George Herbert

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who, according to the French philosopher Simone Weil, wrote ‘the most beautiful poem in the world’. Herbert gave his poems on his relationship with God to a friend, to be published after his death if they offered comfort to any ‘dejected pour soul’ but otherwise be burned. They became so popular across the range of Christians in the 17th Century that they were printed several times, somehow uniting those who disliked each other but found a common admiration for Herbert; Charles I read them before his execution, as did his enemies. Herbert also wrote poems prolifically and brilliantly in Latin and these he shared during his lifetime both when he worked as orator at Cambridge University and as a parish priest in Bemerton near Salisbury. He went on to influence poets from Coleridge to Heaney and, in parish churches today, congregations regularly sing his poems set to music as hymns.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Helen Wilcox No other episodes
  Professor Emerita of English Literature at Bangor University
• Victoria Moul No other episodes
  Formerly Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at UCL
• Simon Jackson No other episodes
  Director of Music and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

Reading list

• A Life of George Herbert
  Amy Charles (Cornell University Press, 1977) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell
  Thomas M. Corns (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Google Books →
• Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
  John Drury (Penguin, 2014) Google Books →
• The Complete Poetry
  George Herbert (eds. John Drury and Victoria Moul) (Penguin, 2015) Google Books →
• The English Poems of George Herbert
  George Herbert (ed. Helen Wilcox) (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture
  Simon Jackson (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Google Books →
• George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word
  Gary Kuchar (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Google Books →
• George Herbert: A Literary Life
  Cristina Malcolmson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
• A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England
  Victoria Moul (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Google Books →
• George Herbert: His Religion and Art
  Joseph H. Summers (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New York, 1981) Google Books →
• The Poetry of George Herbert
  Helen Vendler (Harvard University Press, 1975) Google Books →
• This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert
  James Boyd White (University of Michigan Press, 1995)
• George Herbert. 100 Poems
  Helen Wilcox (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

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Programme ID: m0024lyy

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024lyy

Auto-category: 821.3 (English poetry - 16th and 17th centuries)