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“Times trans‐shifting:” Chronology and the Misshaping of Herrick

The universal assumption that very few of the 1400 poems collected by Robert Herrick in Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648) can be dated has since the nineteenth century perversely encouraged editors and scholars to impose a diversity of shapes on his poetic career. The most powerful and recent versions of this wishful thinking have led to assertions that Herrick was primarily a poet of the 1630s and ’40s, and moreover a polemical partisan of extreme royalist and Laudian values. This essay reasserts that Herrick's poetic reputation was high in the 1620s, and demonstrates that some poems assumed to belong to the political crises of the personal rule were in fact written two decades earlier. It further demonstrates that as many as 190 of the poems can be dated more or less precisely, and that when these poems are read chronologically a significant shape to the poetic career does emerge. The dual volume is a life's work, spread fairly evenly over four decades. Moreover, the high poetic achievement, far from belonging to the ’30s and ’40s, came virtually to a close with Herrick's move from London to Dean Prior in 1631. This also has implications for the structure of the two collections. Although it is too simple to say that their arrangement is broadly chronological, most of the poems placed late in the sequences were also late in date. Rather than being expressively shaped, the collections tend to peter out in routine verse after much writing of high quality in the earlier pages.