George Herbert: His Religion and Art: Its Making and Early Reception

Abstract

George Herbert: His Religion and Art: Its Making and Early Reception* by Joseph H. Summers I hardly knew of Herbert as a poet while I was an undergraduate. In 1937-38 English 1 at Harvard was fairly experimental: the first term we spent three weeks each in intensive reading of The Canterbury Tales, Marlowe's plays, Donne's poems, and Paradise Lost, and then rushed on to the eighteenth century the second term. Later, I took period courses in the Middle Ages (two terms exclusive of Chaucer) and the eighteenth century, but not the seventeenth century. My honors tutor was a brilliant Marxist named Jack Rackliffe, who loved seventeenth-century prose and worked hard on my prose, but we never read any seventeenth-century poetry. Walter Houghton's English 80, "Criticism of Poetry," (only one term in 1939-40) was the most exciting single course I took as an undergraduate: until then I had been studying many courses about literature, but Houghton's showed me some ways I could read poetry more directly and even come to understand something of how it works; but we read only, as I remember it, Donne, some Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Yeats, and Louis MacNeice. My senior year I was one of the undergraduates who crowded into Houghton's fine graduate course in seventeenth-century prose, and there I did read Walton's Life of Herbert, along with a number of the other Lives. But my Senior Honors Essay was on the poetry of Louis MacNeice. In those days honors candidates in English at Harvard were 'George Herbert: His Religion and Art by Joseph H. Summers remains one of the very few essential works on Herbert. To help mark the re-issuing of his book (available in cloth and paperback from Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghamton, New York), the George Herbert Journal invited Professor Summers to discuss the personal and intellectual background of his study. What follows is his response. Quotations from Elizabeth Bishop are included with the permission of her literary executor, Alice Methfessel. Joseph H. Summers provided with extensive bibliographies of primary works in their sophomore or junior years. There were five bibliographies for each of seven periods or literatures (Medieval, Renaissance, 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, American, 20th century), and each student was responsible for all the reading on at least one bibliography in each group: I took Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the Renaissance, and seventeenthcentury prose — although I had also done most of the reading in Milton in a course with Douglas Bush. Inthe spring of 1941, my mother waited until I had finished the last of about ten hours of written honors examinations (including one entire examination based on analyzing and dating a heterogeneous collection of passages of prose and verse and a critical analysis of a dreadful fake "Elizabethan" sonnet) before she telephoned me that my father had suffered a severe stroke a few days earlier. I left for Kentucky immediately; after about a month there, I returned to Cambridge to take my final oral examination, having done no systematic work at all to prepare for it. (I later discovered that some others, more informed about the examinations, had attempted to memorize a good deal of the Cambridge History of English Literature during the interval.) I was later led to believe that my record and honors essay had given me a chance for a summa; but my oral examination was a disaster. The examination was conducted by a board of four or five professors and was, in retrospect at least.a good deal rougher than my doctor's oral.l had had no notion at all that I was supposed to fill in the gaps in all those twenty-eight other bibliographies I had nof prepared for the written examinations; the board quickly discovered how many things I knew nothing at all about. I had taken only the first half of Howard Mumford Jones's course in the Victorian period, so he asked me only about figures in the second half. I was so rattled that I couldn't even remember for George Sherburn the name of Tom Jones's father (Sommers). And when Kenneth Murdock said...