Herbert, George

Herbert, George (1593–1633), younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, published his first poems (two sets of memorial verses in Latin) in a volume mourning prince Henry's death in 1612. But he had already, according to his earliest biographer, I. Walton, sent his mother, in 1610, a New Year's letter dedicating his poetic powers to God and enclosing two sonnets. In 1616 he was elected a major fellow of Trinity, and in 1618 appointed reader in rhetoric. He was public orator at Cambridge from 1620 to 1627. He was ordained deacon, probably in 1624, and installed in 1626 as a canon of Lincoln cathedral and prebendary of Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire, near Little Gidding, where Ferrar, whom Herbert had known at Cambridge, had established a religious community. Herbert set about restoring the ruined church at Leighton. His mother, whom he greatly loved, died in 1627, and his Memoriae Matris Sacrum was published in the volume containing Donne's commemoration sermon. He became rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, in April 1630, being ordained priest the following September. He died of consumption. Shortly before his death he consigned his poems to Ferrar, to publish or to burn as he saw fit. The Temple, containing nearly all his surviving English poems, was published in 1633, and Herbert's prose picture of the model country parson, A Priest to the Temple, in 1652, as part of Herbert's Remains. He told Ferrar that his poems represented ‘a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master’. Their simple piety was much admired in the 17th cent. but in the 18th cent. Herbert went out of fashion, though J. Wesley adapted some of his poems. The Romantic age saw a revival, and the appreciative notice in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) enhanced Herbert's reputation. Modern critics have noted the subtlety rather than the simplicity of his poems, seeing them as an attempt to express the ultimately ineffable complications of the spiritual life. (See also metaphysical poets.)