SOURCE: "Pastoral Wars: Matthew Prior's Poems to Cloe," in Ball State University Forum, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Spring, 1968, pp. 39-49.

In the following essay, Rower explains that, while Prior's early poems are typical of the Restoration, his later lyrics addressed to Cloe feature an enlarged context in which he achieves previously unattained levels of characterization and realism.

There is no love poetry of the English Augustan Age quite like Matthew Prior's. With the possible exception of Swift, whose Cadenus and Vanessa and birthday poems to Stella¹ are not totally unlike Prior's love poems in their subtle delineations of a relationship between a man and a woman, Prior alone, of all his contemporaries, went beyond the trivial limits established for the genre of amorous lyric in the Restoration. Perhaps the only other nondramatic writing of the earlier part of the eighteenth century that gives a comparable sense of realistic relationships...