SOURCE: Clayton, Thomas. Introduction to Cavalier Poets: Selected Poems, edited by Thomas Clayton, pp. xiii-xxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

In this essay, Clayton presents an overview of the four major Cavalier poets: Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace.

Herrick, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace share a continuing appeal that continues also to change as the times change. They are ‘for all time’, as Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, but they are also much more ‘of an age’; hence their varying critical fortunes with ages and audiences like and unlike theirs. They have always found most favour with those who prefer their poetry first to be poetry (‘creation through words of orders of meaning and sound’, as the late Reuben Brower once put it), and who recognize ‘high seriousness’ as not necessarily to be demanded everywhere in the same measure, kind, and character. Not that these poets...