The Poetics of Common Prayer: George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Devotional Lyric

This essay challenges our critical understanding of devotional poetry as inherently private outpourings of the soul by examining the lyrics of George Herbert within the context of early modern attitudes toward the efficacy of form. The work of critics as diverse as Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski share in common a profound resistance to the potential influences on the lyric of practices beyond the private realm, and this resistance owes more to a misreading of Protestant poetics fueled by Romantic conceptions of poetic production than to an understanding of the devotional conditions that dominated the established Church of England, conditions that enable a lyric voice whose power is derived in a harmonious and not oppositional relationship to the paradigms of public prayer. Far from being caught between his roles as country parson and lyric poet, Herbert displays his commitment to the relationship seventeenth– century conformists sought to create between rhetorical skill on the one hand and devotional faith on the other: in poem after poem of The Temple, Herbert imagines the status of his rhymes to extend far beyond their formal achievement; the poet's persistent attention to his own verse reflects less an idiosyncratic investment in his artistry than a theological commitment to the disciplining practice of formal perfection.