What is actually known and documented of Robert Herrick’s life forms a rather skeletal outline and can be readily summarized. Christened in London on August 24, 1591, Herrick appears to have been the seventh child of Nicholas and Julian Herrick. Nicholas, a goldsmith, fell to his death from an upper story of his house on Goldsmith’s Row on November 9, 1592, just two days after he had recorded his will. Obvious questions were raised concerning the possibility that Herrick’s father had committed suicide, and they appear never to have been resolved. The nature of Herrick’s boyhood education is not known, but in 1607, he was apprenticed for ten years to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, a wealthy goldsmith and merchant. The venture, however, was aborted, when, in 1613, at the relatively old age of twenty-two, Herrick was enrolled with his uncle’s consent in St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was during his years at Cambridge that Herrick wrote a series of letters to his uncle, all of which are variations on the timeless theme rehearsed by innumerable students: Send more money. Herrick received his A.B. degree in 1617, his A.M. in 1620, and in 1623, he was ordained an Anglican priest, serving in 1625 as chaplain in the duke of Buckingham’s abortive military expedition to the Isle of Rhe. In 1630, Herrick left London and its cultural life to assume the vicarage of Dean Prior in rustic Devon, a position he held until 1647, when, because of his loyalties to the king and the Church of England, he was expelled, an event that was the catalyst for his return to London and the publication of his works in the following year. Nothing else is known of him until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when he successfully petitioned the Crown to be reinstated as vicar of Dean Prior, where, with no evidence of strife, he resided until his death in 1674 at the age of eighty-two.

That the documentary detail of Herrick’s life is so easily reducible to a thumbnail sketch has made the task of relating Herrick’s biography to his writings a difficult one. Indeed, early commentators tended, understandably, to approach Herrick’s poems as if they were authorized and unexpurgated autobiography, attempting to fill in the gaps in what was known of his life from the evidence of his works. Such a modus operandi runs the obvious risk of confusing the poetic persona that Herrick creates in his verse with the person whom the persona...

Robert Herrick, a poet who found his poetic inspiration in the pagan poets, especially Anacreon, Horace, Catullus, and Martial and who was in his youth associated with Ben Jonson and his witty followers, would hardly seem to have been suited for a career in the Church and even less so for a rural parish. Indeed, Herrick was deeply dissatisfied with his ignorant country congregation and regarded his Devonshire residence as a punishment. He found some consolation, nevertheless, in the pagan qualities of the local songs and dances, and he loved his pet menagerie, particularly the pig he taught to drink.

Herrick was born in London in 1591, about the time William Shakespeare began to write for the stage, and he died in the same year as John Milton. Herrick’s father, a prosperous goldsmith, died when Herrick was an infant, but he was aided by a rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who was jeweler to the king. He was apprenticed to his uncle, but his academic talents made it advisable to send him to St. John’s, Cambridge, at the age of twenty-two. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1617 and his master’s degree in 1620. Little is known of the next nine years of his life, but he probably spent them in London.

In 1629 Herrick became vicar at Dean Prior, Devonshire, where, despite feeling exiled, he began to write poetry that exalted the charms of rusticity. He stayed in this rural setting until 1647, when he was removed from his position because he...

Herrick was born in the Cheapside district of London in August of 1591. He was the seventh child and fourth son of Julia Stone Herrick and...