![]() ![]() During these years he made many of the friendships that sparkle in the titles of his poems, most notably with Mildmay Fane, Clipseby Crewe, John Weekes and Simeon Steward. He managed to stretch out his time at Cambridge to ten years, evidently enjoying the leisurely academic life of which we all dream, and moving after a while to Trinity Hall where the cost of living was cheaper and where he could take up the study of civil law. He went to Cambridge late, entering St John’s as a fellow-commoner when he was twenty-two, in 1613. He must already have felt poetic aspirations as a young man in London, for that seems to have been the most likely time for him to have been drawn into the convivial meetings of Ben Jonson’s circle, meetings that seem to have been the happiest incidents of his life. (The editors return several times to the poem “To the reverend shade of his religious Father”- Hesperides 82-as a deeply significant expression of his distress). Adopted by his relatives, he was brought up amid the mercantile elite of London, in a Calvinist household, apprenticed as a goldsmith, but then broke his indenture and went to Cambridge instead. Robert’s poetry would show an uncommon concern with the proper rites of burial, with an attention to the need for order, decorum and grace in the ceremonies, as if he could never enough console the shade of the father he never knew. ![]() Prominent friends managed to obscure the circumstances and get him a rapid burial in St Vedast’s. Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith, apparently threw himself out of a window at the top of his house on Cheapside. Now we learn of the dense ramification of his family in Leicestershire and London, and of the presumed suicide of his father when Robert was an infant. The editors of this splendid new edition from OUP very sensibly begin with that great desideratum, a well-researched biography. One reason for this is the lack of a detailed biography another is the difficulty of dating so many of his poems. He died in 1674, having become an almost forgotten man.Īlthough Herrick’s reputation revived in the twentieth century, and has grown stronger in the last three decades, as critical attention has concentrated more on the literature of Charles’s reign and the Civil War, his place in the literary record has been insecure. Hesperides was not reprinted, and in the Restoration period, Herrick’s name faded away. ![]() When they finally came out, England had been transformed by civil war, and they seemed like an elegy for a lost age. Herrick’s ‘Poems’ had been entered for publication back in April 1640, when their evocations of pastoral pleasures and Cavalier gallantry would have resonated with a society still unfractured, but they did not appear. Robert Herrick’s sole volume of poetry, Hesperides, was published in 1648, an injudicious time to launch a book of strongly royalist verse into the world, as King Charles was a captive and the royalist cause was in terminal decline. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, eds. , 1648.įor suggestions on citing this text, please see Citing the TCP on the Text Creation Partnership website.The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, eds. London: Printed for John Williams and Francis Eglesfield. Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674., Marshall, William, fl. If you have questions about the collection, please contact If you have concerns about the inclusion of an item in this collection, please contact This statement does not extend to any page images or other supplementary files associated with this work, which may be protected by copyright or other license restrictions. These transcriptions are believed to be in the public domain in the United States however, if you decide to use any of these transcriptions, you are responsible for making your own legal assessment and securing any necessary permission. The University of Michigan Library provides access to these keyboarded and encoded editions of the works for educational and research purposes. Hesperides, or, The works both humane & divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. ![]()
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