Introduction: Robert Herrick and the Hesperides: On the Edge of the Renaissance

Introduction Robert Herrick and the Hesperides: On the Edge of the Renaissance by Ann Baynes Coirò This collection of essays on Robert Herrick ends with Leah Marcus' evocative description of the world of Hesperides as strange. The experience of reading Herrick's poems, alone or in groups, is indeed discomforting, no matter what critical perspective one focuses upon them. Herrick, the great major minor poet of the seventeenth century, is displaced in literary history because he lies on the fault line between periods, schools, and critical methodologies, and because he is too consistently powerful a poet to fit comfortably into genre or influence studies. Herrick is at once the most classical of English Renaissance poets, speaking of ancient themes of love and death with a perfect native voice, and the most eerily modern, caught in the tensions of his nuclear family and turned inward to a private domestic space where he finds safety in contemplating his own oblivion. It may be argued that Herrick is the poet of anxiety— and that much of that anxiety is ours. If, for example, we approach the little beauties of Hesperides as pure art, as they do invite us to, then we discover there is nothing to say; such faultless little pieces deflect us. If we approach the collection from a literary-political perspective, then we are mocked; there are voices from almost every mid-seventeenth-century political perspective here, undercutting any univocal argument we may want to construct. If we read the sexual drives of these poems, we are embarrassed by what seems at times like raw pandering to every category of psychoanalytic analysis; Hesperides is astonishingly generous with its desires and neuroses. If we attempt a social analysis, then our discomfort is perhaps the greatest, for it is not possible to place the nervous energy of Herrick's narrative voice in the register of social comment Hesperides records, from vicious mockery of the lower classes to flippant and pointedly remunerated praise of the iiAnn Baynes Coirò aristocratic and monied power structure. As scholars and professional readers of poetry we are left at the end of Hesperides shuffling uncomfortably between the actual experience of reading Herrick and our trained assumptions about the art and politics of the seventeenth century. The following essays invite us into that strange world as they engage with Herrick's poems in a rich complex of angles, many of which attempt, at the same time, to trouble or to rethink literary history. In the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century Herrick was preserved in small anthologized jewels so that he was celebrated (and subtly denigrated) as a lapidary artist of purely beautiful, ineffectual poetry, new historicism recovered Herrick, with considerable distrust, and asked us to consider the ideological import of such rhythmic beauty built upon a celebration of the old order. Out of this dialectic of beauty and history comes the current collection. Mary Thomas Crane, for example, focuses on Herrick's noxious and demeaning work as a goldsmith's apprentice and, in the process, asks us to question the ways in which, from Tillyard to Foucault, we have theorized history with the result that individual agency and experience are erased. Herrick, the poet-persona who never completes a seduction, never marries — in some ways more Puritan than the precisionists he mocks with such elegant grace, yet also suspiciously resistant of the new world order. He ends up staying home with his housekeeper. Katherine Wallingford discusses the generic instability of "Corinna's going a Maying," Herrick's most celebrated literary accomplishment, and makes us see the ways in which the tension between seduction and marriage enacts the death of an aristocratic standard for sexual behavior and the birth of a new bourgeois contract. William Kerrigan invites us into the luscious sexual pleasures of Hesperides, but argues at the same time for the refusal of full erotic adulthood in these poems, spoken by a narrator more Pan than Peter, but happy still in the never-never land of a fantasy elizium. Michael Schoenfeldt anatomizes the intense disgust with bodily functions in Herrick's poetry, a disgust and fascination earlier appreciations of his poetry had found so disturbing that...