A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick, credited to Robert Herrick, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick by Robert Herrick. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland. Robert Herrick had been apprenticed to a goldsmith before entering holy orders. This early training has been credited with influencing his metrical precision and his success with short poems. A still more important influence was Ben Jonson, for he was a member of the "sons of Ben," the coterie of younger poets that surrounded that great dramatist, Shakespeare's rival and friend. He even addresses a poem to Jonson addressing him as his "saint." As a country parson, far from the bustle of London and his poetic peers, Herrick found inspiration in the beauties of nature, but loneliness may have skewed his perception toward the melancholy lessons taught by the changing seasons. Still, he remained a social poet, his verses always seeming to require an audience, usually a jolly one; inward meditations are not his style. Herrick has been called pagan in spite of his religious calling, and heaven does always rank as an afterthought in his poetry, while daydreams of the maidens that populate the Latin poets' verses provide him with a rich and sensuous fantasy life. In his lifetime he was seen as an anachronism, a perfect representative of the Elizabethan versifier, highly skilled but not to be taken seriously because, though admittedly as perfect as if they were to be inscribed in marble, his lines lack the arch tone and puzzling wit of the new age. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick
• Author credits: Robert Herrick
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 7
• Listed recording duration: 4:10:10

Catalogue topics

• song
• pastoral
• seventeenth century
• tribe of ben
• son of ben
• devonshire

Track guide

1. 01 - Section 1: Preface — 36:54
2. 02 - Section 2: Prefatory; Idyllica 1 — 36:20
3. 03 - Section 3: Idyllica 2 — 31:21
4. 04 - Section 4: Idyllica 3 — 36:52
5. 05 - Section 5: Amores — 41:30
6. 06 - Section 6: Epigrams; Nature & Art — 39:59
7. 07 - Section 7: Musae Graviores — 27:14

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.