Love and its Costs in Seventeenth-Century Literature

This chapter engages in a discussion of the carpe diem motif in poems by Donne, Herrick, Jonson, and Marvell in terms of their emphasis on troubadour/trobaritz ideas of love and individual choice in a world of arranged marriages. This chapter includes a prime example of the criticism of suspicion (based in the idea of pulling back the surface of a poem to reveal what ‘really’ lies beneath that surface) in a discussion of Robert Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins to Make Much of Time.’