Blackwell Reference Online

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In his life of George Herbert, Izaak Walton relates that when the poet was dying at Bemerton in 1633, he entrusted a “little book” that contained his English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, with the instruction that if he thought it would help people in their struggles and afflictions, he might publish it. If not, he should burn it. It was published at Cambridge within the year under the title The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations with a foreword, “The Printers to the Reader,” in which Ferrar related that Herbert used to refer to Jesus Christ in New Testament Gospel terms as “My Master” and that: Next God, he loved that which God himself hath magnified above all things, that is, his Word: so that he hath been heard to make solemne protestation, that he would not part with one leaf thereof for the whole world, if it were offered him in exchange. So Herbert's verse came to the public as the work of a biblical poet, one familiar with a century of biblical translation and excitement and so reflective of a culture deeply and widely scriptural. This chapter shows that Herbert has a claim, rivaled only by his younger contemporary Milton, to be the biblical poet of the period. He achieved this status through a deft ability to portray devotional love in his reworkings of the Psalms, notably in The Temple , but also through overt and covert allusions to Scripture that ... log in or subscribe to read full text