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George Herbert

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera; Writers
and critics

   CAPTION: George Herbert

   Portrait by Robert White in 1674
   ( National Portrait Gallery)
      Born:    April 3, 1593
               Montgomery, Wales
      Died:    March 1, 1633
               Bemerton, Wiltshire, England
   Occupation: Poet, orator, priest

   George Herbert ( April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633) was a Welsh poet,
   orator and a priest. Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he
   received a good education which led on to him holding prominent
   positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. In his late thirties
   he gave up his secular ambitions and took holy orders in the Church of
   England, spending the rest of his life as a rector in Bemerton, near
   Salisbury. Throughout his life he wrote religious poems characterized
   by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious
   use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school
   of poets. He is commemorated on February 27 throughout the Anglican
   Communion and on March 1 of the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical
   Lutheran Church in America.

Early life

   Herbert was born in Montgomery in Wales. His family was wealthy,
   eminent, intellectual and fond of the arts. His mother Magdalen was a
   patron and friend of John Donne and other poets; his older brother
   Edward, later Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was an important poet and
   philosopher, often referred to as "the father of English deism".
   Herbert's father died when George was three, leaving a widow and ten
   children.

   After graduating from Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge
   (where he achieved degrees with distinction), Herbert was elected a
   major fellow of his college. In 1618 he was appointed Reader in
   Rhetoric at Cambridge and in 1620 he was elected to the post of "public
   orator", whose duties would be served by poetic skill. He held this
   position until 1628.

   In 1624 he became a Member of Parliament, representing Montgomeryshire.
   While these positions were suited to a career at court, and James I had
   shown him favour, circumstances worked against him: the King died in
   1625, and two influential patrons of Herbert died later in the decade.

Priesthood

   He took up his duties in Bemerton, a rural parish in Wiltshire, about
   75 miles southwest of London in 1630. Here he preached and wrote
   poetry; also helping to rebuild the church out of his own funds.

   In 1633 Herbert finished a collection of poems entitled The Temple:
   Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, which imitates the architectural
   style of churches through both the meaning of the words and their
   visual layout. The themes of God and love are treated by Herbert as
   much as psychological forces as metaphysical phenomena.

   Suffering from poor health, Herbert died of tuberculosis only three
   years after taking holy orders. On his deathbed, he gave the manuscript
   of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of a semi-monastic
   Anglican religious community at Little Gidding (a name best known today
   through the poem Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot), telling him to publish
   the poems if he thought they might "turn to the advantage of any
   dejected poor soul", and otherwise, to burn them. In less than 50
   years, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations had gone
   through thirteen printings.

Works

   All of Herbert's surviving poems are religious, and some have been used
   as hymns. They are characterised by directness of expression and some
   conceits which can appear quaint. Many of the poems have intricate
   rhyme schemes, and variations of lines within stanzas.

   Herbert also wrote A Priest to the Temple (or The Country Parson)
   offering practical advice to country parsons. In it, he advises that
   "things of ordinary use" such as ploughs, leaven, or dances, could be
   made to "serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths".

   His Jacula Prudentium, (sometimes seen as Jacula Prudentum), a
   collection of pithy proverbs published in 1651, included many sayings
   still repeated today, for example "His bark is worse than his bite."

   Richard Baxter said, "Herbert speaks to God like one that really
   believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God.
   Heart-work and heaven-work make up his books". Dame Helen Gardner adds
   "head-work" because of his "intellectual vivacity".

   Herbert influenced his fellow metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan who, in
   turn, influenced William Wordsworth.

   George Herbert's poetry has been set to music by several composers,
   including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley, Judith Weir, Randall
   Thompson, William Walton and Patrick Larley.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert"
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