Herbert, George, 1593–1633, one of the English metaphysical poets metaphysical poets, name given to a group of English lyric poets of the 17th cent. The term was first used by Samuel Johnson (1744). The hallmark of their poetry is the metaphysical conceit (a figure of speech that employs unusual and paradoxical images), a reliance
..... Click the link for more information. . Of noble family, he was the brother of Baron Herbert of Cherbury. He was graduated from Cambridge. His early determination to enter the church was temporarily deflected by an appointment as public orator in 1619, a post he held until 1627. In 1630 he was ordained an Anglican priest and made rector at Bemerton. 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. All unpublished at his death, the poems were left by Herbert to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, who had them published as The Temple (1633). Herbert also wrote Latin poems and a prose manual of clerical life, A Priest of the Temple (first printed in Herbert's Remains, 1652). The 20th-century revival of interest in the metaphysical poets has stressed Herbert.

Bibliography

See his complete works edited by F. E. Hutchinson (2d ed. 1953); biographies by I. Walton (1670), G. H. Palmer (1905), and A. M. Charles (1977); studies by M. K. Rickey (1966), A. Stein (1968), and C. A. Patrides, ed. (1983).

Herbert, George

(born April 3, 1593, Montgomery Castle, Wales—died March 1, 1633, Bemerton, Wiltshire, Eng.) British Metaphysical poet. He was elected orator of Cambridge University in 1620, a position that involved him with the royal court. He was later ordained and became a rector at a rural parish, to which he devoted himself unstintingly until his death. His poems, published only after his death in The Temple (1633), concern personal, doctrinal, and ritual matters, and they are noted for their mastery of metrical form, use of allegory and analogy, and religious devotion. Some are pattern poems, the lines forming a shape suggestive of the subject. (See also Metaphysical poetry.)