SOURCE: “Carew's ‘A Rapture’: The Dynamics of Fantasy,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Winter, 1976, pp. 145-55.

In the following essay, Johnson analyzes Carew's erotic poem “A Rapture.”

“A Rapture” was in its day a very shocking poem. Not only did it provoke rebuttals from poets as small as Habington and as great as Marvell, but it even drew upon Carew a reproof in Parliament.¹ Its reputation has persisted to our own times: until recently it has been regularly omitted from anthologies of seventeenth-century verse, and as regularly included in collections of erotica.² Carew's editors have been reticent or disapproving in their annotations, and literary historians have usually shied away with the briefest of ambivalent remarks. “A Rapture” is “the most daring and poetically the happiest of the imitations of Donne's clever if outrageous elegies”; it “has great interest as a libertine version of the...