ROBERT HERRICK

Abstract

Robert Herrick (i591-1674) and his Hesperides have long been admired for their lyricism. After a century of relative neglect between the poet's death and the late eighteenth century, interest in Herrick was revived by John Nichols through the Gentleman's Magazine. Poems like 'To the Virgins, to make much of Time', 'Corinna's going a Maying', 'Delight in Disorder', 'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses', 'How Roses came Red', and 'How Violets came Blue' made Herrick the darling of nineteenth-century anthologists; Algernon Charles Swinburne called him 'the greatest songwriter as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist ever born of English race'. The copy of Hesperides now in the Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois) was once owned by a Mr William Combes of Henley, an amiable gentleman book collector who was said to carry Hesperides in his right-hand coat pocket and Izaak Walton's Complete Angler in his left whenever 'with tapering rod and trembling float, he enjoys his favourite diversion of angling on the banks of the Thames'. But the genteel songster of this pastoral vignette was not the only image of the poet to surface during the nineteenth century: at least one Herrick poem, 'To Daffodils', was appropriated by Chartist writers, who identified him as a poet 'for the People'. During the early twentieth century, Herrick continued to be frequently anthologized, but his association with lyric ease and country jollity did not help his reputation among critics who admired the 'strong lines' of Ben Jonson and John Donne. Ezra Pound owned and annotated a copy of his verses; other modernists read him, but often found him lacking. For F. R. Leavis he was 'trivially charming'; for T. S. Eliot, he was the paradigmatic 'minor poet'. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, a revival of sorts began, not because the ideal of rural merriment with which Herrick was so strongly associated had come back into fashion, but because critics had become more interested in reading Hesperides as a whole than in admiring its anthologized parts. Taken all together, Hesperides is a huge, sprawling