George Herbert

Abstract The immediate success of George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) was partly a function of timing. Coinciding with the emergence of a fully mature English Protestant literary culture, Herbert’s collection builds on three remarkable, but controversial, achievements: the English Bible, especially the purposefully non-polemical King James Version, the Book of Common Prayer, and the ongoing development and maintenance of church architecture. To understand the forms and themes of Herbert’s English poetry is to understand them as a response to the spiritual and ideological exigencies to which these three interrelated achievements were themselves an answer. In developing his response to the shifting contexts of early modern Protestantism, Herbert answered to the needs of both a private Bible-centred spirituality as well as a public spirituality rooted in common prayer. The result of his effort is a biblical poetics responsive to the embodied and emplaced nature of religious life as lived in (variously contested forms of) sacred space.