturally [i.e. by nature] not valiant, and not much cavalier’); ‘careless in manner, off-hand, free and easy’; and ‘Royalist’. The word was also incorporated in ‘Cavalierism’ (1642) for ‘the practice or principles of … the adherents of Charles I; an expression characteristic of the Cavalier party.’

It is thus hardly surprising that Charles delighted to be portrayed by Van Dyck as ‘just dismounted from his horse on a hunting expedition’, and it is in fact to Van Dyck ‘that we owe an artistic record of this society with its defiantly aristocratic bearing and its cult of courtly refinement’; he ‘showed the Stuart monarch as he would have wished to live in history: a figure of matchless elegance, of unquestioned authority and high culture, the patron of the arts, and the upholder of the divine right of kings, a man who needs no outward trappings of power to enhance his natural dignity’—in short, a Cavalier King.² With reference to such qualities as these, which were inherently aesthetic as well as ‘social’, it used to be customary to speak of ‘the Cavalier spirit’, and once, indeed, there seems to have been one, which, lost to history, found its archetypal way readily into the fictions of gallantry of Dumas and Rostand, for example.

In ‘The Line of Wit’ F. R. Leavis did much to prepare for more recent thinking about the poets of the Caroline period by arguing that, in ‘the idiomatic quality of the Caroline lyric, its close relation to the spoken language, we do not find it easy to separate Donne's influence from Jonson's’; the line ‘runs from Ben Jonson (and Donne) through Carew and Marvell to Pope’; and the Cavalier manifestation, ‘which is sufficiently realized in a considerable body of poems, may be described as consciously urbane, mature, and civilized.’³ More recently Josephine Miles has studied the poetry of the period in relation to ‘a part of literary style more clearly limitable than tone or theme or genre or even manner’, namely ‘mode: the selective use of the elements and structures of language’.⁴ Her studies have led to the conclusion that in some vital respects ‘the so-called “sons of Ben” turn out to be even more strongly sons of Donne’.⁵ For, in connection with a stylistic factor ‘in which Donne's uses are clearly dominant’, of thirty poets those with the nearest affinities are Carew, Suckling, Shirley, and Herrick. Another factor places Lovelace as a member of smaller mid-century groups including, in proximate order, Cowley, Marvell, Crashaw, and Quarles. The study reveals for the first group a poetical vocabulary ‘remarkably packed with verbs of action, and with a world-time-love-death-reciprocal-action complex which we may recognize as part of what has been called “metaphysical”. These terms together bear a very high proportion of the whole burden of metaphysical vocabulary’. The practice of the mid-century group, in its ‘more domesticated metaphysics’, was also a ‘carrying on and modifying of the Donne tradition’. Finally, in a strictly grammatical perspective (the ratio of verbs to adjectives, nouns, and verbs together), one finds Milton, Sylvester, and Spenser at one extreme, and at the other Carew, Herrick, Jonson, Donne, and Suckling, in order of increasing difference. In short, the ‘idiolects’ of the Cavalier poets are manifestly non-Spenserian. Theirs are Strong Lines, by turns more like Jonson's (especially Carew and Herrick), but quite as often like Donne's (Lovelace and Suckling). Ultimately, their poetical ethos is their own.

These Cavalier poets are the most prominent and significant of the royalist poets of the reign of Charles I. It is not so often, nowadays, that one meets with an overgeneralized notion of literary Cavalierism, but such a notion persists, in some quarters: viewed as interchangeable, Carrick and Herew, Sucklace and Loveling, materialize in this presbyopic vision as a four-way poetical Janus that their trochaic surnames seem to suggest. But for all they have in common they clearly had their differences: Herrick died a priest at 83, Carew a debauchee at 45 or 46, Lovelace a bankrupt gentleman at 39, and Suckling a rash royalist conspirator at 32. Juxtaposed in contrast here are Herrick's scholarly squinting, widely smiling, city-country curiosity; Carew's shaded vein of witty but felt-in-the-blood-and-felt-along-the-heart sense of transiency; Suckling's often surprisingly modest and almost always playful but not unreflective sprezzatura; and Lovelace's soldier's-courtier's-philosopher's brightly interwoven thought, charm, and keen bravura.

Herrick had the best chance of major poetical achievement, and Hesperides and Noble Numbers in a measure reflect the fifty-six years that preceded their publication in 1648. Crashaw attained a generally granted poetical majority in fewer years (36 or 37) than Carew or Lovelace lived, and in an earlier generation Marlowe at 29 left a corpus of work far more substantial than Suckling did in his thirty-two years. The achievement of each and all of these poets is not insubstantial, nevertheless, and what Dr. Johnson wrote of the Earl of Rochester (who died at 33) applies in some degree to Carew and Lovelace and in a pronounced degree to Suckling: ‘in all his works there is sprightliness and vigour, and everywhere may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to excellence. What more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men began to be displayed?’ (‘Life of Rochester’). A brief descriptive survey will help to convey a sense of the character of the respective canons of these Cavalier poets.

