The English poet and Anglican parson Robert Herrick (1591-1674) invented a fanciful world compounded of pagan Rome and Christian England, of reality and fantasy, which he ruled as his poetic domain.

Robert Herrick's 83 years stretched from Elizabethan times, when Shakespeare was writing history plays and Edmund Spenser was publishing The Faerie Queene, to the Restoration period, when John Dryden was composing heroic drama and John Milton was publishing Paradise Lost. He was contemporary with the metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert and is classified with the neoclassic or Cavalier poets Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace.

Little is known about Herrick other than what may be gathered from a few extant letters and the 1,403 poems in his only book, Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. (1648). Unknown are what school he attended, what he was doing in 1620-...