George Herbeat And The Seventeent century Religious Poets

George Herbeat And The Seventeent century Religious Poets .This volume presents the major work of five poets-George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne. Whether considered with their contemporaries Donne and Milton or not, these five poets created a significant body of religious literature. Each of them is important and impressive in his own right. Herbert and Marvell are regarded, properly, as major poets; Crashaw, Vaughan, and Traherne are poets of real distinction. Remarkably diverse, yet the five also share many familial resemblances, and the differences are less significant than the way's in which they complement or counterpoint each other. These poets are often called “Metaphysical,” but that term is misleading even though many find it serviceable. Robert Ellrodt recently referred to these poets as constituting a “school of Herbert." The suggestion is interesting. Not made contentiously, it points to the general orientation: like Elizabethan lyric, seventeenth-century religious verse is a special phenomenon. For practical reasons—since users of this volume may rely on it as their only text for some or all of these poets—it seems appropriate to include some secular verse by Crashaw and Marvell as well as their religious verse. Herbert and Traherne wrote virtually no secular verse at all; Vaughan's is not distinguished. But Marvell and Crashaw wrote secular poems of great merit, and I have included several here.