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"HERRICK: HIS EPIGRAMS AND LYRICS M. L. S. LOSSING H ERRICK'S poetry has been found of very unequal merit: a few of his lyrics have been accepted as among the finest in English, while by Southey and others the coarser lyrics and the epigrams have been dismissed as mere "garbage", and the Noble Number], the religious verse, has been held inoffensive but puerile and dull. The assumption that two parts of Herrick's work are irrelevant to an understanding of the third is, however, quite inadmissible. ."If his poetry is considered sympathetically and as a whole, the sensitiveness to physical impressions which results in the "coarseness" of thi: epigrams will be recognized as the very same quality which brings sensuous beauty into the lyrics, while the Noble NumbeYJ will reveal the limitations inherent in the poet's reliance on sense impressions. The history of Herrick's reputation indicates how the false segregation of part of his work from his main achievement came to be made and how much it has led cri tics astray. On its first appearance, in 1648, Herrick's volume the HeJperides, which .included the epigrams and the Noble Numbers, made little stir. Not only was the year itself singularly inauspicious, but the poet, long resident in distant Devonshire, was out of touch with current literary fashions. His notion of poetry had not progressed, if indeed it were under any circumstances capable of progressing , beyond that of the Elizabethans. I do not ~ugĀ­ gest that he was wholly ignorant or careless of what was 239 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY passing in the world of letters; .but his sympathy did 'not extend beyond 'the sons of Ben' to Donne and his school. His opinion of their religious poetry is succinctly expressed : . To seek of God more than we well can find Argues a strong distemper of the mind. Of this distemper no one ever stood in less danger than the poet of Noble Numbers. With the Restoration came new fashions in poetry but no increase in popularity for Herrick. In the llnthologies, such as Musarum Deliciae, Witt's Reet'eations, and the English Parnassus, he was given a minor place. But he was in the process of being forgotten. Omitted from Johnson's great collection of the poets in the next century, he was rediscovered through the instrumentality of John Nichols of the Gentleman's Magazine: the issue for June, 1796, contained a short biography and critique. In 18ro, Nott published his edition of the Hesperides; Maitland's appeared in 1823 and was reprinted in 1825. During the hundred years . that followed, interest in H errick steadily incl'eased and scholarship devoted to him produced at last such works as Moorman's life and his edition of the Hesperides. Enthusiasm (or Herrick's poetry also increased until 'a wri ter in the Edinburgh Review, in 1904, could declare that "where Horace. reaches perfection he is most like Herrick." In general, however, nineteenth-century criticism had its very definite reservations to make, and it is to this criticism that we owe the tendency to segregate the more delicate lyrics from the rest of Herrick's output. Southey was markedly hostile: to him Herrick appeared "a coarseITJ ..inded and beastly writer, whose dunghill, when the few Bowers that grew therein had been transplanted, ought never to have been disturbed"; but these " few Bowers" 240 HERRICK: HIS EPIGRAMS AND LYRICS he found "beautiful and perennial". Much more friendly . but similar in its segregating tendency is the comment of a critic in the Retrospective Review for 1822: " But forgetting the impurities of our author, and estimating the chaster effusions of his felicitous genius, we do not hesitate to pronounce him the very best of English lyric poets." Henry Morley' in his edition omitted, with an apologetic reference to "the change of times", the pieces that "would interfere with the free reading of Herrick in our English homes"; and Mr. Pollard acquiesced in this Dr. Jekylland -Mr. Hyde view of the poet by relegating the epigrams . to an appendix. Swinburne, enchanted with an "excellence unique and unapproachable" in the lyrics, was, of course, undismayed by the improprieties of the epigrams, but...

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