Herbert, George

Herbert: The Complete English Works (Everyman's Library)

Introduction by Ann Pasternak Slater

The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics)

George Herbert combined the intellectual and the spiritual, the humble and the divine, to create some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English language. His deceptively simple verse uses the ingenious arguments typical of seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and unusual imagery drawn from musical structures, the natural world, and domestic activity to explore a mosaic of Biblical themes. From the wit and wordplay of "The Puley" and the formal experimentation of "Easter Wings" and "Paradise," to the intense, highly personal relationship between man and God portrayed in "The Collar" and "Redemption," the works collected here show the transcendental power of divine love. This vast collection includes all HerbertÂ’s English poems, selections from his Latin poetry with translations, his major prose work A Priest to the Temple, and Izaak WaltonÂ’s Life of Herbert.

The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert (Christian Classic)

In 1633, George Herbert published what has become the best-known religious poem in the English language, The Temple. Actually a sequence of poems, The Temple is shaped by the order of church ritual and liturgy. At the heart of The Temple stands "The Church," poems that are patterned on the Church's liturgical calendar and that discuss theological ideas such as death, judgment, and heaven. Herbert's poetry is at once personal and confessional. His poems about the Eucharist and holy baptism are not only general theological explorations of the sacraments but also the poet's expression of the struggles of his own flesh to be reconciled to God. This mildly modernized edition makes the spiritual insight and quiet passion of this great poet available to today's reader.

Metaphysical Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)

The Works of George Herbert

Priest to the Temple

Written at a time of very lax standards in the parish ministry, this short, classic text by George Herbert exudes the wisdom, humility, and love for the priestly life for which the poet became renowned in his short life.

Herbert: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

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.

The English Poems of George Herbert

The Classic Hundred Poems: All-Time Favorites

Imagine if Billboard compiled a list of the top 100 poems, chosen not by critics or professors but by the people themselves. That's the concept behind The Classic Hundred, and it works brilliantly. William Harmon found the 100 most anthologized poems in English, based on the ninth edition of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry—the most objective measurement of greatness available, representing consensus among the editors of some 400 anthologies. Then he put them in order and prefaced each one with concise, erudite, often humorous commentary. The range of poets, subjects, and forms—from Shakespeare to Frost, from love and death to crime and punishment, from sonnets to odes—makes this an entertaining, enlightening, and indispensable aural guide to the finest verse in the English language.

George Herbert (Poet to Poet)

George Herbert (1593-1633) was educated at Westminster School and Trinity, College, Cambridge, where he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric in 1618, and Public Orator in 1620. He was a Greek and Latin scholar, was fluent in modern languages, and an accomplished musician. In 1626, he resigned his seat in parliament and took holy orders, becoming Rector of Bemerton, a tiny rural parish on Salisbury Plain, in 1630. "The Temple", Herbert's great structure of poems from which the present selection is drawn, first appeared in 1633, the year of his death.