Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick : Volume I, PDF eBook

The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick : Volume I PDF

Edited by Tom Cain, Ruth Connolly

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets.

Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing.

The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides.

In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and hissubsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon.

It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of abook which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet.

There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose.

An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish.

The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far moreplayful, than has hitherto been realised.

It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominatingthe collection.

Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Information

Information