Herbert’s Accessibility

“What kind of an appeal does this have for a reader – especially one from a post-Christian society like our own-who does not share Herbert’s theological premisses?” asks Stephen Prickett in his TLS review of John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert.

Coleridge already raised the same point: “G. Herbert is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man . . . . [one should be] a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church.” 

Prickett notes that Drury’s aim is to counter Coleridge’s claim, and “to argue both that Herbert is much more generally accessible than Coleridge believed, and, so far from being relegated by his subject matter to being a great minor poet, is a major poet, by implication to be judged by the two best traditional criteria: lasting reputation and readership through many changes of fashion; and influence on subsequent poets.”

Prickett thinks that Drury doesn’t quite succeed at the first aim but does in his second: Drury’s “use of later poets and critics is one of the greatest strengths of his biography – and, I believe, establishes beyond doubt Drury’s claim that Herbert is, indeed, a major poet.”

Along the way, Drury offers insightful readings of Herbert’s poetry. He makes clear that his “chosen way of pondering things was poetry,” and points out that for Herbert this meant an engagement with all the senses, not merely sound but vision. 

But, as Prickett notes, the subtlety of Herbert’s pattern poems is not always appreciated: “Drury notes how in ‘The Collar’ the chaotic form, with neither stable rhyme nor metre, only settles on a structure in the final quatrain, with God’s intervention, which then reshapes our understanding of the previous confused utterances.”

Pricket suggests that Herbert’s poetry “marks a shift from poetry as a spoken form to a written one. What is presented as an aural experience, is actually meant to be seen on the page: something both private and interiorized. Herbert’s poetry (like Eliot’s) is here marking changes in consciousness itself.” 

Which hints that Herbert is perhaps even more than a major poet.