Cavalier Poets
The Cavalier Poets were a group of 17th-century English poets who were known for their elegant and sophisticated style, as well as their celebration of love, beauty, and pleasure. They often wrote about courtly life, chivalry, and the pleasures of the present moment, and their poetry was characterized by its wit, lyricism, and polished language.
3 Key excerpts on "Cavalier Poets"
eBook - ePub- Harry Blamires(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Sometimes (as in ‘Bid me to live, and I will live/Thy Protestant to be’) fine feelings are unpretentiously embodied in shaped and fluent stanzas that defy criticism; and sensuous experience of touch or sight may be neatly recaptured in images of unpremeditated felicity. The voluptuous quality of silk is subtly verbalized in: When as in silks my Julia goes, Why, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes That liquefaction of her clothes. Herrick wrote much bad and mediocre verse, and he could be guilty of indecent bad taste, but an idealized world of great charm is freshly and frankly reconstituted in his best lyrics. Faultlessly patterned stanzas shape it, and it is sprinkled with the lore of a well-stocked, if wanton, mind. In reading Herrick we note a decisive shift from the centre of poetic interest evident in the work of Donne and his school. We leave the poets who struggle with themselves, struggle with love and struggle with words, for a poet who comments with an air of facility. The group of poets known as the ‘Cavalier Poets’ are akin to Herrick in this respect. Poetry does not seem to be an essential business of their lives. This does not merely mean that they were not professional poets: neither were Donne and Herbert. But poetry seemed to matter to Donne and Herbert precisely because what they were using it for mattered enormously. Much of the poetry of the Cavalier Poets is, we feel, so peripheral to their true inner and active lives as to represent a fashionable accomplishment rather than an art. Thomas Carew (?1594–1640), in ‘Disdain returned’, explains to Celia why, having learned her arts, he will never return to her. Wordsworth spoke of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, but this is emotion dissipated in tranquillity. So is the poem ‘Ingratefull beauty threatned’. ‘Let fools thy mystique forms adore’, says the poet, explaining that his verse created Celia’s image and he himself cannot be taken in by it...
eBook - ePub- Gary F. Waller(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But his views are those of an observer who saw the Court's influence over far more than those men and women who are clasified as ‘courtier poets’ in a recent study, ‘the ranking officeholders’ and ‘that relatively permanent group of courtiers’ who ‘spent an appreciable amount of time, often traceable for weeks or months per year, attending court’. Beyond that small and often intensely anxious group, who certainly included all four of the poets in this chapter, were many aspiring gentlemen, like Puttenham, or Donne, or Spenser, who wished to be part of that magic circle. Beyond that again was a further circle, that included a poet like Shakespeare, whose living was made in activities that were on a social level below the Court but which were still subject to its surveillance and sometimes direct intervention. Furthest of all from the Court's power are some of the poems, songs and ballads that grow from marginal regions and dialects, from the dispossessed and poor, many of which were appropriated by poets closer to the Court (as the old ‘Walsingham’ ballad is by both Ralegh and Sidney). These are the relatively voiceless poets, whose compositions and, very occasionally, whose writings echo across our history in their eloquent silences and half-silences. 1 With all four of the poets discussed in this chapter, the direct connections with the Court are unmistakable. The poetry they wrote and the social formations by which they were themselves, in a very direct sense, written are inseparable. All four were taken into the Court's attempt to control poetry as a means of articulating its values, to make it an ‘art of state’. For them all, poetry was something incidental, merely a small part of their public careers. All were glittering public successes and yet also suffered frustration, failure (and in two, almost three, cases) execution...
eBook - ePub- Derek Pearsall(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Court poetry The complex relationships of English and Anglo-Norman as literary languages during the Middle English period up to about 1350 have already been discussed (p. 88 above), and some demur entered against too strict a segregation or social hierarchy of roles. One constant factor in the relationship, however, is the exclusion of English poetry from royal and aristocratic patronage. The admission of alliterative poetry to the patronage of the provincial aristocracy and gentry after 1350 provided an important part of the cultural context for the last chapter; the admission of English poetry to the King’s court and its associated metropolitan milieu is the starting-point for this chapter. The title of this chapter, ‘Court poetry’, implies a relationship between social environment and literary production such as I have tried to maintain throughout, but it must be admitted that the growing complexity of the literary situation makes this relationship not always easy to define. The ‘court’ is itself an amorphous social organisation, and the dependence of individual poets upon its stimulus very varied. It will often be the case, therefore, that ‘courtly poetry’, that is, poetry expressive of the values associated with court society, may seem a better term than ‘court poetry’ since it does not insist on a direct social relationship. It may seem, furthermore, that ‘courtly poetry’, so defined, is insufficiently distinguished from some of the alliterative poetry discussed in the previous chapter, which had all the sophistication associated with courtly and aristocratic society. However, it is worth arguing for a distinction between the royal court and provincial households in a comparatively backward country like England, and worth insisting on the significance of Chaucer’s role as an innovator, on the development of that role as being essentially related to his position at court, and on the influence of Chaucer in all the poetry discussed in this chapter...
