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Royalists thought they were the true Israel and turned to the Hebrew Bible and Israelite analogies to create an ‘Anglican’ identity during the 1640s and 1650s for those who remained loyal to both monarchy and an English Church that had been dismantled by Parliament. Devotions and collections of psalms appeared, to be used by loyal subjects of Charles I, who was now identified with biblical David—an identity further elaborated by Eikon Basilike and Royalist pamphlets after the King's execution. But the narrative Royalists found most compelling was the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 bce and the subsequent Babylonian exile of the Jews. Psalms and Lamentations expressed Royalist grief about exile and destruction of their Temple. There was interest in Judaica and the Jewish Temple. The chapter discusses poetry by Cowley, Harvey, Herrick, Vaughan, and Crashaw but also publications by Thomas Fuller, John Lightfoot, Thomas Godwin, and John Gregory.

Sisson's addresses explore how far a poet should create ‘agreement’ between the poem of the present and past. Speaking to you through time, Sisson is in conversation with long-deceased auditors including Donne, Catullus, Thomas à Kempis, and Marcus Aurelius. Sisson's handling of the relationship of the body and passions, mind and reason, is in dialogue with Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’. But why is Sisson concerned with historical, usually early modern, yous over others (usually contemporary)? Hill, Douglas Dunn, and Harrison are points of comparison, as the chapter traces the links between addresses to the nation in twentieth-century verse, and the early modern tradition of comprising ‘England’ through patriotic, propagandist, public addresses (Donne, Herbert, Milton and Jonson, Marvell's ‘Upon Appleton House’, and Herrick's Hesperides). For Sisson, England is less a concrete geographical location than a way of saying, a collective idea dependent upon language: ‘the saying is you’.

The assertion of immortality on the title-page of Hesperides, Effugient avidos Carmina nostra Rogos--a misquotation from Ovid's elegy for Tibullus--is no mere invocation of a literary commonplace. Rather, it points to a nexus of intertextual relations involving poems on death, afterlife, and poetic companionship in Tibullus, Propertius, the Amores and Ovid's exile poetry, which is persistently important to Herrick. Ovid's elegy makes poetic imitation itself integral to its consideration of literary immortality, figuring poetry as an ongoing conversation between poets living and dead. In Herrick's numerous evocations of this group of interrelated poems we see him entering the conversation with his classical predecessors, and extending it to his near contemporaries through beautifully integrated allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Denham, Cowley, Carew, and above all Jonson.

This chapter analyses how poetry for Herrick and many other royalists connected to the Caroline court is political, not in the limited sense of power relations but in the sense of being concerned with public life and affairs, with the body politic and the social body as well as the individual. It involves a moral stance. The continuing vitality of historicist criticism for reading Herrick’s poetry is made clear and it is argued here that if this is combined with a sophisticated, complex understanding of the structures of religious belief, structures which express ideas about human nature, imagination and art and the relationship of the past to the present, the resonance of Herrick’s printed poetry for a defeated and dispersed royalist Anglican community becomes clear.

Herrick has a mixed reputation. On the one hand Hesperides includes some of the best known, best loved poems in the English language. Still, Herrick is widely condescended to in the criticism, because he is apparently not ‘great’ in the way we usually think important writers are supposed to be. This essay discusses some of the salient characteristics of Hesperides: in particular its preference for reiteration over causal sequence, its apparently deliberate thwarting of narrative momentum, and its interest in materials often considered trivial or valueless. It argues that these features are evidence not of a failure or a lack but of Herrick’s intelligent scepticism about the value of goal-oriented ambition.

Herrick engaged in a dialogue with Jonson throughout his literary career, from the early 1610s to the publication of Hesperides in 1648. Jonson's influence may have remained a constant, but what it meant to imitate Jonson changed. In the early 1610s, when Herrick began composing poetry, Jonson offered an exclusive yet meritocratic author function and communal identity. Later, at the end of the 1640s, when royalist writers actively sought to renew the Jonsonian community, Herrick used the symposiastic lyric to resurrect Jonson, and to consider the possibilities for cultural and aesthetic renewal. Jonsonian literary filiation was therefore central to Herrick's authorial self-fashioning. By adopting Jonson as his literary father, Herrick was able to mediate issues of social status and construct lines of literary descent that could serve as powerful vectors for continuity and tradition.

This chapter recovers Herrick’s association with a formidable, secretive, and almost unknown literary circle which formed in London in the aftermath of the first Civil War, and whose raison d’être was to encourage translation and imitation of classical, neo-Latin, and continental verse. I suggest that when Herrick prepared Hesperides for publication, he was close to, or was perhaps even a member of the poetic community that gathered in the Middle Temple rooms of Thomas Stanley and included prominent royalist writers such as Richard Lovelace and James Shirley.

This chapter examines Robert Herrick’s translations and imitations of the Anacreontea, concentrating in particular on his appropriation of the concept of the anacreontic symposium in Hesperides. For Herrick, this provides the model for an elite and refined form of sociability and conviviality that is often associated with Ben Jonson and those convivial drinking sessions held by Jonson and his ‘sons’ at various London taverns in the 1620s. A number of Herrick’s anacreontics might have been composed during this period, registering an aspect of his literary exchange within this select community of poets. However, as it is argued, these poems gain a politically sharpened set of connotations in Hesperides in 1648, as, within the context of the political and ideological controversies of the Civil War period, the element of communal drinking in the genre comes to project a notion of royalist bonding and solidarity.

