Preface

Abstract

Preface The year 1993 saw the four-hundredth anniversary of George Herbert's birth. Although the author of only a single volume of poetry, published posthumously in 1633 as The Temple, Herbert has rarely been without readers; in fact, he has rarely been without a significant readership, and a plausible case can be made that no other poet from the English Renaissance has built so substantial and longstanding a reputation on so slender a body of work. Where many of Herbert's greatest literary contemporaries chose to spread out their literary activities over a lifetime and across several genres, Herbert's achievement was the product of a few intense years and remained exclusively within the domain of a single genre (or more narrowly yet, within a few of its furrows, fertile though they were to become in the seventeenth century): that of sacred lyric itself. In our own time, concerned as we have become with questions about how literary reputations are fashioned and canons formed, Herbert reminds us of the special potential of lyric to speak across many generations and to many different kinds of readers and to give pleasure and instruction alike. But pleasure and instruction of a particular kind, too. As the essays by Joseph Summers and Peter Sacks suggest, Herbert is a poet's poet in more than the appreciative sense of that phrase. For all his attention to formality, Herbert has a long history of inviting imitation — of proving to be remarkably hospitable to later writers for literary as well as creedal purposes; and the most recent chapter in the history of Herbert's influence may well be the most interesting. As Donne helped to provide Eliot and many poets of Eliot's generation with a new conception of poetry, so Herbert has been an especially resonant sounding board for poets who have come of age in the second half of this century, as Professor Sacks's essay helps to explain. Perhaps because in Herbert the auditory and the verbal so deeply interanimate each other in the manner described by Donald Friedman, the boundary between reading Herbert andwriting Herbert, or writing like Herbert, has seemedunusuallypermeable. (In viJonathan F.S. Post a brief aside, Helen Vendler even speaks of her mother as having been a poet of "perfectly constructed Herbertian stanzas.") An otherwise prosaic Robert Overton, as Sid Gottlieb demonstrates, was tempted to "re-versify" large portions of The Temple during one of several lengthy stays in prison in the middle of the seventeenth-century; like the Psalms, Herbert's poetry has had a profound impact on those "in captivity." And only a few years down the road, in part because Herbert was thought to be acceptable instructional fare for an increasingly literate female readership, he could be "personalized" by Dame Sarah Cowper, as Helen Wilcox shows, in staking her claim that The Temple was "woman friendly." Some two-hundred years later, having dreamed about being visited by George Herbert, Elizabeth Bishop was to fulfill this possibility in ways barely imaginable in the seventeenth century. The essays collected here were, for the most part, initially presented at the Clark Library in November of 1993 during a twoday conference sponsored by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and bearing the same title as the one used for this book. In this commemorative context, it is only natural that issues of reception would figure into the formal presentations and ensuing discussion, although I doubt many present would have predicted in advance the novel interpretive possibilities that would be generated by thinking of Herbert as "our contemporary." (I write this as someone conscious of having enjoyed something of a busman's holiday from the Renaissance during part of the conference.) But reception is not the only story told here, nor are the accounts meant to be historically exhaustive. If some participants sought to trace out new lines of influence, or perhaps more accurately to identify new readers and new modes of reading The Temple, other scholars addressed topics of long-standing interest to Herbert scholars. In an essay that is equally about the life, mind, and art of Donne and Herbert, Donald Friedman writes on the subject of...