Cavalier poets is a broad description of a school of poets, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. They were marked out by their lifestyle and religion from the Puritans on the Parliamentarian side; much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject.
Most of the Cavalier poets were courtiers, with notable exceptions: Robert Herrick, for example, was not a courtier but his style marks him as a Cavalier poet.
All the major poets of the period, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, and the Irish poet Jonathan Swift, wrote satirical verse.
Among the foremost of these poets were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom spent part, and in Eliot's case a considerable part, of their writing lives in England.
The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil.
Feeds |
Contact