This chapter presents a biographical narrative of a select group of Left-wing writers and their careers, namely: Milton Wolff, Alvah Bessie, and William Herrick. It describes how the lives of these writers are disparate except in the respect that all were raised in secular New York Jewish families with religious traditions at some distance from their lives, although a Yiddish culture was present. The chapter notes that all suffered the loss of or alienation from their fathers at a young age; two were won to radicalism in the early Depression—the first was initiated by teenage acquaintances, the second by the arguments of his fellow intellectuals, the third was born into a revolutionary family during World War I. It observes that their routes to Communism, Spain, and writing novels collectively comprise a vital subset of the literary Left, as well as a hitherto neglected segment in Jewish American cultural history.

This chapter focuses on the most extreme and uncompromising expression of mortal poetics in the early modern period: the carpe diem lyric. This classical genre was entirely missing from the Petrarchan canon—it was clearly incompatible with the idea that love would endure for all eternity—but it surfaced with renewed energy, and with an entirely different resonance, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the English carpe diem lyric, poets like Herrick and Marvell made a conscious and decisive break with the Christian metaphysics that structured their culture’s attitude toward death. There could be no mention of the soul’s eventual journey to heaven within a poem that urges an immediate seizing of the present; there could be no deferral of joy within a poem that imagines this day as the lovers’ only chance for bliss. Carpe diem poetry always depended upon a strictly physical basis for love, but this physical basis became all the more pronounced once the idea of spiritual transcendence was actively rejected. What emerged was an embrace of the present whose intensity and poignancy was built upon the full recognition of what mortal love left behind.

This chapter examines the discussions of The Young Naturalists’ Society, a club formed in March of 1875 with the purpose of supporting the pursuit of natural history. In its three-year existence, Thomas Sadler Roberts was president. Discussion at the Society’s meetings was not limited to birds, but also covered plants, insects, and fossils; debate also extended to theoretical matters, including the ethics of contemporary natural history, and the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. In his essay in front of the Society, Roberts stated that the increasing scarcity of game and other species was due to overhunting, as he documented golden-lovers and other once plentiful birds driven into scarcity by hunters and collectors. The chapter also mentions the documenting of behavioral observations of birds by Roberts—birdsong, bird food, how they foraged, and where they roosted. Sixty years later, he would include these data in The Birds of Minnesota.

This chapter begins by analyzing Robert Herrick’s poem The Suspicion upon His Over-Much Familiarity with a Gentlewoman, followed by a description of chin chucking or the erotic stroke of a person’s chin. Chin chucking challenges the temporal organization of sex into foreplay and consummation, and alternately constructs and destabilizes the active and passive practices used in the early modern period to describe sexuality according to the participants’ gender, age, and status. The chapter concludes with a review of Herrick’s poem in determining whether chin chucking is considered a “sexual” act or practice.

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.

“The Erotics of Doubt” contends that the carpe diem trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. For a diverse group of early modern poets, an encounter with ancient theories of essence and substance enabled the articulation of a skeptical hypothesis almost impossible to imagine in any other cultural venue. The unassuming carpe diem trope, that is, parlays classical physics’ materialist paradigm into a robust discourse founded entirely upon the presumption of mortality. The chapter shows that the erotic invitation’s discursive environment—its pitting of assaultive rhetorician against naïve virgin—is inherently confrontational. It reveals, through readings of Herrick, Marlowe, Ralegh, and others, that the dynamic structure that propels a lusty speaker towards consummation is latent with rhetorical and dramatic potentiality. To explore these issues, the chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, whose central crisis is generated by a series of unwelcome invitations made to the play’s singular virgin, pressed to surrender her chastity in order to spare her condemned brother from execution. The cloud of unredeemed death that hangs over the play forces a “measurement” of that chastity as weighed against the evocative materialist nightmare it fails to redeem.

This chapter shows that Ben Jonson’s practice in imitating classical poetry was far more deeply indebted to the kinds of ‘formal’ imitation described in Chapter 6 than Jonson himself would have wished to admit. The epigrams of Martial in particular were not in a simple sense ‘sources’ of material for Jonson’s poetry: rather he sought to imitate the rhetorical figurations and manner of Martial and other authors. The chapter argues Jonson’s own (highly derivative) remarks on imitation in the Discoveries should not be simply taken as guides to his practice. It argues for strong affinities between Jonson’s work as a translator and his practice as an imitator. As both an imitator and as a translator Jonson responded not just to the vocabulary and sense of his originals but also to what Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum had termed their ‘figura’, or rhetorical shape. The chapter concludes by showing how Jonson’s mode of ‘formal’ imitation enabled him to create a style which subsequent imitators—both of his works and of classical poetry—could imitate, and how Thomas Randolph, Robert Herrick, and others imitated Jonson’s style and practice.