The complete poetry of Robert Herrick
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0268117x.2014.944207
ISSN2050-4616
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoThe complete poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 2 vols, lxxvi +504 and xx +805 pp., £125 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-921285-9Herrick has been lucky in his editors. This fine new, two-volume of his Complete Poetry, edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, does not, to be sure, enter a crowded field: it follows by nearly 60 years L.C. Martin's Clarendon Press of Poetical Works1, and by an exact 50 years Doubleday of his Complete Poetry by J. Max Patrick2 that, in their characteristically generous estimation, Cain and Connolly judge to have been to this point in time the strongest rival to Martin's edition (1.435). But if he has been seldom edited, and more often selected from than edited in round, editorial luck remains, so that praise that Frank Kermode paid to Martin's in a review from 1958 might very well, and with frill desert, be repeated here: It would be difficult to overpraise this edition; scholarship is unobtrusively superb, down to impeccable proof-reading.3Editors, as Cain and Connolly recognise, often change emphases of author their editions transmit to readers. Their Herrick is still deeply shaped by habits of classical and biblical allusiveness that earlier editions revealed, but seldom can he have seemed so engaged and stimulated by language and forms of earlier seventeenth-century poets as poet who emerges here must have been, among whom Ben Jonson - to early manuscripts of whose verse Herrick must have had access (1.xxv) - lends so much to his early poems. Seldom, too, can geographies, economics and devotional cast of his childhood and later life have been reconstructed with such particularity and care as they are in Cain's Life, which sorts documentary traces and own many-layered self-representations with a wry humanity that can attend both to dazzling, recursive run that might see an early poem of intertextually recall Seneca via Florio's translation of Montaigne (1 .xxxviii and n.86), and at same time lived actuality of what Herrick calls the drooping West (rainfall is indeed high in this area of Devon: 1 .xlv). Nor will Herrick before have seemed so musical, his poems so shaped and reshaped by early modern world of song and performance as he does so rewardingly here.Perhaps he is also in an important sense two Herricks in new edition: a poet of print, as seen in Cain and Connolly's first volume, which presents an edited text of Hesperides (1648), and a poet of manuscript, as seen in their second, with its scrupulous texts of Herrick's Poetry in Manuscript. Certainly editors substantially advance our understanding of printing of Hesperides in 1648, identifying for first time through detailed bibliographical enquiry book's printer, John Grismond (see especially 2.408-11), and survival ofthe book into collections today (57 copies are described in useful and exact detail across 1.438-48). And in their detailed note on Herrick's Hand (2.20-22) and wonderfully searching of mainly manuscript poems that follows, though it also includes a few uncollected poems from print and two epitaphs from church walls, they mark out and authoritatively describe writing and transmission of a part of poetic identity that can never have been seen before so clearly or so well. …
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