Robert Herrick

English poet and cleric

• Born: August 24, 1591 (baptized)
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 1, 1674
• Place of death: Dean Prior, Devonshire, England

Herrick produced a body of poetic works that expresses a distinctively seventeenth century carpe diem philosophy, portrays English country life during the Civil War and Restoration, and both represents and comments upon those and other historical events.

Early Life

Born in 1591 as the seventh child of parents Nicholas and Julia, Robert Herrick (HUR-ik) began his life in London. His father, a banker and goldsmith, is believed to have committed suicide in 1592. After some early education and an apprenticeship at age sixteen to his uncle, a goldsmith, Robert Herrick was able to attend Cambridge University. He began at Saint John’s College but transferred to Trinity Hall to cut down on his overspending. He received a B.A. in 1617 and an M.A. in 1620. Originally hoping to become a lawyer, Herrick studied the Greek and Roman classics, texts important for law that would come to influence his poetry as well.

Three years after graduating from Cambridge, Herrick was ordained a priest in the Church of England. Soon after, he was admitted to the Tribe of Ben, a group of poets who met with and were influenced by famed poet and playwright Ben Jonson . Jonson and his followers are often called Cavalier poets, a term associated with men at the royal court who enforced traditional political values and enjoyed food, drink, sport, and women. Herrick apparently circulated his early poems privately, in manuscript form, to a small London audience, although a few did appear in print. A connection to the court came for Herrick in 1627, when he was appointed as one of the first duke of Buckingham’s army chaplains on an ill-fated expedition to the Isle of Rhé.

When that short-lived military excursion ended, Herrick was nominated to a parish in 1628, the same year his mother died, but the rural parish proved quite unlike the urban environment of London where he felt most comfortable. Instead, his church was to be in Dean Prior in Devonshire, part of the countryside in the far west of England. In September, 1630, Herrick became vicar of the small country Church of Saint George the Martyr, miles away from the London pubs where he had met and discussed poetry with his witty friends. A few of his poems grumble about the isolation of this locale, particularly “Discontents in Devon.”

Herrick, moreover, was not a conventional Anglican priest. He threw his Bible during the service to gain his congregation’s attention. A popular legend from Devonshire holds that Herrick kept a pet pig. At some point, he left the parish for a while without permission to live in Westminster with a young woman named Thomasin Parsons; they may have had a daughter together.

Life’s Work

In some ways, Herrick was born at the wrong time. While his politics, experience, and education prepared him to be a clergyman for the nobility, the dynamics of the seventeenth century prevented that him from achieving that aspiration. With the Puritan Revolution of 1642, those who sided with the nobility were displaced, either literally forced to leave England or involuntarily removed from positions. Within a few years, Herrick lost his small, primarily Puritan parish because of his Royalist sympathies. He returned to London, presumably living off the support of family.

Although there is evidence that he tried to have his poetic work published in London as early as 1640, the major collection of Herrick’s poetry, Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. (1648), was not printed until 1648. It was dedicated to Prince Charles, the son of Charles I , the latter of whom would be executed one year later in the Puritan revolt. Even Herrick’s dedication was politically perilous in this antimonarchical period, but his allegiances ultimately paid off: When Prince Charles returned to England from France in 1660, he was crowned Charles II, and Herrick, no longer a political outcast, regained his Dean Prior vicarage. The Restoration had vindicated Herrick, but he did no further publishing.

Hesperides, a largely secular collection, also contained Noble Numbers, a compendium of Herrick’s religious verse. The title Hesperides, which signifies both the Western Maidens who were the mythical daughters of Night and a garden guarded by those maidens, refers to Herrick’s location in the West of England, as well as to his metaphorical garden of poetry. In his apology, or overview, to the collection, Herrick announces the subject matter of this vast collection of 1,130 poems. The wide-ranging overview includes the delights and drawbacks of the countryside, folk myth, love, the beauty of women, and mortality.

Time represents one major of the volume’s major topics, incorporating the cycles of nature, the seasonal holidays, and the fleetingness of life, which is also related to the concept of carpe diem. Literally meaning “seize the day” and originating in the ancient Roman poetry of Horace and Martial, this concept was revived in the Cavalier poetry of the seventeenth century and refers to enjoying life, especially the favors of young women, while one can, as life is short but precious. Herrick’s most famous poem, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” (1648), espouses this philosophy, an unusual point of view for a clergyman. His focus on time also alludes to the political changes the years have wrought, as in the shift from monarchy to parliamentary rule.

