Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Aemilia Lanyer, & Andrew Marvell

1. Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Aemilia Lanyer, & Andrew Marvell

2. Cavalier poets • Cavalier poets is a broad description of a school of English poets of the 17th century, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. Much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject. They were marked out by their lifestyle and religion from the Roundheads, who supported Parliament. • The best known of the Cavalier poets are Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, and Sir John Suckling. Most of the Cavalier poets were courtiers. • “In fact the common factor that binds the cavaliers together is their use of direct and colloquial language expressive of a highly individual personality, and their enjoyment of the casual, the amateur, the affectionate poem written by the way. They are 'cavalier' in the sense, not only of being Royalists . . . , but in the sense that they distrust the over-earnest, the too intense. They accept the ideal of the Renaissance Gentleman who is at once lover, soldier, wit, man of affairs, musician, and poet, but abandon the notion of his being also a pattern of Christian chivalry. They avoid the subject of religion, apart from making one or two graceful speeches. They attempt no plumbing of the depths of the soul. They treat life cavalierly, indeed, and sometimes they treat poetic convention cavalierly too.” Jokinen, Annlina.

3. Ben Jonson • What do you know from Anonymous? • 1572-1637 What do these dates tell you? • Wrote satires (plays) Volpone, Alchemist, The Devil is an Ass, Every Man in His Humour, etc. and influenced all the Jacobean and Caroline (James I and Charles I) playwrights • Poems about Donne and Shakespeare • “Song, to Celia” • So influential in his day that the cavalier poets called themselves his “sons” or his “tribe.”

4. Robert Herrick, Cavalier poet,1591-1674, “son of Ben” Herrick never married, and none of his love-poems seem to connect directly with any one beloved woman. He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life, and this is shown vividly in such poems as “Cherry-ripe,” “Delight in Disorder” and “Upon Julia’s Clothes.” The over-riding message of Herrick’s work is that life is short, the world is beautiful, love is splendid, and we must use the short time we have to make the most of it. In many poems, the warmth and exuberance of what seems to have been a kindly and jovial personality comes over strongly. Right: gathering rosebuds

5. Aemilia Lanyer

6. Her life 1569-1645 • Born in London to immigrants, apparently illegitimate. Parents were musicians, possibly converted Jews. • Was in Elizabeth I’s court and mistress to Henry Carey • She is one candidate for the “dark lady” of Shakespeare • When she conceived a child by Carey, he had her married off to Alphonse Lanyer. Had miscarriages but had at least two children • Published one book of poetry, proto-feminist, radical in both theology and politics. Has a tirade against class privilege • Her “The Description of Cookham” – why these poems about houses?

7. Andrew Marvell 1621-1678

8. Satirist, Cavalier, Metaphysical?For or against Cromwell? • First to write political verse satire in English (next quarter you’ll see Dryden and Pope in verse and Swift in prose do it) • Defender of religious liberty and the rights of Parliament, enemy of court corruption • Went to Cambridge at 12, but ran away to London where he was found in a bookshop • Had to go back and get his degree

9. Mysteries of his life • No evidence that he participated in the English Civil War • Lots of evidence that he traveled in Europe for four years, but nobody knows how or why • Let’s try to look at the politics in “Upon Appleton House” • Three-person debates on “To His Coy Mistress” • –one person takes the position that this poem is intended to woo as a carpe diem poem. • The second person sees it as a satire on carpe diem poetry. • The third person should argue that the mistress is so sophisticated that she is amused by the irony and the almost absurd images. • He helped John Milton, getting him out of prison and worked for and with him from 1657 on. He died 4 years after Milton.