ABSTRACT
Some writers leave behind them a biographical legend entwined inseparably with what they have written. John Donne was one such. What earned Donne and his fellows the label ‘metaphysical poets’ was the habit of philosophical argument of the kind just illustrated, and the use of extravagant and far-fetched imagery, sometimes technical in substance. The group of poets known as the ‘Cavalier poets’ are akin to Herrick in this respect. Poetry does not seem to be an essential business of their lives. Much of the poetry of the Cavalier poets is, we feel, so peripheral to their true inner and active lives as to represent a fashionable accomplishment rather than an art. Edmund Waller left us one or two lyrics in which the mannered graces of the Cavaliers are recaptured without their air of disenchantment.
