Announcing One Hundred Days of Herbert

So much for not being ambitious! I plan to write 100 days of posts on something related to the wonderful seventeenth-century English parson-poet George Herbert. George Who, you ask? How unfortunate that in the 20^th and now 21^st centuries only literary scholars read George Herbert. Two hundred, 300, and especially 400 years ago he was a household name to any English-speaking person who was literate. (Just ask Samuel T. Coleridge.)

In brief, George Herbert (1593-1633, or, roughly contemporary with Shakespeare) wrote English, Latin, and even some Greek lyric poems during his short lifetime, most of which are in some sense “devotional.” He is considered part of the Metaphysical school of poets from the early seventeenth century (along with John Donne), but Herbert really blazed the way for religious lyric poems that meld Metaphysical wit with Classical polish. The publication of his volume of English poems called The Temple after his death launched this particular trend that lasted roughly half a century.

St. Andrew's, Bemerton

A younger son from an aristocratic family, Herbert was educated at Cambridge’s Trinity College (B.A., M.A.), served as a Cambridge orator and Minister of Parliament, and settled down in the last few years of his life to become a Church of England parson in the country village of Bemerton, outside Salisbury, Wiltshire. Prone to illness his whole life, Herbert finally succumbed in 1633, giving the volume of English poems that he had prepared to his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, to publish. (Herbert’s only previously published poems had been his Latin and Greek ones, many of which are more occasional, such as addressing contemporary debates.)

You may find representative poetry from Herbert in any early English literature anthology or online at such fine sites as Luminarium.org. The entire Temple, as well as Herbert’s prose handbook, The Country Parson, is found online courtesy of Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL). For just a simple paperback reading edition of Herbert’s Temple, get a Penguin copy. For the ultimate scholar’s edition, see Helen Wilcox’s recent (and magnificently thorough) English Poems of George Herbert.

C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, had this to say about Herbert’s place among the English “old books” instrumental in his [Lewis’s] conversion: “I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Rood; more deeply still by Langland; intoxicated (for a time) by Donne; deeply and lastingly satisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment.”