THREE METAPHYSICAL POETS: JOHN DONNE, ROBERT HERRICK, HENRY VAUGHAN SELECTED POEMS Edited and introduced by Charlotte Greene. Three of the major Metaphysical poets are featured in this anthology: John Donne, Robert Herrick and Henry Vaughan. JOHN DONNE was, Robert Graves said, a 'Muse poet', a poetwho wrote passionately of the Muse. It is easy to see Donne asa love poet, in the tradition of love poets such as Bernard deVentadour, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch and Torquato Tasso. Donne has written his fair share of lovepoems. There are the bawdy allusions to the phallus in 'TheFlea', while 'The Comparison' parodies the adoration poem, with references to the 'sweat drops of my mistress' breast'. Like William Shakespeare in his parody sonnet 'my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', Donne sends up the Petrarchan and courtly love genre with gross comparisons ('Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils'). In 'The Bait', there is the archetypal Renaissance opening line 'Come live with me, and be my love', as used by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, among others. And there is the complex, ambivalent eroticism of 'The Extasie', a much celebrated love poem, and the 19th 'Elegy', where features Donne's famous couplet. ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674) was one of the Cavalier poets (other Cavalier poets included Suckling, Carew and Lovelace). He wasborn in London and lived much of his life in the roughremoteness of a parish in Devonshire. He studied at Cambridge(St John's College and Trinity Hall). His law studies weredropped in 1623, and he was ordained as a deacon and priest in1624. Robert Herrick's major work, Hesperides or The Works Both Humaneand Divine of Robert Herrick Esq., was published in 1648. There are some 1130 poems in the first, secular part, Hesperides, and272 in Noble Numbers, the religious pieces. HENRY VAUGHAN is the Metaphysical poet from the Welsh borders (he was born at Newton-upon-Usk, Breconshire, in 1621). He went up to Oxford, studied law in London, wrote some astoundingreligious poetry, and died in 1695. The very best of Henry Vaughan's Metaphysical poems appear in this book, pieces filled with a 'deep, but dazzling darkness'. Lesser known Vaughan works, including some love poems, are collected here beside the famous pieces such as 'The Morning Watch', 'The World' and 'The Night'. With an introduction for each poet and a bibliography. Includes a picture gallery for each poet. www.crmoon.com."

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 his subsequent 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 a book 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 more playful, 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 dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Volume II breaks new ground by printing the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems by which Herrick was known for most of his life. This volume provides the scores and notes on the nature of performance of all of his songs for which contemporary settings survive.

A great survivor among the Cavalier poets, most of his poems were composed in a remote Devonshire parish. Even so, the body of his poetry is large and his religious vocationhardly shows in the almost innocent exhuberanceof his fine verse.