SOURCE: Schelling, Felix E. “The Lyric in the Reigns of the First Two Stuart Monarchs.” In The English Lyric, pp. 73-111. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1967.

In the following excerpt, first published in 1913, Schelling classifies the poetry of Carew, Herrick, and the other Cavalier poets as secular, and stresses its relation to the social life of the period.

Analogies frequently mislead and disprove what they are invoked to illustrate; and yet the often-repeated comparison of the reign of Elizabeth to the spring, the period of peculiar and rapid quickening, the time of bloom and promise, is as useful as it is obvious and hackneyed. In such an age poetry is careless in form and subject as we have seen, more intent on saying many things than cautious in selection; and the moral significance of art with questions of its mission are things little thought on, and...