Herrick, Robert

Robert (1591-1674), an English poet and clergyman. He was born in London and received his education at Cambridge. He studied law, but later entered the church and received the living of Dean Prior, Devonshire. He began to write poems when a young man, but the first collected edition was published in 1648 under the title Hesperides. For many years his poems suffered an undeserved neglect, but interest in them revived in the latter part of the eighteenth century. As a writer of pastoral lyrics Herrick has never been excelled by any English author. He wrote about 1,300 poems, every one short, some of them of little or no value, but among them many beautiful songs, exquisite in finish. He has been compared to Anacreon, and the work of the American poet, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, has been said to resemble that of Herrick.