SOURCE: “‘Wee, of th’adult’rate mixture not complaine’: Thomas Carew and Poetic Hybridity,” in John Donne Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1988, pp. 91-113.

In the following essay, Barbour assesses Carew's relationship to the poetic values of the Caroline era.

This essay explores three related constituents of Thomas Carew's poetry. The first is the poet's uncertainty about the value of what he proclaimed his favorite poetic activity—lyric love poetry. Carew's pronounced ambivalence about this vein emerged from general Renaissance debates about the place of lyric in the literary hierarchy, but it has also influenced the conflicting assessments of his career. He is labelled, on the one hand, a poet of ease, a natural, a “privileged scoffer,” and, on the other, a critical poet of “trouble and pain,” a poet who almost wrote important verse and only inexactly qualifies for any school or tribe of poetry.¹ Thus, Carew's readers seem...