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Afterword: Herrick and Historicism by Leah S. Marcus Robert Herrick's poetry has been curiously impervious to recent critical methodologies, perhaps because in many instances the poet has been there before us. Read as a whole rather than piecemeal, Hesperides appears fractured and irreconcilably multiple, subjecting its moments of transcendence to the corrosion of "times trans-shifting," crowding its many lyric "gems" (the poems so prized in nineteenthand twentieth-century anthologies) up against poems of ugliness that echo and undermine the lyricism. As several of the essays in the present collection suggest, Hesperides also deconstructs its own Laudian line, offering numerous poems that seem to express unequivocal loyalty to the Caroline cause and conservative Anglican ritual practices, but interspersing them with other poems that probe into the weakness of the English church and monarchy even while continuing to assert their value. The impression of Herrick left by the present volume of essays, along with Ann Baynes Coiro's Robert Herrick's "Hesperides" and the Epigram Book Tradition, is of a poet who was strong and complex, not exactly the charming but narrow songster celebrated (and deplored) in critical work as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s. Nearly twenty-five years ago, when several of us began working on the connections between Herrick's verse and political issues of the English pre-Civil War period, I for one felt vaguely transgressive: how could those of us interested in re-attaching Herrick's work to the politics of his age do so without violating the evanescent beauties that had been prized by so many generations of readers? And yet, not to have politicized Herrick would have appeared equally transgressive. The late 1960s was a time of massive iconoclasm within American universities and without. As the nation was torn by the Vietnam conflict and nearly every aspect of academic life was suddenly politicized and polarized, Herrick became political as well. We were, as I think back on it, determined to redeem Herrick's work from the charge of irrelevance that was launched against many canonical authors during those years of ferment, but we were also interested in challenging the prevailing modernist and New Critical image of art as a world apart from daily life and superior to it. Our weapon was AFTERWORD: HERRICK AND HISTORICISM173 traditional historicism; our aim, like that of most traditional historicism, recuperative. By placing Hesperides back into the matrix of seventeenth-century controversy, we hoped to bring new order out of a previous perception of chaos: demonstrate the energy and coherence of Hesperides as not a mere gallery of trivia but a celebration of vanishing political and ecclesiastical ideals. By showing the power of political argument in Hesperides, we also managed to reaffirm the power of Herrick's Puritan opposition. My own loyalties in working with Herrick were curiously split, as they were with regard to political issues of the late sixties: on the one hand, I welcomed the iconoclasm of the times and wholeheartedly embraced what we thought of as a revolutionary scouring away of empty forms from the past; on the other hand, I felt a certain nostalgia for the imagined simplicities of that vulnerable past — hence, I suppose, the attraction of Robert Herrick. But like the anthologizers of Herrick before us, we who politicized Herrick were selective. We expanded the traditional attention to the "beauties" of Herrick through our work with explicitly Royalist poems like "The bad season makes the Poet sad," "Farewell Frost, or welcome the Spring," "To Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter," and "To The King, Upon his welcome to Hampton-Court."1 But we neglected much of the puzzling variety of Hesperides as a whole. Once more the times have shifted. The historicizing of Herrick that seemed transgressive twenty-five or so years ago has now become, if we accept Jonathan Post's assessment here, "the dominant critical trend at the moment" (p. 18), or less politely stated, an irksome new orthodoxy. In the years since the late sixties and early seventies, a "new historicism" has taken over from the old; the degree and kind of Herrick's political engagement no longer seem as clear as they did earlier. As...

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