Epic and romance

This chapter deals with the least read and, in some cases, least studied writing of the period of the English Revolution. In recent years, literary scholars have been drawn towards radical writing of all kinds, in part following on from historians and in part due to a salutary change in political and cultural sympathy. The two obviously canonized writers of the period, Milton and Marvell, are readily accommodated to this radical bias. Their dominance is hardly challenged by the Royalist sentiments of the 'B' list of 'cavalier lyricists' (Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Waller) and Anglican religious poets (Vaughan, Traherne), still less by two other kinds of Royalist writing which have been all but invisible in literary discussion of the period: epic poetry, although this has at least never been entirely invisible, and romance, which has pretty much vanished from the sight of all but a handful of scholars. Recently Timothy Raylor has pointed to the limitations of our understanding of cavalier culture, in comparison to 'the sophisticated appreciation we now have of the ideological complexities of those traditionally labelled “Puritans”'.