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seventeenth-century poet was more popularly read or imitated than
George Herbert, and none represents the lyric implications of the
Christian narrative more fully, with the possible exception of Milton.
There is therefore a growing perception that George Herbert deserves
to be placed more in the mainstream of literary history and that romanticism
and modernism are not exclusively post-Milton phenomena. As one of
the centers of new historicist interest, The Temple has of late been
seated in the context of church controversies, Reformation thought,
and the politics of the 1620s. Yet previous studies have been reluctant
to widen their focus to locate Herbert within the intellectual movements
of the earlier seventeenth century, apart from doctrinal issues and
the social idiom that he often uses.
Harold Toliver explores the implications for Herbert's lyrics
of the Christian narrative-the secular labyrinth and the parables'
guiding rope, the conflicts between heart and mind, the agonies
of postponement, intervals and abstract totality, the visible church
and its calendar, the concept of an ending, and Herbert's adaptation
of the sonnet form. To establish Herbert's place among other seventeenth-century
writers who make use of the Christian narrative, Toliver provides
close readings of several poems and new configurations that reveal
the pressure of the narrative whole on lyric moments as well as
the bearing of the times on them. Herbert had difficulty salvaging
any interest in a university or a secular career once he turned
to sacred poetry. He also subordinated all phases of the Bible as
a cultural history to the single pattern imposed by the Pauline
reduction of the Bible to a single story. As part of Toliver's assessment
of Herbert's intellectual landscape and active engagement in alternatives,
the treatment polarizes that Pauline method and the Hebrew Bible's
anecdotal, political, and social detail. |
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