[2] He was named after an uncle, Robert Herrick (or Heyrick), a prosperous Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester, who had bought the land Greyfriars Abbey stood on after Henry VIII's dissolution in the mid-16th century.

Nicholas Herrick died in a fall from a fourth-floor window in November 1592, when Robert was a year old (whether this was suicide remains unclear).

He spent some time preparing his lyric poems for publication and had them printed in 1648 under the title Hesperides; or the Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick, with a dedication to the Prince of Wales.

He had obtained favour by writing verses celebrating the births of both Charles II and his brother James before the Civil War.

He dealt with English country life and its seasons, village customs, complimentary poems to various ladies and his friends, themes taken from classical writings, and a solid bedrock of Christian faith, not intellectualized but underpinning the rest.

This message is clear in "To the Virgins, to make much of Time", "To Daffodils", "To Blossoms" and "Corinna's Going A Maying", where the warmth and exuberance of a seemingly kind and jovial personality comes over.

A style influenced by Ben Jonson, the classical Roman writers and the late Elizabethan era must have seemed old-fashioned to an audience tuned to the complexities of metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

Herrick appears in James Branch Cabell's "Concerning Corrina", published in his 1916 short-story volume The Certain Hour: Dizain des Poëtes.

Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days has the character Winnie quote from Herrick's "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time".

[11][12] Ken Bruen in his debut novel Rilke on Black makes Herrick's two-line poem "Dreams" a favorite with the protagonist Nick.

The dedication in Thomas Burnett Swann's Will-o-the-Wisp (1976, ISBN 9780552103589) is "A novel suggested by the life of Robert Herrick, poet, vicar, and pagan".

Herrick was referred to by the character Clement in HBO's 'Industry' (December 2020), in view of a candle on a birthday cake representing the passing of precious time.