THE country house is a perfect symbol of idealized England: solid, imposing, and ancient, yet warm and inviting. In the seventeenth century these country seats were put into poetry as metaphorical distillations of the virtues of the gentry. Many of the great poets of that century, from Ben Jonson to Thomas Carew, wrote poems in a genre that came to be known as “Country House Poems.” Many poets in this tradition are considered “Cavalier Poets” because of their loyalty to the throne before and during the English Civil War. This category, however, is not fixed; to this day the debate continues as to what, besides loyalty to the monarch, defines a Cavalier Poet. In the 1970s, Earl Miner proposed a new way of looking at the Cavaliers in his essay “The Cavalier Ideal of the Good Life.” Instead of using a timeline, or looking at poetic form or meter, Miner suggests that the Cavaliers are united around a common desire: the desire to explore the elements that made up “the good life.” Miner notes that “Cavalier social values are those of an aristocracy and gentry that two centuries before might have struggled against the throne, but that now sought to protect the King, for all his faults … against his enemies and to preserve crown, mitre, estates, and what was often termed ‘our liberties.’” Though disparate in their backgrounds, beliefs, meter, and form, the Cavalier Poets shared a common aesthetic: this idea of “the good life.” The elements of this bonum vitae can be summed up as “a conservative outlook, a response to a social threat, classical recollections, love of a very English way of life, and a new blending of old ideas.” All of these features reveal “a consistent urge to define and explore the features of what constituted human happiness.” Right at the center of this exploration sits the country house poem. What better way is there to look back on the past, and promote aristocratic ideals and conservative principles, than by praising a country seat? This article expands on Miner's idea of the Cavalier ideal of the “good life,” particularly as it relates to the country house poem, by showing that “The Description of Cookham” by Aemilia Lanyer and “A Description of an Island” by Margaret Cavendish may both be construed as Cavalier poetry using the definition proposed by Miner.