The early seventeenth century extends from the accession of the first Stuart king (James I) in 1603 to the coronation of the third (Charles II) in 1660. But the events that occurred between these boundaries make much more sense if they are seen in a larger pattern extending from 1588 to 1688. Between these two dates massive political and social events took place that bridge the gap between the Tudor “tyranny by consent” of the sixteenth century and the equally ill-defined but equally functional constitutional monarchy of the eighteenth century.
A sense of deep disquiet, of traditions under challenge, is felt everywhere in the literary culture of the early 17th century. Long before the term was applied to our own time, the era of Donne and Robert Burton (the obsessive anatomist of melancholy) deserved to be called the Age of Anxiety. One may think of the “Metaphysical” poets who followed Donne (such as Herbert, Crashaw, Vaugham, and Cowley) as trying to reinforce the traditional lyric forms of love and devotion by stretching them to comprehend new and extreme intellectual energies. In the other direction, Jonson and his “sons” the so-called Cavalier poets (such as Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, Waller, and Denham) generally tried to compress and limit their poems, giving them a high polish and a sense of easy domination at the expense of their intellectual content. The common contrast of Cavalier with Metaphysical does describe two poetic alternatives of the early century. Yet both style were wholly inadequate containers for the sort of gigantic energy that Milton was trying to express.
At the heart of the century of rapid change lies the Puritan Revolt of 1640-60. The century together with the English Revolution was a time of intense ferment in all areas of life —religion, science, politics, domestic relations, culture. That ferment was reflected in the literature of the era, which also registered a heightened focus on and analysis of the self and the personal life. However, little of this seems in evidence in the elaborate frontispiece to Michael Drayton's long "chorographical" poem on the landscape, regions, and local history of Great Britain (1612), which appeared in the first years of the reign of the Stuart king James I (1603-1625). The great seventeenth-century heroic poem, Paradise Lost, treats the Fall of Man and its tragic consequences.
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