This volume claims to have the authoritative texts of poems by Ben Jonson and his followers (including Richard Corbett, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Thomas Randolph, and Edmund Waller, among others). This claim is certainly a fair one. Also incuded are wonderful, relevant critical essays, some of them modern, some written by Jonson and his contemporaries.


The young poets influenced by Jonson were the self-styled 'sons' or 'tribe' of Ben, later called the Cavalier poets, a group which included, among others, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace.

Also included is a copious selection from the works of Richard Corbett, Robert Herrick (eighty-two poems from Hesperides and fifteen from His Noble Numbers), Thomas Carew, James Shirley, Mildmay Fane, Thomas Randolph, Edmund Waller, William Harbington, Sir John Suckling, Sidney Godolphin, William Cartwright, James Graham (Marquis of Montrose), Sir John Denham, Richard Lovelace, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Stanley.




Among the critics represented are Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Edmund Bolton, James Howell, Thomas Fuller, Edward Hyde, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Patrick Cruttwell, Joseph Summers, Earl Miner, Geoffrey Walton, G. A. E. Parfitt, L. A. Beaurline, Stephen Orgel, Ronald Berman, Bruce King, Hugh Richmond, Earl Wasserman, D. C. Allen, T. S. Eliot, and Hugh Maclean.