Herrick's first datable poem, ‘A Country Life’ (32), was probably written c. 1610, when the poet was nineteen.⁶ He wrote virtually all the rest of his poems before 1648, when the 1,130 poems of Hesperides (with the 272 of Noble Numbers) were published. Only eight of his poems are known to have been published before Hesperides, and only thirty-nine (and one of the Noble Numbers) circulated in manuscript, so Herrick evidently shared the time's and gentleman's preference for private to public circulation, at least for most works short of an authorized collection. As Mark L. Reed asserts, in arguing that many of Herrick's poems could have been written before Herrick moved to Dean Prior in 1630, ‘if these poems do not grow from and sing of Devonshire’, as some of them certainly did, however, ‘they do, in a manner unparalleled by any other group of lyrics of the time, grow from and sing of England …, more exactly of the beauties and meaning of the countryside, the inhabitants, and popular activity of England itself.’ They are, in fact, manifestations of a wholly new consciousness: ‘the growing awareness in the English artistic sensibility of natural scenery and folk and rural life other than that of Arcadia or classical verse.’⁷

If one examines and loosely classifies the first and last twenty poems in Hesperides, an interesting fact emerges that tends to be true of most of the collection: Herrick's world is prominently one of apostrophic address, in which he enacts the ‘social life’ of a person who finds much of his companionship in his imagination.⁸ The following kinds of poem make up the forty: thirteen epigrams, fifteen apostrophes (including five to his ‘mistresses’ named or collective, and ten to other persons and things), five soliloquies and epigrammatic meditations, three poems to and on himself, two ‘other’ dramatic monologues, a narrative witch-poem in lyric stanzas (‘The Hag’), and a carmen figuratum. As for the longer poems that are customarily taken to measure poetical reach, Herrick's fifteen include three wedding poems, three ‘fairy’ poems, and nine ‘miscellaneous’ poems: ‘Corinna's Going a Maying’, two ‘Country Life’ poems, a ‘Farewell’ and a ‘Welcome to Sack’, ‘His Age’, ‘A Panegyric’, ‘The Parting Verse’, and ‘The Apparition of His Mistress Calling Him to Elysium’. These range from 54 to 170 lines; twelve of them are included in the present collection. The shorter masterpieces, which are not easily categorized, are such poems as ‘Delight in Disorder’, ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, and ‘Upon Julia's Clothes’, and Herrick is no doubt most widely known for these shorter poems, which are indeed among his best.

In a creative life of at least two decades' duration (c. 1619-40), Carew wrote Coelum Brittanicum (a masque, 1634), 121 poems, and translations of nine Psalms. His first datable poem, ‘A Fly That Flew into My Mistress' Eye’ (24), was written when he was twenty-five or thereabouts, but it is difficult to imagine that he didn't write similar lyrics before that age. Thirty-five of his poems are more or less ‘occasional’ in the strict sense, and many of these are datable at least within a year or so. Ten of the poems were printed during his lifetime, and his poems circulated widely in manuscript, as was usual with the members of his circle; at least two manuscript collections contain a substantial number (42 and 65, respectively). Just over half of his poems are conveniently characterized as amatory poems, complaints, and compliments. Of his twelve longer poems (56-166 lines, five in the present collection), his longest and one of his two most famous is the erotic body-topographical poem, ‘A Rapture’ (28). The categories of the remaining poems do not contain many members, and the social connection looms large, from the two bountiful Country-House Poems (19, 39), the seven elegies and consolatory poems of which the elegy on Donne is generally thought to be his best poem (34), the two poems on sickness, the four celebratory and congratulatory marriage-poems (48), the three New Year's greetings (40), the five epitaphs (29-32), the two miscellaneous occasional-poems (35, 38), to the two verse epistles (one the Country-House Poem, 39). This group of social genres suggests that some claim could be made for Carew as the master of Cavalier greeting-card verse, but virtually all such poems at Carew's hand transcend their genres, and few fall short of considerable accomplishment. Carew also has a poem to a painter, three pastoral and amatory dialogues (26), a dramatic monologue (21), a remonstration to Ben Jonson (33), four choric songs, six commendatory poems (41, 42), and a poem for a picture (36). His magnitude as a poet is established rather less by the canon as a whole, perhaps, than by the brilliance of his performance in a wide variety of individual poems both short and long. In Carew's short and profligate life a real poetic and intellectual gift was largely dissipated.

The scope of Suckling's work is represented in part by a group of religious and Christmas-seasonal poems written in or before 1626, when the poet was seventeen; his four plays, The Sad One (c. 1632, unfinished), Aglaura (1637), The Goblins (1638-41), and Brennoralt (1639-41); his Account of Religion by Reason; several political tracts; and over fifty letters, some of literary character and many of literary quality. Of his seventy-eight poems, written between 1626 and 1641, the two ‘major’ ones introduced minor genres into English verse, ‘The Wits’ as a ‘trial for the bays’ of poetry (26, 1637), and ‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’ as a burlesque, rusticated epithalamion (27, 1639). Suckling was the arch-Cavalier in prizing ‘black eyes, or a lucky hit / At bowls, above all the trophies of wit’, as he claimed to do, and it is doubtful whether he would have gone on to truly disciplined and serious work even if he had not died a suicide at thirty-two; but he managed to get rather a lot done for all his apparent insouciance, and he is the most often neglected, underrated, and misrepresented of the Cavalier poets. The canon consists in only 2,010 lines, and only the poems already mentioned are of any length (118 and 132 lines). The rest average about twenty-three lines.