Petrarchan and Ovidian poetry heavily influence Herrick’s often-playful presentation of love, and he addresses poems to numerous female characters named for those in classical Latin pastoral poetry. Herrick’s other well-known poems include “Delight in Disorder” (1648), reinforcing the Cavalier aesthetic of art that seems effortless, and “Corinna’s Gone A-Maying” (1648), celebrating the English May festival, a celebration of spring and fertility that the Puritans condemned.

There are more somber poems in Hesperides as well, dealing with the waning of the year and the deaths of Herrick’s brother and his friend and mentor, Ben Jonson. Herrick also wrote frequently about his housekeeper, Prudence Baldwin, who took care of him for numerous years. A number of his poems are even addressed to himself. The variety of verse forms includes epigrams—compact, witty poems, some humorous, some serious; epithalamia, or wedding poems; shaped poems, in which the printed poem resembles its subject matter; and celebratory songs. Herrick’s friend, the composer Henry Lawes , set some of Herrick’s poems to music, making the most of the verses’ melodic qualities.

Significance

Herrick’s significance lies entirely in the poetry he published; however, throughout the years, critics have argued over just how important that poetry is. The scholar and poet T. S. Eliot made Herrick famous in the mid-twentieth century by branding Hesperides minor poetry, and it has gone through periods of being regarded as entertaining ephemera. Contemporary evaluations see the poems as more culturally sophisticated, reflecting the seventeenth century’s conflicts in religion and politics. Critics interested in cultural history have traced Herrick’s material to a variety of classical sources, seventeenth century intellectual movements, and artistic aesthetics. Feminist critics discuss the numerous poems to anonymous women composed by this never-married poet. New formalist poets celebrate Herrick’s carefully crafted poetic style. The quantity of poems and range of subject matter in Hesperides allow it to continue to be both enjoyed and analyzed by many different sorts of readers with different points of view and critical agendas.

Bibliography

Coiro, Ann Baynes. Robert Herrick’s “Hesperides” and the Epigram Book Tradition. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Argues that Herrick created Hesperides as a unified work that has a well-thought-out structure, following the pattern of epigram writing from classical poets and Ben Jonson. Portions of Herrick’s life are interwoven with discussions of his art.

Deneef, A. Leigh. “This Poetick Liturgie”: Robert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974. Theorizes that the poems are united by their speakers’ emphases on four types of ritual celebration: pastoral, courtly, realistic, and artistic. This is an advanced study, primarily for literary specialists.

Ingram, Randell. “Robert Herrick and the Makings of Hesperides.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 127. Focusing on seventeenth century print culture and its difference from our own, Ingram takes to task critics who try to apply current ideas of coherence to Hesperides. He asserts that Herrick desired to preserve his poems beyond the printed page, in part by engaging the reader to make them his or her own.

Martin, L. C., ed. The Poems of Robert Herrick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Often considered the standard edition of Herrick’s works, the introduction has a brief overview of Herrick’s life, and reproductions of the frontispieces of Hesperides and Noble Numbers.

Patrick, J. Max, ed. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. A carefully edited edition that includes a biographical chronology, brief introductory material on Herrick’s critical reception, and extensive footnotes to the poems, incorporating information on people, places, and events in Herrick’s life. Also contains some poetry that may be attributed to Herrick but that is not traditionally printed with Hesperides.

Roe, John. “’Upon Julia’s Clothes’: Herrick, Ovid, and the Celebration of Innocence.” The Review of English Studies 50, no. 199 (August, 1999): 350. Traces Herrick’s important response to the ancient Roman poet Ovid in his construction of the erotic.

Rollin, Roger B. Robert Herrick. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. An excellent starting point for a study of Robert Herrick and his work; contains an opening chronology of the poet’s life, as well as sustained discussion of the Hesperides’ language, genres, sources, historical context, and critical reception.

Rollin, Roger B., and J. Max Patrick, eds. “Trust to Good Verses”: Herrick Tercentenary Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. These essays by literary scholars were written for a 1974 conference memorializing the three hundredth anniversary of Herrick’s death, covering such diverse subjects as Herrick’s politics, imagery, literary influences, and poetic musicality. Includes a good annotated bibliography.