SOURCE: “‘To my friend G. N. from Wrest’: Carew's Secular Masque,” in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982, pp. 171-91.

In the following essay, Parker analyzes Carew's “To my friend G. N. from Wrest,” maintaining that the poem “represents the crucial middle term between Jonson's initial essays in the English country-house poem and Marvell's transformation of the genre in the 1640s and 1650s.”

Despite the upsurge of interest in the English country-house poem during the past twenty-five years, critics have largely ignored Thomas Carew's two contributions to the genre, “To Saxham” and “To my friend G. N. from Wrest”. The neglect of “To Saxham” is attributable in part to Carew's patterning of his poem on “To Penshurst”; despite its occasionally ingenious conceits and felicitous phrasing, we might argue that “To Saxham” can be dismissed as no more than a...