George Herbert's Christian Narrative

George Herbert was the most widely read and imitated poet of the seventeenth century, yet his lyrics are usually studied against church controversy, Reformation doctrine and the politics of the 1620s. Harold Toliver widens the lens, asking how the whole Christian story presses on the brief moments of a single poem in The Temple. His chapters move through the secular labyrinth and the guiding rope of the parables, the quarrel between heart and mind, the agonies of postponement, the visible church and its calendar, the idea of an ending and Herbert's reworking of the sonnet.

Close readings sit alongside a telling contrast between the Pauline habit of reducing the Bible to one story and the Hebrew Bible's anecdotal, political and social detail. Students and scholars of early modern poetry will find Herbert placed firmly within the intellectual currents of his age.