CAREW, THOMAS (b. 1595), English poet, was born at West Wickham, Kent, the son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in chancery, and his wife, Alice Ingpenny, widow of Sir John Rivers, lord mayor of London. At the age of 13 he matriculated at Merton college, Oxford. He took his degree of B.A. early in 1611, and studied at the Middle Temple. Two years later he was sent to Italy as one of the ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton's household, and when the ambassador returned from Venice he seems to have kept Thomas Carew with him, for he is found in the capacity of secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton at The Hague, early in 1616. In Aug. 1618 Carew entered the service of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in whose train he started for France in March 1619.
Carew became gentleman of the privy chamber in 1628. Prob ably in 1630 he was made "server" or taster-in-ordinary to the king. To this period may be attributed his close friendship with Sir John Suckling, Ben Jonson and Clarendon ; the latter says that Carew was "a person of pleasant and facetious wit." Donne, whose celebrity as a court preacher lasted until his death in 1631, exercised a powerful if not entirely healthful influence over the genius of Carew. In Feb. 1633 a masque by the latter, entitled Coelum Britanicum, was acted in the banqueting house at Whitehall, and was printed in 1634. Carew was generally sup posed to have died in 1638, but Clarendon tells us that "after 5o years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence." If Carew was more than 5o years of age he must have died in or after 1645, and in fact there were final additions made to his Poems in the 3rd edition of 1651.
Carew's poems, at their best, are brilliant lyrics of the purely sensuous order. They open to us, in his own phrase, "a mine of rich and pregnant fancy." His metrical style was influenced by Jonson and his imagery still more clearly by Donne, for whom he had an almost servile admiration. His intellectual power was not comparable with Donne's, but Carew had a lucidity and directness of lyrical utterance unknown to Donne. It is perhaps his greatest distinction that he was the earliest of the Cavalier song-writers by profession, of whom Rochester was the latest, poets who turned the disreputable incidents of an idle court life into poetry which was often of the rarest delicacy and the purest melody and colour. The longest and best of Carew's poems, "A Rapture," would be more widely appreciated if the rich flow of its imagination were restrained by greater reticence of taste.
The best edition of Carew's Poems is that prepared by Arthur Vincent in 1899.