Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’: Coterie Verse and the Form of the Poetic Anthology

Abstract

AbstractIn this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of the young gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid‐1640s, in the aftermath of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the culture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the Stanley circle was a material condition for the exceptional lyric productivity and publishing activity in the late 1640s of several of those who have become known to posterity as the ‘Cavalier Poets’, especially Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Alexander Brome, and James Shirley. Recognition of the intimately connected lyric output of the Stanley coterie, which is focused on translation and imitation of classical, neo‐Latin, and continental lyric, might help us to revive the study of ‘Cavalier’ poetry by identifying it with the efforts of Stanley and his friends to expand English lyric capability at a time when the future of English letters looked to them to be under threat. This insight into coterie poetics might also encourage us to rethink how we put together an anthology of early modern verse.