SOURCE: Wooden, Warren W. “The Cavalier Art of Love: The Amatory Epistles of Sir John Suckling.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 24, no. 5-1 (November 1977): 30-36.

In the following essay, Wooden examines John Suckling's love letters and contends that they demonstrate control, awareness, sophistication, and unconventionality.

To our era as to his own, Sir John Suckling seems the quintessential Cavalier, “the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest Gamester,” in John Aubrey's phrase.¹ Today, however, his reputation rests almost exclusively on the body of lyrical verse—witty, masculine, playfully irreverent—which was collected posthumously in Fragmenta Aurea (1646) and The Last Remains of Sir John Suckling (1659). But both of these volumes contained, in addition to the poetry, separate collections of Suckling's letters set off from the poems and provided with their own titlepage within each volume (“LETTERS To divers Eminent PERSONAGES: Written on several Occasions” in Fragmenta Aurea; “LETTERS...