The poet was probably the third of the eleven children of his parents, and was born in West Wickham in Kent, in the early part of 1595; he was thirteen years old in June 1608, when he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford.

He was therefore sent to Italy as a member of Sir Dudley's household and, when the ambassador returned from Venice, he seems to have kept Thomas Carew with him, for he was working as secretary to Carleton, at the Hague, early in 1616.

[3] According to a probably apocryphal story, while Carew held this office he displayed his tact and presence of mind by stumbling and extinguishing the candle he was holding to light Charles I into the queen's chamber, because he saw that Lord St Albans had his arm round her majesty's neck.

[2] To this period may be attributed his close friendships with Sir John Suckling, Ben Jonson and Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon; the latter described Carew as "a person of pleasant and facetious wit."

It is perhaps his greatest distinction that he is the earliest of the Cavalier song-writers by profession, of whom John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a later example, 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.

Among many others, two of the most celebrated writers of the age, Sir John Suckling and William Davenant, paid tribute to Carew, playfully admiring his poetic craftsmanship.

More recently, Carew's place among the Cavalier Poets has been examined, as have his poetic affinities with Ben Jonson and John Donne; "A Rapture" has been scrutinized as both biography and fantasy; the funerary poetry has been studied as a subgenre; evidence of Carew's views concerning political hierarchy has been found in his occasional verse; and love and courtship have been probed as themes in the "Celia" poems.

"[3] American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau used Thomas Carew's poem "The Pretensions of Poverty" as a "complemental verse" to conclude the "Economy" chapter in his 1854 book Walden.

By Thomas Carew, Esquire is a collection of lyrics, songs, pastorals, poetic dialogues, elegies, addresses, and occasional poems.

Several of the poems, including "An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne" are memorial tributes; others, notably "To Saxham," celebrate country-house life; and a few record such events as the successful production of a play ("To my worthy Friend, M. D’Avenant, upon his Excellent Play, The Iust Italian") or the marriage of friends ("On the Marriage of T. K. and C. C. the Morning Stormie").