ABSTRACT

According to one of Robert Herrick’s nineteenth-century editors, Hesperides (1648) is a collection “abounding in passages of outrageous grossness.”1 Take, for instance, the epigram, “Upon Pimpe”:

When Pimpes feet sweat (as they doe often use) There springs a sope-like-lather in his shoos. (H-1113)2

Poems about sudsy foot sweat, syrupy diarrhea, maggot-producing bad breath, and other disgusting bodily effusions appear throughout Herrick’s collection of over 1,400 poems. When Hesperides was rediscovered at the turn of the nineteenth century, Herrick’s editors were appalled by this aversive verse. Francis Turner Palgrave, compiler of the well-known Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, proclaims, “We have, probably, no poet . . . to justify the invidious task of selection . . . more fully and forcibly than . . . Herrick.”3 Herrick found great success as a selected and anthologized poet. He became known for his church hymns, carpe diem lyrics, and poems about country ceremonies, Julia’s clothing, and the pleasures and perils of alcohol consumption. By the mid-twentieth century, almost one hundred editions of Herrick’s verse had been published, but only a few scholarly editions included the disgusting poems.4 Today, they are rarely anthologized – and thus rarely read or taught.