Collected Poems

by Thomas Carew

Thomas Carew (1595-1640) was, with Robert Herrick, the finest poet of the "tribe of Ben", the poets who gathered around Ben Jonson in the taverns of Southwark in the early 17th century. This collected edition is the only complete edition of his poems available.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1640

About the author

Thomas Carew (pronounced as "Carey") (1595 – 22 March 1640) was an English poet, among the 'Cavalier' group of Caroline poets.

Reviews

[Janese]

Rock star

[Liam Guilar]

SO my rating is for the edition. Another one of Shearsman's 'Shearsman Classics'. These are what were once called 'reading copies'. A brief introduction to point the reader in the right direction, and then the poems on the page, decent sized font, nice paper, no footnotes or marginal glosses, a few endnotes at the end.

Carew is one one of the footnote poets. He turns up in large anthologies, or in passing in someone else's biography. He scrapes into Marvell's in a list of poems and their writers, he isn't even in the index of Donaldson's life of Jonson.

Perhaps this is one of the many times when the foot note poet deserves to be a foot note poet. As the blurb says, it was his misfortune to have been writing when Jonson, Donne and Marvell were writing.

So why read him? There are numerous well-handled short pieces. His elegy on Donne is fascinating. But otherwise what you see is a fine poet missing the mark.

'A Rapture' is, as his modern editor says, a startling erotic poem, condemned in parliament at the time and capable of surprising even now. But it's a failure, compare it to Donne at his best and it's all over the place: a strange mix of showing off with literary allusions, over done imagery and explicit imaginary sex. It lacks the 'wit' of Donne or the directness of Rochester. 'To A.L Persuasions to Love' is a long winded (though perhaps kinder) version of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. But everything that makes the latter memorable is missing from Carew's poem.

If you're nagging at the question, what is a good poem, then it's instructive to read someone who is technically as good as Carew, and compare him to his contemporaries, especially his famous contemporaries, and consider what makes their famous poems famous and his mostly forgotten.

[Redding Walters]

Love this anthology. He is the poet in my second novel, "Celia," an unsung hero of the 17th century and a literary figure unfairly relegated to obscurity.