SOURCE: Miner, Earl. “The Social Mode.” In The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, pp. 15-42. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

In the following excerpt, Miner analyzes Waller's works to demonstrate the use of conventional motifs in Cavalier poetry.

Ii. the Creation of Person and Place

One purpose of this study is to show how the best Cavalier poetry works, how it enlivens conventions, whether social or literary, and how, to a reader grown accustomed to the accent of this province of English poetry, it has something enduringly important to say. As Charles Cotton had served my purpose earlier to convey something of the quality of the musical key, as it were, of the social mode, so now Edmund Waller may be taken to show something of the range of Cavalier motifs after Jonson. Waller's name is no longer the coffee-house word it was to critical Dick Minims in...