George herbert new biography 2013

  • John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man.
  • Giving equal weight to the man and his work, this is the perfect introduction to a parson-poet who has fallen out of fashion.
  • Seventeenth-century poet George Herbert has a new audience, says Ned Denny, attracted by the parson's message that love must come before.

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    George Herbert, circa Image: Getty

    The name George Herbert invariably conjures three memories into my consciousness. First, it is the s, I am at school and we are being introduced to one of our A-level English literature texts: the Penguin anthology The Metaphysical Poets. Edited by the distinguished Oxford scholar Dame Helen Gardner and shaped by the phenomenally influential critical thought of T S Eliot, it nominates John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell as the three greatest “metaphysical” poets, on the grounds of their shared complexity, their delicate ambiguity and their capacity to hold emotion in equipoise with thought.

    Second, it is the s and I am at Cambridge, where our living metaphysical poet Geoffrey Hill is giving lectures on how there has been something elegiac about the air of England ever since the end of the Great War. The Tories are being transformed from the party of rural estate managers into that of urban estate agents. The Church of England is los

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    Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert - Hardcover

    Synopsis

    For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

    'Love bade me welcome . . .'
    'Teach me my God and King . . .'

    George Herbert wrote, but never published, some of the very greatest English poetry, recording in an astonishing variety of forms his inner experiences of grief, recovery, hope, despair, anger, fulfilment and - above all else - love.

    He was born in and died at the age of 39 in , before the clouds of civil war gathered, his family aristocratic and his upbringing privileged. He showed worldly mål and seemed sure of high public office and a career at court, but then for a time 'lost himself in a humble way', devoting himself to the restoration of the church at Leighton Bromswold in Buckinghamshire and then to

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    George Herbert&#;s Music At Midnight

    John Drury’s Music At Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Allen Lane ) is an excellent addition to Herbert studies. Colour plates, integrated illustrations and maps of the places in Herbert’s life, lavishly augment the book, which is the result of extensive immersion in the life and its world.

     

    Unlike Herbert’s contemporary, John Donne, there has been no new biography since Amy Charles’ A Life of George Herbert in   There is a lack of documentation of Herbert’s short life, the last four years of which were spent as rector of Bemerton with Fugglestone, just outside Salisbury, midway between Wilton House and the Cathedral. The Wilton House, home of the earls of Pembroke, archive now at Trowbridge Library, is sadly depleted of references to Mary, Countess of Pembroke and her poetic school, which attracted Spenser and Drayton, let alone Shakespeare who may have performed As You Like It there in , and Herbert. Of the earlie

  • george herbert new biography 2013