"Cleanly-Wantonnesse" and Puritan Legislation: the Politics of Herrick’s Amatory Ovidianism.

Recent years have seen increasing recognition of the Hesperides' political
engagement, with more attention paid to the poems on explicitly political
themes, to Laudian aspects of its religious stance, and to the Caroline agenda of its poems on festivities banned by Parliament. Yet the role of the Hesperides'
oft-noted and pervasive allusiveness within its political programme has
not been examined. Indeed, under the influence of the most accomplished
student of Herrick's classical 'borrowings', Gordon Braden, the generally accepted idea of Herrick as classical imitator still resembles the now discredited traditional view of Herrick the apolitical aesthete, 'who in a troubled age is largely content to create a timeless Arcadia'.