Thomas Carew (poet)

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Thomas Carew, drawing after a painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyke

Thomas Carew (* 1594 probably in West Wickham, Kent ; † March 23, 1640 ) was an English poet . He is counted among the cavalier poets , but was equally under the influence of metaphysical poets such as John Donne . Among the erotic lyric poets of the 17th century, Carew is considered the greatest stylist.

Life

His father, Sir Matthew Carew , was a lawyer; with him the family moved to London in 1598 . Carew enrolled in 1608 at Merton College , Oxford , which he left in either 1610 or 1611 with a Bachelor of Arts . He then studied at the Middle Temple in London. From 1613 to 1616 Carew worked as secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, an English diplomat, and initially traveled with him at various embassies to Italy and the Netherlands . Due to several literary diatribes , he fell out with Carleton and his wife and was released.

Carew was at odds with his patriarchal father; by falling out with Carleton, he lost his socially respected position. In the period that followed, Carew tried to regain support as a protégé of well-known personalities such as Kit Villiers, the brother of the infamous Duke of Buckingham . In 1619 he traveled to Paris in the wake of the diplomat Edward Herbert , First Baron of Cherbury .

In the early 1620s, Carew got to know the circle around Ben Jonson . Around this time, after Charles I's accession to the throne, he also stayed at the royal court, where he was finally able to establish himself and in 1630 was appointed head sesson . In 1633 his opulent mask play Coelum Britannicum was performed in the palace of Whitehall , the game was printed in 1634. As one of the most ingenious cavalier poets , he succeeded in gaining the favor of the king who was fighting for his power. In 1640 a collection of his poems appeared in Poems .

Under the influence of Alexander Pope , who criticized the late Baroque Sprezzatura in Carew's poetry, the one-sided image of Carew as a virtuoso, libertine courtier poet, which has been handed down to the present day, emerged . In contrast to contemporary literary rivals such as Richard Lovelace or Sir John Suckling , Carew can be seen as a thoroughly versatile writer and poet, whose work is under the influence of Ben Jonson as well as John Donne and uses different poetic idioms .

Due to his early death, Carew did not live to see the Puritan interregnum from 1642 to 1660 and the execution of the king. Regardless of this, his extremely heterogeneous poetic work reflects the awareness of living in a time of upheaval or an end. Against the background of the historical upheavals, his ostensibly gallant or innocuous poems often contain a deep, politically explosive statement.

For example, the speaker's metaphorical request to his beloved to withdraw from the suction of the raging stream like a vortex and to go to the refuge , i.e. H. in the bay of his arms, to oppose the threatening danger of extinction by the ocean, on a political meta-level at the same time be interpreted as an appeal to the royalists or cavaliers to seek a refuge in a kind of inner emigration that makes it possible to equalize Surviving the iconoclasm of the Puritans .

The topography of these refuges poetically designed by Carew varies in his poems from the erotic paradise of the female body to the locus amoenus of a country estate; In almost all of the poems, however, the author's escapist yearning for seclusion and a paradisiacal original state is clearly recognizable.

Carew's best-known poem, the Epidecum on John Donne, is not only an intellectually equal obituary for this poet he admires, but is also an elegiac lament in an era of decadence that wistfully looks back on the time when poets like Donne were still alive with a vital one and masculine language broke with the traditions of antiquity and only allowed the realm of esprit or wit to apply.

After his death in 1640, he was buried in Saint Dunstan's-in-the-West Church in Westminster, London.

Work (selection)

Carew's poems and songs were published after his death. Much of his work deals with love or praises a woman.

  • A cruel mistress
  • A Deposition From Love
  • A Divine Mistress
  • A looking glass
  • A Prayer to The Wind
  • A song
  • A Song: When June is Past, the Fading Rose
  • Another
  • Ask me no more
  • Boldness In Love
  • Celia Beeding, To the Surgeon
  • Disdain Returned
  • Epitaph On Maria Wentworth
  • Epitaph On The Lady Mary Villiers
  • Epitaph On The Late Mary Villiers
  • I Do Not Love Thee For That Fair
  • Ingrateful Beauty Threatened
  • Lips and eyes
  • Mediocrity In Love Rejected
  • My Mistress Commanding Me To Return Her Letters
  • Persuasions To Joy, A Song
  • Secrecy Protested
  • Song. A beautiful mistress.
  • Song. Conquest By Flight
  • Song. Good Counsel to a Young Maid
  • Song. Eternity of Love Rejected
  • Song. Mediocrity In Love Rejected
  • Song. Murdering Beauty
  • Song. Persuasions to Enjoy
  • The Primrose
  • The Spring
  • The Unfading Beauty
  • To AL Persuasions In Love
  • To His Inconstant Mistress
  • To My Inconstant Mistress
  • To My Mistress In Absence
  • To My Mistress Sitting By A River's Side

Work edition

  • Rhodes Dulap (Ed.): The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum . Oxford University Press. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1949, 2012 reprint, ISBN 978-0198-11804-6 .

literature

  • Annie Cointre: Thomas Carew, l'homme et son œuvre. Poétique, étude historique, thématique, stylistique et prosodique . Dissertation, University of Paris 1981.
  • Robert G. Howard: Minor poets of the 17th century. Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, Lord Herbert of Cherbury . Dent, London 1969 (reprinted unchanged, London 1931).
  • Lynn Sadler: Thomas Carew . Twayne, Boston, Mass. 1979, ISBN 0-8057-6683-9 .
  • Edward I. Selig: The flourishing wreath. A study of Thomas Carew's poetry . Archon Press, Hamden, Conn. 1970, ISBN 0-208-00964-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Hans-Dieter Gelfert : Small history of the English literature . 2nd edition. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 109, ISBN 3-406-52856-2 . See also the article by Norbert Lennartz in: Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 96. See also Bernhard Fabian : Die Englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 75.
  2. ↑ Cf. Norbert Lennartz: Carew, Thomas . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 96.
  3. ↑ Cf. Norbert Lennartz: Carew, Thomas . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 96.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Carew, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet
DATE OF BIRTH 1594
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 1640