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Herbert's Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most formal of seventeenth-century Anglican poems have been so much enjoyed by the anti-formalists in religion and art. The appeal of George Herbert's poetry to the opponents of ritual was a justifying triumph for Herbert's conception of form: in poetry as well as religion Herbert tried to work out-a middle way between “slovenliness” and “superstition.” It was by means of form that the material could be used in the service of the spiritual, that the senses could be properly employed for the glorification of God.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 6 , December 1951 , pp. 1055 - 1072
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 1055 See Kenneth B. Murdock's discussion in Literature & Theology in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 8–29. I owe a great deal to his comments on Herbert, pp. 21–27.

Note 2 in page 1055 Spiritual Exercises, ed. Orby Shipley (London, 1870), p. 24.

Note 3 in page 1056 The Lives, World's Classics (London, 1927), p. 278.

Note 4 in page 1056 The Ferrar Papers, ed. Bernard Blackstone (Cambridge, Eng., 1938), p. 34. For the symbolic design of the chapel at Little Gidding, see p. 28.

Note 5 in page 1057 Lives, p. 301.

Note 6 in page 1057 L'Esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno, 1933), p. 199. I am reminded of Paul Oskar Kristeller's oral admonition concerning the historical impropriety of the word “aesthetic” in such a context. In their use of the word, however, Svoboda, and Katherine . Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn in A History of Esthetics (New York, 1939), pp. 129–130, 155–160, are conscious of Baumgarten's invention of 1750 and of the fact that “art” meant something quite different to the ancients and the men of the Middle Ages from what it usually means today. Yet thinkers before the Renaissance were immensely concerned with the definition and the meaning of “beauty,” and their conceptions of beauty, while never confined to the productions of men's hands, were relevant to such productions. If we clearly understand the modernity of the ideas of an isolated group of “fine arts” and a particular “psychology of the artist,” the use of the word “aesthetic” in itself should cause no misconceptions.

Note 7 in page 1058 Augustine, The Confessions, tr. Pusey, Book x, Chap, xxxiv.

Note 8 in page 1058 Cf. “Sinne (II),” The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1945), p. 63. I refer always to Hutchinson's edition of Herbert's Works.

Note 9 in page 1059 Confessions, Book x, Chap, xxxiii.

Note 10 in page 1059 The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York, 1938), p. 95. Burton's “quotation” is hardly fair: in The Confessions, Book i, Chap, xvi, Augustine condemned the teaching of erotic pagan poetry to the young.

Note 11 in page 1059 Herbert, “The Pulley,” Works, p. 160.

Note 12 in page 1162 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book v, Sect. lviii.

Note 13 in page 1162 “George Herbert and the Emblem Books,” RES, xvii (1941), 151. For a full historical discussion of the form, see Miss Freeman's English Emblem Books (London, 1948).

Note 14 in page 1063 See, e.g., the sections of Byrd's “Magnificat” and Morley's “Out of the Deep” printed in Edmund H. Fellowes, English Cathedral Music from Edward VI to Edward VII (London, 1941), pp. 77, 84.

Note 15 in page 1064 Works, pp. 184–185.

Note 16 in page 1064 Walton, Lives, p. 314.

Note 17 in page 1065 Sermon x, 9 April 1615, from Ninety-Six Sermons, Works (Oxford, 1841–54), II, 347–348. The entire sermon provides an interesting analogue to Herbert's thought.

Note 18 in page 1065 The Metaphysical Poels: A Study in Religious Experience (New York, 1936), pp. 167–168.

Note 19 in page 1065 Hutchinson, Works, pp. lv–lvi, summarizes the changes in order: “the first sixteen poems in W are in nearly the same order as in B, but... after them there are only nine instances of two poems in the same consecutive order in W and B, until the group of nine W poems at the end of B. There are no W poems in between No. 79 ‘Obedience’ and the Qnal group beginning with No. 156 ‘The Elixir’. ” See Hutchinson's listing of the poems in W and his general discussion, pp. liii–lv, lxx–lxxiv.

Note 20 in page 1066 The sequence of poems which I discuss is found in Works, pp. 44–61.

Note 21 in page 1067 Works, pp. 46–48, 62, 73,89–90, 97.

Note 22 in page 1067 “George Herbert,” Spectator, cxxviii (1932), 360–361.

Note 23 in page 1068 Mr Herbert's Temple & Church Militant explained and improved by a discourse upon each poem critical & practical,“ Bodleian MS. Rawlinson D 199.1 quote from p. 326 of the MS. copy made in 1904 by A. F. Parker for G. H. Palmer, Houghton Library, Her 2.3.

Note 24 in page 1068 Works, p. 67.

Note 25 in page 1069 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, Works, p. 283.

Note 26 in page 1069 See, e.g., “Sepulchre,” Works, pp. 40–41.

Note 27 in page 1070 The Metaphysical Poets, p. 183.

Note 28 in page 1071 “The Familie,” Works, p. 137.

Note 29 in page 1071 “Man,” Works, p. 92.

Note 30 in page 1072 Rage for Order: Essays in Criticism (Chicago, 1948), p. 30.

Note 31 in page 1072 See Herbert's “Grief,” Works, p. 92.