SOURCE: Inglis, Fred. “Metaphysical Poetry and the Greatness of Fulke Greville.” The Critical Review No. 8 (1965): 101-09.

In the following essay, Inglis argues that Greville has been undeservedly neglected by critics and uses the poetry of Caelica to illustrate his claim that Greville's poetic works should be grouped with those of the later school of Metaphysical Poetry.

At the beginning of Revaluation, Dr Leavis, in discussing The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, remarks:

After ninety pages of … Fulke Greville, Chapman and Drayton, respectable figures who, if one works through their allotments, serve at any rate to set up a critically useful background, we come to this [and Leavis quotes “The Good-morrow”]. At this we … read on as we read the living.

I wish to question this rather casual rating of Greville, and certainly to oppose the almost universal neglect of his poetry. For we have in Greville, I...