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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’.

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.

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 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 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 looks at royalist lyric poets, who celebrated the affective power of rhyme's chime. In the decades that followed the outbreak of the Civil War, royalist poets played up the charming, mystical aspects of the rhyming couplet. Rhyme, therefore, became an emblem of the grounded sublimity that poets like Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, and Abraham Cowley pursued in their verse. They endeavored to make the case that the form and matter of their verse were linked, on the one hand, to the most deep-rooted, primitive desires of the heart and, on the other, to the higher harmony of the cosmos. If the Civil War was, as Cowley suggested, a crisis of unleashed passion, embracing the charming, prerational nature of rhyme seemed like one way to reconnect those passions to forces of political, social, and cosmic order.

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.

Many of the city’s women civic and political activists supported La Guardia during his many electoral campaigns. The women he appointed to his administration brought into his government the feminist and social justice ideals they had been espousing since the suffrage and progressive reform movements: an end to sex discrimination, an expansion of measures to benefit human welfare, and the achievement of pay equity and more career opportunities for women. They believed that they would carry out the mayor’s modernizing agendas as well as, if not better than, the men he had appointed as commissioners. This chapter highlights five women who made singular contributions to the success of the La Guardia administration: Rebecca Rankin, Eunice Hunton Carter, Jane Bolin, Elinore Herrick, and Anna Rosenberg.

An ostensive-inferential model of communication offers useful tools for organizing our thinking about reading works from the past and practising historicist criticism. Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ is woven into the religious controversies of its time, but it also accesses more or less timeless traditions in poetry (pastoral; carpe diem). It looks backward into tradition, forward into posterity, and at its immediate context. In order to describe the poem’s different kinds of communication with readers at different temporal and cultural distances, it is useful to see its intentions, the different things it might communicate, and its implicatures as an ‘array’ (a term taken from Sperber and Wilson’s ‘array of implicatures’). A cognitive pragmatics of literary interpretation provides good ways of exploring how writers explore this multiple communication, how they use contemporary readers as a screen for posterity, and how they use posterity as a screen for the contemporary.