SOURCE: “The Poetry of Thomas Carew,” in Renaissance and Modern Studies, Vol. XII, 1968, pp. 56-67.

In the following essay, Parfitt contends that Carew should not simply be categorized as a Cavalier poet and instead emphasizes Carew's association with Jonson and Donne and his revitalization of poetic conventions.

I

No-one seems really sure what to do with Carew, partly perhaps because no fully adequate account of English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century has been written. In Revaluation, Dr. Leavis suggested an approach which makes Carew an important link between Johson and Marvell, thus giving his work a greater prominence than it usually has, but Leavis's remarks have not been followed up and so the traditional view of Carew, linking him vaguely with ‘the Cavalier poets’, is still dominant.

One reason why this traditional view matters is that, insofar as it follows Jonson, Cavalier poetry shows...