Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Cavalier Poets

Ben Jonson
Robert Herrick
Thomas Carew
Richard Lovelace

Characteristics:
  • use of direct and colloquial language expressive of a highly individual personality
  • enjoyment of the casual, the amateur, the affectionate poem written by the way
  • "cavalier" in the sense of not only being Royalists but that they distrust the over-earnest or the too intense
  • avoid subject of religion
  • the Mistress is no longer an impossibly chaste Goddess to be wooed with sighs, but a woman who may be spoken to in a forthright manner
  • poems are celebratory of things that are much livelier than philosophy or art

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