SOURCE: “Carew's Funerary Poetry and the Paradox of Sincerity,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 127-44.

In the following essay, Fitzmaurice studies Carew's poetic thoughts on death and the artificiality of language.

Sincerity, inasmuch as it is allied with or derived from intention, is likely to occupy a controversial position in current critical discussion. For what might be called the traditionalists in the evaluation of literature, it is at the root of all creative activity and is especially a criterion in funerary verse. Allowances may be made for poetry which appears mortuary but is not so in the strictest sense, for example, Donne's “First Anniversary,” or, for what is both mortuary and concerned with other matters, as in Tennyson's In Memoriam. But that which is truly involved with the death of an individual human being, is directly from our selves and untainted by “slavish...