George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593, the fifth son of an eminent Welsh family. His mother, Magdalen Newport, held great patronage to distinguished literary figures such as John Donne, who dedicated his Holy Sonnets to her. Herbert’s father died when he was three, leaving his mother with ten children, all of whom she was determined to educate and raise as loyal Anglicans. Herbert left for Westminster School at age ten.
Background
Herbert’s practical manual to country parsons, A Priest to the Temple (1652), exhibits the intelligent devotion he showed to his parishoners. On his deathbed, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to his close friend, Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems only if he thought they might do good to “any dejected poor soul.” He died of consumption in 1633 at the age of forty and the book was published in the same year. The Temple met with enormous popular acclaimit had been reprinted twenty times by 1680.
Education
Herbert left for Westminster School at age ten, and went on to become one of three to win scholarships to Trinity College, Cambridge.Herbert received two degrees (a B.A. in 1613 and an M.A. in 1616) and was elected a major fellow of Trinity.
Two years after his college graduation, he was appointed reader in Rhetoric at Cambridge, and in 1620 he was elected public oratora post wherein Herbert was called upon to represent Cambridge at public occasions and that he described as “the finest place in the university.” In 1624 and 1625 Herbert was elected as a representative to Parliament.
Career
Herbert is also important, especially in the seventeenth century, not only as a poet but as a cultural icon, an image of religious and political stability held up for emulation during tumultuous times. Much of his early popularity—there were at least eleven editions of The Temple in the seventeenth century—no doubt owes something to the carefully crafted persona of "holy Mr. Herbert" put forth by the custodians of his literary works and reputation. In the preface to the first edition of The Temple, published in 1633,
Achievements
Works
Metaphysical poet
George Herbert
Religion
All of Herbert's English surviving poems are religious, and some have been used as hymns, William Cowper said of them I found in them a strain of piety which I could not but admire. 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 described as 'a cascade of form floats through the temple'.
Politics
George Herbert (23 January 1892 – 16 June 1982) was a British Conservative Party politician. He was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Rotherham at the 1931 general election, and resigned on 6 February 1933 by appointment as Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds
Views
Suffering from poor health, Herbert died of tuberculosis only three years after taking holy orders. On his deathbed, he reportedly 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.
Quotations:
Every mile is two in winter.
Go not for every grief to the physician, nor for every quarrel to the lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot.
Hope is the poor man's bread.
Living well is the best revenge.
Storms make oaks take deeper root.
There would be no great men if there were no little ones.
Woe be to him that reads but one book.
Membership
Evangelical Lutheran Church
,
America
Personality
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 Richard Herbert, Lord of Cherbury died when George was three, leaving a widow and ten children.
Quotes from others about the person
By 1652, the time of the next major biographical statement about Herbert, the tensions of the 1630s had erupted into a devastating civil war: the army of King Charles I had been decisively defeated, and the king himself executed; the bishops had been disenfranchised from their high place in both church and state government; and the maintenance of peace depended on a coalition of parties —old and new landowners, merchants, religious enthusiasts, army commanders, and soldiers—with conflicting interests. Little wonder, then, that Barnabas Oley, a Royalist divine, envisioned Herbert as a "primitive ... holy and heavenly soul" who could instruct a later generation living in much-deserved chastisement and exile. Herbert seemed to be a fit subject for nostalgia, one who lived and died in peace.
Interests
poet
Artists
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley
Connections
Herbert's devotional poems combine a homely familiarity with religious experience and a reverent sense of its magnificence. His verse is marked by quietness of tone, precision of language, metrical versatility, and the use of conceits.
HerbYer is one of the first poets to use the titles of his poems as an integral part of their meaning.The title 'The Collar',of course,is an emblematic image that informs our understanding of the whole poem.If the poem were untitled an one were asked to assign a title to it,i doubt if anyone would come up with 'The Collar'.since neer does the word appear in the poem.
Awards
The Chruch,
England
The two long early poems that frame "The Church" are thus substantially different from the lyrics that are Herbert's greatest achievement. But they serve an important function in the overall structure of The Temple, helping Herbert to present a multidimensional, comprehensive examination of moral, spiritual, and institutional history, and situating the persona (and reader) alternately in the world, in the church, and then finally in the midst of a macrocosmic struggle between religion and sin that begins in time but ends out of it. And in a curious way these two long poems do share something with the poems of "The Church." Like Herbert's most characteristic lyrics, they are "self-consuming," to use Stanley E. Fish's phrase: that is to say, the premises from which they begin are suspended by their conclusions.
The two long early poems that frame "The Church" are thus substantially different from the lyrics that are Herbert's greatest achievement. But they serve an important function in the overall structure of The Temple, helping Herbert to present a multidimensional, comprehensive examination of moral, spiritual, and institutional history, and situating the persona (and reader) alternately in the world, in the church, and then finally in the midst of a macrocosmic struggle between religion and sin that begins in time but ends out of it. And in a curious way these two long poems do share something with the poems of "The Church." Like Herbert's most characteristic lyrics, they are "self-consuming," to use Stanley E. Fish's phrase: that is to say, the premises from which they begin are suspended by their conclusions.