Music-making was a popular leisure activity in aristocratic households in the early seventeenth century and a growing number of courtier poets wrote and exchanged verse in aristocratic salons and literary coteries. Chapter 12 continues the exploration of Herbert’s intellectual achievements and reputation as a polymath. It traces his interest in playing the lute and singing, and the musical preferences and fashions demonstrated by the music books he owned and the preludes, fantasias, pavanes, galliards, courantes, voltes, sarabands, and airs assembled in his unique manuscript lute book. It probes his inclusion among the metaphysical poets, exploring the influence of John Donne and Giambattista Marino, but also that of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir Philip Sidney, and of Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. It uses the themes of love, beauty, immortality, and death to examine examples of his sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, and lyrical poems, some of which were published posthumously as The Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1665, and looks briefly at his Latin philosophical poems and his rough draft for a masque. It explores his preference for deploying verbal ingenuity and erudition rather than feelings, his deployment of metaphysical conceits and concepts, his innovative experimentation with rhyme and the extent of his participation in the literary coterie culture of the times. It claims a place for him among the leading minor poets and suggests that this was an impressive achievement for a man heavily engaged in other intellectual fields as well as political and estate matters.
