"All are not born (Sir) to the Bay": "Fack" Suckling, "Tom" Carew, and the Making of a Poet

Sir John Suckling's brief career may be read as a struggle to free himself from the influence of Thomas Carew in order to stake out his own place in Caroline poetry. Suckling's frequent references to Carew are double-edged; his life and poems seem to be modeled in calculated contrapposto to those of the older poet. Suckling's affected libertinage represents an attack upon the "piatonic love" fashionable at court but also an attempt to conceal his inability to fashion poems in the proper courtly style. Similarly, his vaunted amateur status in poetry is both a rejection of poetic fathers and a hedge against the possibility of failure. Suckling eventually finds a solution to the contrary impulses that stymie him in lyric by abandoning that genre in favor of the familiar letter, the epithalamion, and drama; the question of his vocation as a poet, however, was still unresolved at the time of his death.