Since the first publication of The Temple in 1633, fellow poets and critics have commented diversely on the perceived simplicity of George Herbert’s verse. Their responses have differed widely in terminology, analysis and definition. “Simplicity” heads a nexus encompassing “plainness,” “homeliness,” “directness,” “sincerity” and “purity.” This post gathers together a selection of views and quotes on the topic of Herbert’s simplicity.

From Fellow Poets:

A younger contemporary and like Herbert a Welshman, Henry Vaughan remains his closest poetic imitator, though his work is more mystical than Herbert’s. F. E. Hutchinson, Herbert’s scholarly editor, and the writer of a book on Vaughan,  remarks in respect of Vaughan’s borrowings in his anthology Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655) that ‘[t]here is no example in English literature of one poet adopting another poet’s words so extensively” (Works xlii; cf. Henry Vaughan 102-103).

Coleridge sparked a nineteenth-century revival to which, each in his or her distinctive way, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Christina Rosetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins contributed. In 1921 T. S. Eliot wrote:

It is to be observed that the language of these [Metaphysical] poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. (Times Literary Supplement 20 October 1921, 669–70)

Eliot may have modestly included himself among the last-named. In the same year he repeated his praise of Herbert’s poetry as a model of simplicity:

The poem entitled “The Flower,” is especially affecting; and, to me, such a phrase as, “and relish versing,” expresses a sincerity, a reality, which I would willingly exchange for the more dignified, “and once more love the Muse,” &.
(Collected Letters, nos.1159 and 1524)

Forty years later, Eliot was still denying that the simplicity attributed to “the school of Donne” made them “lesser poets” (23). He reaffirmed his view of The Temple as “a more important document than all of Donne’s religious poems taken together” (George Herbert 1962 26; italics in text). In the same study Eliot deepened his assessment of  Herbert as “the master of the simple everyday word in the right place” (34; 38).

In 1973 W. H. Auden honoured The Temple as “the finest expression we have of Anglican poetry at its best”:

He is capable of writing lines of  a Dante-esque directness….But as a rule he is more ingenious, though never, I think, obscure (235-236).

In 1991 Peter Porter’s introduction to a new edition of Eliot’s George Herbert rephrased the conundrum by praising him as “perhaps the most honest poet who ever wrote in English,” yet as one who “conceded not an inch to plainness: his conceits and devices continue unassuaged through his didactic performance” (2).

From Scholars:

Scholars’ focus on the riddle of Herbert’s simplicity (or “plainness” or “homeliness” or “directness” or “purity”) has been just as intense as that of poets, but they have also perceived a the presence of a paradox.

In initiating academic study of the “metaphysicals,” Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) contrasted Donne with Herbert, whom he disparaged as “a little stuffy.” Grierson reiterated the contradiction between Herbert’s perceived simplicity and the ingenuity that Johnson had condemned in the whole “race”:

The metaphysical taste in conceit, ingenious, erudite and indiscriminate, not confining itself to the conventionally picturesque and poetic, appealed to [Herbert’s] acute, if not profound mind, and to the Christian temper which rejected nothing as common or unclean. He would speak of sacred things in the simplest language and with the aid of the homeliest comparisons. (Grierson 24; my italics)

Introducing in 1941 the first modern scholarly edition of Herbert’s Latin and English writings, F. E. Hutchinson wrote: “Few English poets have been able to use the plain words of ordinary speech with a greater effect of simple dignity than Herbert” (l).

Three years later the agnostic L. C. Knights wrote:

[Herbert’s] leaning towards the manner of common Elizabethan speech is further emphasised by his well-known liking for homely illustrations, analogies and metaphors. (1944; 115, 117; see 112);

In 1955 Joseph H. Summers attempted to further define simplicity as The Temple’s paramount quality:

With Herbert, in contrast with Donne, our final impression is not of brilliant surfaces….; it is, rather, an impression of astonishing simplicity….
The simplicity is simplicity of the spirit; it is the reverse of naϊveté….
It is only superficially a paradox that simplicity of spirit should be the primary quality of the poetry which has been too well known recently as “conceited” and difficult.… (187, 189)

Among writers revisiting the attribution in the present century, in 2013 Oxbridge Chaplain John Drury defined Herbert’s poetry as “a sustained search for lucidity and the simple truth” (135; see 2, 21, 24, 46, 133-134), and in 2015 praised him as “the poet who valued above all transparent simplicity and sincerity” (xxi)

The many later references to Herbert’s simplicity mostly adapt or seek to explain the contradiction that Grierson thus ensconced in the critical tradition. Some praise or blame it as intentional. In 1930 William Empson chose The Sacrifice to exemplify the seventh and most extreme type of ambiguity:

…with a magnificence [Herbert] never excelled, the various sets of conflicts in the Christian doctrine of the Sacrifice are stated with an assured and easy simplicity, a reliable and unassuming grandeur, extraordinary in any material, but unique as achieved by successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind jumping like a flea. (226; my italics)

