Robert Herrick's complete works appeared in one large volume of poetry entitled Hesperides: or the Works both Humane and Divine (1648). The number and range of Herrick's poems are astonishing. Herrick's more than one thousand "humane" poems range in subject matter and verse form from the carpe diem lyric and polite compliment to meditations on death and immortality, from the satirical and moralistic epigram to the formal ode and epithalamium. A critical problem arises here: is there any unity among all this diversity, or is Hesperides just a haphazard collection of lyrical gems? Herrick's status as a poet and place in English poetry depends very much on the answer to this question. This study sets out to demonstrate that Hesperides is a well wrought poetical book. Herrick had behind him an ancient and well-defined tradition when he undertook the composition of Hesperides. Horace and the Latin elegists provided him with classical models of the poetical book, while Herrick's own master Ben Jonson established a precedent for the poetical book in English with The Forest and Epigrams. Indeed, the fact that the "Metaphysicals" Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan composed poetical books demonstrates that the tradition of the poetical book transcends the familiar dichotomy between "Metaphysical" and "Cavalier." Herrick makes poetry and his book one of his major subjects. He calls his book, among other things, an "expansive Firmament" and an "immensive Sphere" metaphors which suggest that Hesperides was conceived as a microcosm which reflects the diversity-in-unity of the Renaissance world-view. Herrick also regards his book, as the poems on fame demonstrate, as a bulwark against mutability and his personal guarantee of immortality. He is thus not the singer of transience, as his popular image would have it, but a poet who celebrates permanence and cosmic order. Hesperides is structured according to a Neo-Platonic scale of love, which ascends step-by-step from profane to sacred love. Herrick's amatory ideal harmonizes profane and sacred love in the paradox of "cleanly-wantonnesse." Herrick sees himself as a poet-priest celebrating a "Poetick Liturgie" and performing the rites of "Loves Religion." Many of his poems display a subtle use of biblical allusion and liturgical symbolism. Therefore, Herrick's poems are not, as the title-page of Hesperides suggests, entirely "humane," but rather represent a synthesis of the "humane" and the "divine" in a unified world-view. Herrick's aesthetic ideal of "wilde civility," like his amatory ideal, balances freedom and discipline. Herrick sees himself as both an inspired vates, or "Lyrick Prophet," and a responsible craftsman. His idea of decorum allows for slight deviations in syntax, rhythm and phrasing. Therefore, his verses display greater freedom and subtlety in their design than Jonson's. Herrick is no slave of his master Jonson, but has his own unique voice and sensibility. In conclusion, Herrick should be ranked with Jonson, Donne and Herbert and not with the "Cavaliers." In fact, Herrick is not as far removed from Herbert as is usually thought. This thesis, then, attempts a reevaluation of Herrick by treating Hesperides as a complex but unified whole, a poetical book, and by calling attention to the "metaphysical" dimension of his verse. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere.

No description available.

No description available.

From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)