Robert Herrick Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Robert Herrick was baptized in London on August 24, 1591, the seventh child of Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith, and Julian Stone. His earliest years were marked by abrupt dislocation: in 1592 his father died after a fall from an upper window, an event later shadowed by rumor of suicide. Whether accident or despair, the loss reordered the household economy and may explain the poet's lifelong sensitivity to precarious fortune and sudden change.

Raised in a mercantile city alive with pageantry, sermons, plague alarms, and the hard arithmetic of trade, Herrick grew up at the hinge of two Englands: the late Elizabethan confidence and the Jacobean unease that followed. Even before he became famous for country lyrics, he absorbed the London mixture of guild discipline and theatrical display - a background that helps explain why his later poems so often mingle the sacred and the sensual, the civic calendar and the private pulse.

Education and Formative Influences

Herrick was apprenticed in 1607 to his uncle Sir William Herrick, a notable goldsmith and jeweler, but books pulled harder than bullion. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1613 and later Trinity Hall, taking his B.A. in 1617 and M.A. in 1620. At Cambridge he encountered classical lyric, epigram, and pastoral, and he formed literary ties that led him into the London "sons of Ben" circle around Ben Jonson, whose crisp line, learned allusion, and moral bite Herrick adapted into a voice both ceremonious and intimate.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

By the 1620s Herrick was moving in metropolitan literary society; he is often linked to Jonson's gatherings and to fellow Cavaliers such as Thomas Carew and John Suckling. In 1629 he took holy orders and accepted the vicarage of Dean Prior in Devon, a rural posting that became the great contradiction of his life - a courtly-minded poet in a secluded parish. The English Civil Wars then split his world: loyal to the crown, he was ejected from his living in 1647. During this exile in London he published his major book, Hesperides (1648), paired with the religious collection His Noble Numbers, a double ledger of revel and repentance. With the Restoration he returned to Dean Prior in 1662 and remained there until his death in October 1674, leaving behind a body of short lyrics that turned transient pleasures into durable form.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Herrick's inner life is best read as a disciplined oscillation between appetite and conscience. Hesperides stages delight not as mindless indulgence but as a chosen art - a way to hold time still by naming it precisely: blossoms, ribbons, cups, saints' days, and kisses become instruments of attention. His famous carpe diem strain is less a shout than a technique of feeling, compressing experience into clean stanzas that can be memorized like prayers. The rural Devon of his poems is not reportage so much as a pastoral theater where rites of love, harvest, and household order temporarily reconcile a nation sliding toward fracture.

That tension - between pleasure's urgency and life's instability - gives Herrick his moral edge. He understands desire as adhesive, making community out of two bodies: "What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve: The sure, sweet cement, glue, and lime of love". Yet he also warns that wanting can become a shackle, converting the free self into a dependent one: "Who covets more is evermore a slave". Underneath the bright surfaces lies a historian's awareness of mutability, sharpened by civil war and personal displacement: "Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old". Formally, he matches that philosophy with miniature architectures - epigram, song, and benediction - lines polished like the goldwork of his youth, where brevity makes intensity credible.

Legacy and Influence

Herrick's reputation rose and fell with changing tastes - dismissed by some moralists for sensuality, prized by later readers for precision and music - but his long influence is unmistakable. He helped define the Cavalier lyric: courtly grace under historical pressure, pleasure defended as a kind of truth. Victorian anthologists kept his best poems alive; twentieth-century poets and scholars returned to his exacting craft and the psychological realism beneath the pastoral mask. Today he endures because he neither denies transience nor submits to it: he makes an ethic of attention, turning private feeling into public song and proving that small poems can hold whole eras.