A stream of ripostes to Empson’s analysis has flowed from his century into ours.[i] In refuting Grierson’s adjective “stuffy,” L. C. Knights, who like Empson did not share Herbert’s faith (1944 112), praised his “homely” style as that of “the popular preacher”: “[Herbert’s] leaning towards the manner of common Elizabethan speech is further emphasised by his well-known liking for homely illustrations, analogies and metaphors” (115, 117). Rosemond Tuve’s excavation in 1952 of the medieval traditions supporting Herbert’s poetry was followed in 1954 by Joseph H. Summers, who concluded George Herbert: His Religion and Art with a spirited defence of the complexity of Herbert’s simplicity:

With Herbert, in contrast with Donne, our final impression is not of brilliant surfaces….; it is, rather, an impression of astonishing simplicity. And true simplicity cannot be imitated (the attempt results only in the mawkish); it must be earned.
The simplicity is simplicity of the spirit; it is the reverse of naϊveté….
It is only superficially a paradox that simplicity of spirit should be the primary quality of the poetry which has been too well known recently as “conceited” and difficult.…We can only partially judge of such things when they are communicated to us by an artist who has also achieved an anything but simple technical mastery of his craft. (187, 189)

In the same year, Louis L. Martz read Herbert’s poems as meditations on the model of  Francois de Sales’ popular Introduction à la Vie Dévote (1608; 58-59).

In 1966 Mary Ellen Rickey expanded Tuve’s findings by documenting Herbert’s “endeavor to concentrate a great store of motifs in small and unpretentious verses” (Rickey xv). Striking out against the mainstream, Rickey nevertheless insisted on the “complexity” of Herbert’s verse, and renounced the condescension that she said was implicit in critics’ attributions of “simplicity”, “smooth surfaces” and “obvious orderliness”: “How curious that a poet’s technical genius should be turned into evidence of narrowness of sensibility!” (149-50). Against this misdirection, Rickey argues that in poems such as “Vertue” and “Clasping of Hands,” “[t]he simplicity of their appearance does not accompany simplification of idea” (151; my italics). Yet two years later Arnold Stein strove via oxymorons precisely to meld appearance with idea in Herbert’s verse, by finding there “an art of plainness” and “above all a rhetoric of sincerity” (Keast 257, 264; my italics):

The advertised simplicity of the plain style could support its share of the mysteries of expression. Contradiction and paradox managed to maintain their unofficial residence without noticeable embarrassment…The example of Socratic irony, to mention a single prominent consideration, encouraged certain kinds of flexibility in the art of being simple. (Stein xiv, xv, xvii; my italics)

In 1974 C. A. Patrides concurred:

[F]or to be cognizant of the total control that [Herbert] exerted over his poetry is to appreciate how far “simplicity” conceals complexity, and apparent artlessness the highest reaches of art. (22)

The following year Helen Vendler remarked more reservedly: “I wish at least to establish as a principle that Herbert’s apparent simplicity is deceptive” (3).

In 1980 the distinguished Shakespearean critic A. D. Nuttall, an “unbeliever” (ix) and Herbert’s most hostile critic, derided the two “Jordan” poems, in which “the poet is crossing the river beyond which nothing less than the most perfect simplicity is tolerated.” Consequently,

this mid-river poetry is crucified by inconsistency. It is, necessarily, poetically parasitic upon the devices it so austerely renounces. I say ‘necessarily’ because that which is renounced is finally, poetry, simpliciter. (15)

A year later, John H. Wall’s introduction to an American re-editing of The Country Parson and The Temple contradicted what he calls the “traditional” view of Herbert as “a poet of simple pieties”: “the voice that actually confronts us…is one of great variety and range” (26).

In 1985 Chana Bloch’s wide-ranging analysis affirmed that Herbert’s poetry opposes the simplicity of Biblical verses to “the pretensions of human wit” (16), sometimes “distilling” the verses even further. Published in 2007, Helen Wilcox’s meticulous re-editing of Herbert’s English poems testified yet again to critics’ interest in what had sometimes been considered an illusion:

It is vital to make the distinction between poems that are simple (which Herbert’s are not) and those that arrive at simplicity through the use of, as well as the explicit rejection of, complex learning and rhetoric. (Introduction xxxi)

Finally, in 2013 Oxbridge Chaplain John Drury’s Music at Midnight reiterated that “Simplicity… was what Herbert sought in his life and in the writing which accompanied it” (21); and that Herbert’s poetry “is a sustained search for lucidity and the simple truth” (135; see 2, 24, 46, 133-134).

[i] See Tuve 25-32, 41, 46, 85, 89-91, 93-94, 96-97; Eliot 27-28; Drury 69, 294, 319.

A more numerous group of modern critics insists that simplicity in The Temple co-exists with ingenuity, erudition, ambiguity, plenitude, precocity, artfulness and invention. 

