As scholars and professional readers of poetry we are left at the end of Hesperides shuffling uncomfortably between the actual experience of reading Herrick and our trained assumptions about the art and politics of the seventeenth century. If we attempt a social analysis, then our discomfort is perhaps the greatest, for it is not possible to place the nervous energy of Herrick's narrative voice in the register of social comment Hesperides records, from vicious mockery of the lower classes to flippant and pointedly remunerated praise of the iiAnn Baynes Coirò aristocratic and monied power structure. If we read the sexual drives of these poems, we are embarrassed by what seems at times like raw pandering to every category of psychoanalytic analysis Hesperides is astonishingly generous with its desires and neuroses. If we approach the collection from a literary-political perspective, then we are mocked there are voices from almost every mid-seventeenth-century political perspective here, undercutting any univocal argument we may want to construct. If, for example, we approach the little beauties of Hesperides as pure art, as they do invite us to, then we discover there is nothing to say such faultless little pieces deflect us. It may be argued that Herrick is the poet of anxiety- and that much of that anxiety is ours. Herrick is at once the most classical of English Renaissance poets, speaking of ancient themes of love and death with a perfect native voice, and the most eerily modern, caught in the tensions of his nuclear family and turned inward to a private domestic space where he finds safety in contemplating his own oblivion. Herrick, the great major minor poet of the seventeenth century, is displaced in literary history because he lies on the fault line between periods, schools, and critical methodologies, and because he is too consistently powerful a poet to fit comfortably into genre or influence studies. The experience of reading Herrick's poems, alone or in groups, is indeed discomforting, no matter what critical perspective one focuses upon them.
Introduction Robert Herrick and the Hesperides: On the Edge of the Renaissance by Ann Baynes Coirò This collection of essays on Robert Herrick ends with Leah Marcus' evocative description of the world of Hesperides as strange. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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