Of the prominently quasi-dramatic poems in the secular-metaphysical manner, there are two dialogues (7, 28); eighteen answers, arguments, and dramatic monologues (10-15, 22, 23); three carpe diem poems (13); four compliments and protestations (4, 8); two valedictions (25); eleven exclamations, expostulations, and ‘soliloquies’ (3, 16-20); and three ‘impersonations’ (2). A second group is made up of descriptive, narrative, or explicitly ‘written’ poems: three imprecations (9), five narratives and retrospectives, a ‘trial for the bays’ (26), a dramatic-narrative burlesque epithalamion (27), two ‘songs’ (6), four occasional-commendatory poems, a prologue, a verse epistle, four extended conceits and definitions (1, 21, 24), an ‘amatory cosmology’ poem, and a poem in the ‘praise of ugliness’ genre. Finally, the eleven (juvenile) religious poems. Suckling's verse is emphatically an art of stance, poise, and the medium, and his single most famous poem, probably, is a pungent avowal of constant inconstancy that concludes,

Had it any been but she,
And that very very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

If it is taken as ‘male-chauvinistic’ psycho-sociology, it may displease (or elate); if it is taken as lyric fiction, it can sing for itself.

Lucasta's sixty-one poems (1-25 here) were published in 1649, when Lovelace was thirty-one, and most of the forty-three in Lucasta. Posthume Poems (1659, 26-47 here) were probably written 1649-57. Like Carew and Suckling, Lovelace turned his hand to drama, with his comedy The Scholars, written during his first year at Oxford when he was 16-17 (1634-5), and The Soldier (1640). He is best known for his war-connected (1, 2) and prison poems (9, 10, 17), but well known also for his poems of compliment and amatory lyrics, of which there are forty-four in all (28 in Lucasta, 16 in Posthume Poems) and fifteen in this collection. What Lovelace is less well known for (except through ‘The Grasshopper’), but which are very characteristic as well as unique for his time, are his nine meditative ‘creature poems’ (most included here), and his ‘painting poems’ (13, 45). His occasional verse is scant and most of it is late, except for the prologue and epilogue to The Scholars. The four funeral-elegiac poems were written 1638-49, and the anniversary (44) and wedding poems after 1649. Lovelace's longest, and in several other ways also ‘major’, poems conclude each volume: Aramantha: A Pastoral (384 lines) complements but far exceeds ‘Amyntor's Grove’ in accomplishment as well as length, in Lucasta; and ‘On Sanazar's Being Honoured’ (267 lines), in Posthume Poems, is his only formal satire. Also typical of Lovelace are his meditation and advice poems (15, 43), and a mixed bag of ten ironical meditations and anti-love songs (e.g. 22, 23). The remaining poems are four mythological conceits and paradoxes (6, 7), four dialogues (42, which is also a political satire), a political ‘Mock-Song’ (39), and a translation (a number of other translations are appended at the end of Posthume Poems).

The character and direction of Lovelace's poetical career is similar to the movement of poetry in general during the mid-seventeenth century, from the private and personal, through the social, to the public, or at any rate impersonal, including the detached and philosophical (lyrics continue to be written, but most are depersonalized songs). If, as seems likely, some of the compliments and amatory lyrics in Posthume Poems were in fact written before 1649 but not included in Lucasta, then the poems written after 1649, the year Charles was beheaded, are characterized by an increasingly meditative strain and a gathering gloom. There is not a simple transformation of gallant courtier into hounded and pessimistic royalist fugitive, but a general movement of the kind seems indicated: from a witty amatory lyrist to a poet personally and poetically engagé to one whose main hope of stability and deliverance is found in personal stoicism and friendship. Lovelace's gifts did develop in his known twenty-two years as poet, and interesting and larger accomplishment might have been expected of him had he lived beyond thirty-nine.

It is fair to say that of these four Cavalier poets only Herrick outlived his poetical gifts, but he had the good fortune within his lifetime to bring them to their relative perfection in full in a book of his own making, Hesperides well named.

Notes

1. The title of ch. i of the Cavalier and Puritan volume (vii) of the old Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. Sir A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (1911).

2. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 12th edn. (1972), pp. 316-17.

3. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1947), pp. 18, 19, 29.

4. Eras and Modes in English Poetry, 2nd edn. (1964), p. viii.

5. Josephine Miles and Hanan C. Selvin, ‘Factor Analysis of Seventeenth Century Poetry’, The Computer and Literary Style, ed. Jacob Leed (1966), p. 122.

6. The poem-numbers given here and below in parentheses are those of the poems in this edition.

7. ‘Herrick Among the Maypoles: Dean Prior and the Hesperides’, SEL [Studies in English Literature] v (1965), 133-50 (quotations from pp. 148-50).

8. The poems are classified for convenience by salient characteristics; there are obviously alternative ways of classifying many poems.