For example, Herbert J. C. Grierson’s 1921 edition, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, disparages Herbert as “a little stuffy”:

The metaphysical taste in conceit, ingenious, erudite and indiscriminate, not confining itself to the conventionally picturesque and poetic, appealed to [Herbert’s] acute, if not profound mind, and to the Christian temper which rejected nothing as common or unclean. He would speak of sacred things in the simplest language and with the aid of the homeliest comparisons. (24; my italics)

In 1930 the atheist William Empson chose Herbert’s The Sacrifice to exemplify the seventh, most extreme type of ambiguity:

…with a magnificence [Herbert] never excelled, the various sets of conflicts in the Christian doctrine of the Sacrifice are stated with an assured and easy simplicity, a reliable and unassuming grandeur, extraordinary in any material, but unique as achieved by successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind jumping like a flea. (226; my italics)

Attempting to dismantle the paradox, in 1966 Mary Ellen Rickey opted for complexity as The Temple‘s leading feature. Rickey documented Herbert’s “endeavor to concentrate a great store of motifs in small and unpretentious verses” (Utmost Art xv). She repudiated the condescension that she said was implicit in attributions of simplicity (149-50), but admitted that “[t]here is…one kind of actual simplicity in The Temple, that of language” (163). Moreover, in poems such as “Vertue” and “Clasping of Hands,” “[t]he simplicity of their appearance does not accompany simplification of idea” (151; my italics).

In 1968 Arnold Stein strove by oxymorons to meld appearance with idea in Herbert’s verse, by uncovering there “an art of plainness” and “above all a rhetoric of sincerity” (Keast 257, 264; my italics):

The advertised simplicity of the plain style could support its share of the mysteries of expression. Contradiction and paradox managed to maintain their unofficial residence without noticeable embarrassment…The example of Socratic irony, to mention a single prominent consideration, encouraged certain kinds of flexibility in the art of being simple. (Stein xiv, xv, xvii; my italics)

Introducing his selected edition of The Temple in 1973, W. H. Auden suggested, with apparent perplexity:

[Herbert] is capable of writing lines of a Dante-esque directness….But as a rule he is more ingenious, though never, I think, obscure” (235-236).

The following year C. A. Patrides invited readers to appreciate “how far [in The Temple] ‘simplicity’ conceals complexity, and apparent artlessness the highest reaches of art” (22).

And a year later again, Helen Vendler remarked: “I wish at least to establish as a principle that Herbert’s apparent simplicity is deceptive” (3).

In 1980 the Shakespearean critic A. D. Nuttall, an “unbeliever” (ix) and Herbert’s most hostile critic, derided the two “Jordan” poems, in which “the poet is crossing the river beyond which nothing less than the most perfect simplicity is tolerated.” Consequently,

this mid-river poetry is crucified by inconsistency. It is, necessarily, poetically parasitic upon the devices it so austerely renounces. I say ‘necessarily’ because that which is renounced is finally, poetry, simpliciter. (15)

The following year John H. Wall’s introduction to an American edition of The Temple refuted the “traditional” view of Herbert as “a poet of simple pieties”: “the voice that actually confronts us…is one of great variety and range” (26).

In 1985 Chana Bloch affirmed on the basis of painstaking analyses that Herbert’s poetry opposes the simplicity of Biblical verses to “the pretensions of human wit” (16).

In 1991 Peter Porter offered yet another reformulation by praising Herbert as a poet “who conceded not an inch to plainness: his conceits and devices continue unassuaged through his didactic performance” (2).

Finally, Helen Wilcox’s meticulous re-editing of Herbert’s English poems in 2007 testified to the new century’s continuing recognition of the simplicity paradox:

It is vital to make the distinction between poems that are simple (which Herbert’s are not) and those that arrive at simplicity through the use of, as well as the explicit rejection of, complex learning and rhetoric. (Introduction xxxi)

Bibliography

Auden, W. H., ed. George Herbert Selected by W. H. Auden. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973; qtd. Di Cesare 233-36.

Bloch, Chana. Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters…., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford 1956-), letters 1159 and 1524.

Drury, John and Victoria Moul, eds. George Herbert: The Complete Poetry, with Translations from the Latin by Victoria Moul. UK: Penguin Random House, 2015.

Drury, John. Music at Midnight. The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. London: Allen Lane, 2013.

Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets,” Times Literary Supplement 20 October 1921, 669–70; repr. Keast, William R. ed. Seventeenth-Century English Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971: 23-44.

—. George Herbert. Writers and Their Work. 1962. Introduction Peter Porter. London: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1994.

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto & Windus, 1930.

Grierson, Herbert J. C., ed., Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. 1921. Revised with a Preface by Alastair Fowler. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Hutchinson, F. E., ed. The Works of George Herbert. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941, rev. 1945.

Huxley, Aldous. Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology with Commentaries. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932.

Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. Intro. L. Archer Hind. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1925.

Knights, L. C. Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of The Seventeenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946; “George Herbert,” dated 1944.

Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954.

Nuttall, A. D. Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John. London: Methuen, 1980.

Patrides, C. A., ed. The English Poems of George Herbert. Everyman’s Library. 1974. London: Dent, 1991.

Rickey, Mary Ellen. