This chapter examines a spectrum of civil war and Interregnum venues – literal and textual – in which authors either imagined alternatives to engagement or pursued intellectual projects at some remove from the era’s political, religious and military conflicts. Drawing on longstanding generic practices, foreign and native, as well as various philosophical and religious traditions, numerous writers, mainly Royalist, celebrated country life and rural retirement in order to evade or address Britain’s crisis. Royalist authors also expressed defiant insouciance, shared values and mutual support-in-adversity with innovative contributions to traditional genres, such as the drinking poem, and newer sorts of publications, such as the anthology of verse ‘drollery’. With differing degrees of involvement in current events, like-minded intellectuals, such as Samuel Hartlib’s circle, the Oxford scientific club and the Cambridge Platonists articulated new intellectual visions. Others, such as Thomas Browne and Thomas Urquhart, pursued more solitary intellectual and literary paths for a personal purchase on both their age and eternity, or participated in contemporaries’ group endeavours with self-conscious distinctiveness – as did John Milton, the Puritan convivial poet and Hartlib’s classicising colleague in educational reform.

One of the greatest celebrants of country life and retired contentment, Robert Herrick mixes lyric grace and epigrammatic point in his 1648 volume consisting of the predominantly secular Hesperides and religious Noble Numbers. Hesperides documents ‘Times trans-shifting’ (‘The Argument of his Book’, line 9) – not only seasonal changes, ageing and death, but also English sociopolitical disruption. Yet the polysemous title Hesperides evokes England as a paradisal garden island.

Seventeenth-century English critics applied classically derived conceptions of the writer's aims, natural endowments, and artistic method to English literature. A flexible neoclassicism not only shaped poet-critics like Jonson and Dryden but also accommodated to the canon authors who did not fit a rigid classical paradigm, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Throughout this century of intense socio-political conflict and change, classical norms, adapted to English developments, acquired a range of new cultural meanings.

The early seventeenth-century poet-critic Ben Jonson draws mainly upon Roman sources: the rhetoricians, Seneca, and particularly Horace, upon whom Jonson based his cultural role and his belief that the critic must be an excellent poet himself. Like Horace (Ars poetica 333–46), Jonson argues poetry should combine pleasure and utility by teaching with delight. Like the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium (1.2.3), Jonson claims ‘naturall wit’ or talent, a writer's primary qualification, must be shaped by ‘exercise’, imitation and study (of classical models), and ‘art’ (knowledge of rules for effective expression). As Quintilian advises (Institutio oratoria 10.3.5-6), one must temper vigorous ‘invention’, the discovery of interesting material, with strong judgement regarding material's suitability; after giving invention free reign, one must judiciously revise.

Just as Roman authors sought to surpass Greek models, English authors must emulate the classics. Neither ignoring nor slavishly following ancient precedents, the good writer transforms them. Jonson stresses that classicism itself demands independence by echoing Seneca's claim that the ‘Ancients’ are ‘Guides, not Commanders’. Adapting a Roman boast that orators of Cicero's time equalled those of ‘insolent’ Greece, Jonson praises English Renaissance orators, culminating in Francis Bacon, for equalling or surpassing ‘insolent Greece, or haughty Rome’.

The personal lyric, conceived as the expression of a highly individualized voice and subjective feeling, was not a major form between the early seventeenth-century flowering of the “metaphysical” lyric and the lyric resurgence of the late eighteenth century and Romanticism. From 1650 to 1740, England witnessed great social and political change, from the successive upheavals and reactions of the Interregnum, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution to the stabilizing consolidation of Whig constitutionalism, oligarchy, and bureaucracy. Profound economic and cultural transformations also occurred: a financial revolution, a growing commercial empire, and the increasing hegemony of a middle-class culture commercial in background and “polite” in aspiration. Traditional martial values (still crucial for England's foreign relations but tarnished by associations with civil war) clashed with aristocratic libertinism and middle-class ideals of civility. Men and women renegotiated their relations within the context of an increasingly prosperous, pacific, “feminized” domestic culture. Aggressively modern scientific and philosophical trends challenged the classics' still potent authority.