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"A bilingual edition. George Herbert is well-know as one of the great religious "metaphysical" poets of the seventeenth century. Very little is known about Herbert's Latin verse which shows unexpected sides of the man and the poet." --
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For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. A scholar of poetry as well as a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Advent. Among the classic writers he includes are: George Herbert, John Donne, Milton, Tennyson,and Christina Rossetti,as well as contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and Grevel Lindop. He also includes a selection of his own highly praised work.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.
George Herbert (1593-1633) has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. Though he is a profoundly religious poet, even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness, which are amply showcased in this selection. Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to pattern poems, the shapes of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet, who admonished his readers to “dare to be true.” An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from “The Collar” and “Jordan” to “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.
George Herbert has for centuries been admired by the religious for his piety and by lovers of poetry for his language and his wit. In the present volume, Professor Summers seeks to abolish this dualism of approach: he is concerned throughout to demonstrate Herbert's religion as it is expressed in his poems, and to interpret the poems in the light of his religion, for they are a "picture" of meticulously observed spiritual experience. He gives us a scholarly, lucid, and integrated study of a much-loved poet, who was at once a good man, a profound Christian thinker, and a most daring experimentalist in the craft of verse. Professor Summers charts the many currents and cross-currents of early seventeenth century religious thought that affected Herbert, traces the stages of the poet's life, and then proceeds to a thorough examination of the form and content of his work. There are interesting chapters on his metrical "counterpoint," his dramatic-colloquial style, and the influence of music upon his poetry. This is not only an authoritative study of the poet himself but a notable contribution to the problem, so keenly discussed today, of religious belief in relation to poetry.