Seventeenth-Century Poetry: III. The Academic and Courtly Tradition

Secular poetry during the reigns of James I and Charles I lay in the shadow of Spenser, Jonson, and Donne; but the lyric undergrowth was very dense. Two bishops, who passed (with a ten-year interval between them) through Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and so into the higher order of clergy, illustrate pleasantly the upper-class taste of the day. Richard Corbett 1 (1582-1635), successively. Bishop of Oxford and of Norwich, had a humorous bent best carried out in his longest poem, Iter Boreale , which describes the journey of “four clerks of Oxford” to the north of England in a certain month of August ( c. 1620). Henry King 2 (1592-1669), Bishop of Chichester, the close friend both of Jonson and of Donne, owed most discipleship to the former. He wrote on some of the same occasions as Corbett, but had a larger range and a better singing voice. His elegy on the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1618 is a fine example of controlled indignation: I will not weep, for ‘twere as great a sin To shed a tear for thee, as to have been An actor in thy death... ;