Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a genteelly impoverished family that traced its New England lineage back to 1636. Schooled locally, he also graduated from Harvard, where he benefited from a recent interest in encouraging...

Although he is largely forgotten today, Robert Herrick was regarded in the decade before World War I as an important inheritor of the realist tradition and a controversial critic of American materialism. Herrick was one of a number of middle-class,...

Herrick's three collections of short stories written over a thirty-year period from 1895 to 1925 do not alter the reputation established for him by his seventeen novels and five novellas. He is considered a brilliant, minor realist who fused Theodore...

Robert Herrick's 'Hesperides' contains several poems that reveal the poet's search for a father or father figure. Among the father figures alluded to or outrightly referred to are Ben Jonson, Endymion Porter, Charles I and God. The allusions to several different fathers is, in...

Robert Herrick's poems have been classified as minor poetry due to their alleged lack of uniformity and continuous conscious purpose. However, some of Herrick's critics defended the poet by pointing out to the cohesiveness displayed by his poetry, 'Hesperides' in particular. His defenders further...

In the following essay, Gertzman illustrates Robert Herrick's “recreative” (as opposed to didactic) pastoral in several poems in his Hesperides, noting that the “cleanly wanton” poems are marked by playful humor, fancy, naive enthusiasm, and genial humility.