Katherine Maus' opening essay challenges the dismissive legacy of critical approaches to
Cavalier poets, which she sees in the continued belittling of Herrick's works as insignificant and slight in subject and form.
Wilcher, a recently retired educator, focuses on the literary works of Sir John Suckling, sometimes disparagingly known as one of a group of "
Cavalier poets." Biographical information certainly plays a part here, but the author notes that the works themselves provide a glimpse into the England of the early 1600s in which Suckling lived.
This new collection replaces two earlier Norton Critical Editions: Ben Jonson and the
Cavalier Poets and George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets.
English
Cavalier poets urged people to carpe diem, or "seize the day." If computer investigators were to have a mantra, it might be "seize the data." But like seizing the day, the latter may be easier said than done.
Chapter 2 ("Lawes and the
Cavalier Poets"), the heart of the book, is packed with pertinent observations on both words and music.
Viewed askance in periods which set store by propriety and good taste, his gift for writing light verse has now and then been hailed as welcome proof that German literature is not an eternal exception and that it, too, was capable of producing a seventeenth-century poet worthy of being set alongside the Italian Marinists or
cavalier poets such as Lovelace, his exact contemporary, or Suckling, his closest English counterpart.
ignoring the
Cavalier poets; and the title of Saintsbury's great
Both Spenserian and
Cavalier poets appropriated Shakespeare's distinctive treatment of fairylore, ironically aligning it with the courtly myth of the TudorStuart "faery" monarchs.
Like the
Cavalier poets countering emptiness with a tortured sophistication, Massinger's accommodations were doomed.
There was, prima facie, some logic in this: all the really significant Jacobean poets were dead, the coterie of the 1630s were busily being not just
cavalier poets in a losing cause, and in some cases literal Cavaliers; and Milton, busily employed in prose polemic, was well away from his greatest triumphs.