Write a short essay on Cavalier Poets.

Write a short essay on Cavalier Poets.

Introduction:

In the Caroline period (the age of Charles I—1625-49) there was a remarkable outburst of lyrical activity. Most of the lyricists, with the very notable exception of Herrick, were courtiers. On account of their leanings towards the King and the court party as against the Puritans or Roundheads, these lyricists-cum-courtiers have come to be classed in the history of English literature as Cavalier poets or Cavalier lyricists. Among the Cavalier poets Herrick, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace are remarkable. They emulated Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare. These poets opposed metaphysical poetry, such as that of John Donne.

Some Common Features:

1. They all wrote very short poems, very few of them comprising above a hundred words.

2.  They show an undisguised, and sometimes intense love of such natural objects as trees, plants, birds and country scene in general.

3.  All of them exhibit an admiration for simplicity as against the sophisticated culture of the court.

4. None of them shows any real intensity of feeling or rapturous spontaneity we have come to associate with Elizabethan lyricists.

5. Their idiom and diction reflect the flavour of aristocratic speech-fluent.

Let us now consider briefly the work of the four major Cavalier poets we have named above.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674):

Herrick by the consensus of critical opinion enjoys the highest status among the Cavalier poets. This is the status which Douglas Bush also gives him in English Literature in the Earlier XVIIth Century. However Geoffrey Walton in his essay on the Cavalier poets in Vol. II of the Pelican Guide to English Literature would place Carew above him. Harrick was the only Cavalier who was not a courtier. He was the first of the "Sons of Ben" who came under his influence. Hardin Craig observes in A History of English Literature, ed. Hardin Craig: "He became Jonson's greatest disciple and actually realized a greatness in the field of the classical lyric superior to that of Jonson himself." Along with Jonson, Herrick took for his model and inspiration the clear, objective, spirited but perfectly ordered and lucidly worded poetry of the Latin poets like Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Martial, and the Greek poet Anacreon (possibly, in his Latin version done by Henri Estienne). He does not seem to have paid much -attention to Elizabethan lyricists before him. But his first guide was "Saint Ben" whose aid he invoked in his poem "Prayer to Ben Jonson."..................................................

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