John Wesley's Use of George Herbert

Abstract

JOHN WESLEY'S appreciation of George Herbert, the metaphysical poet, has already been demonstrated.' Not only did Wesley refer to Herbert in his Journal and quote him in his Letters, but he adapted some forty-nine of Herbert's poems for the early collections of hymns he made for the Methodists. Wesleys' first hymn book, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (Charles-Town, I737), contains six poems from Temple as rewritten by John Wesley; the second, anonymously published, Collection of Psalms and Hymns (London, 1738), offers reworkings of six more poems by Herbert. But this rather tentative use of Herbert is far exceeded in the Hymns and Sacred Poems (London, I739), for which John Wesley furnished forty-two poems from Temple, including all six of the 1737 poems and four of the six poems of the 1 738 edition. Though it has no other Temple poems, the 1740 edition of Hymns and Sacred Poems adds Businesse to the total Wesley-Herbert canon. Submission' which had appeared in the I738 but not in the I739 anthology of hymns, is offered again in A Collection of Psalms and Hynms (I74). Finally, John Wesley's A Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems From the most Celebrated English Authors (Bristol, 1744) embraces, together with sections from Nosce Teipsum and Paradise Lost, Herbert's The Church-porch and Providence unchanged by Wesley, but with some stanzas omitted, and Life and Rose' rewritten as Anacreonticks'2