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AudioA Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick
About this film
LibriVox recording of A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick by Robert Herrick. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland. Robert Herrick had been apprenticed to a goldsmith before entering holy orders. This early training has been credited with influencing his metrical precision and his success with short poems. A still more important influence was Ben Jonson, for he was a member of the "sons of Ben," the coterie of younger poets that surrounded that great dramatist, Shakespeare's rival and friend. He even addresses a poem to Jonson addressing him as his "saint." As a country parson, far from the bustle of London and his poetic peers, Herrick found inspiration in the beauties of nature, but loneliness may have skewed his perception toward the melancholy lessons taught by the changing seasons. Still, he remained a social poet, his verses always seeming to require an audience, usually a jolly one; inward meditations are not his style. Herrick has been called pagan in spite of his religious calling, and heaven does always rank as an afterthought in his poetry, while daydreams of the maidens that populate the Latin poets' verses provide him with a rich and sensuous fantasy l…
Directors & creators
Robert Herrick
Subjects
librivox; audiobooks;song; pastoral; seventeenth century; tribe of ben; son of ben; devonshire
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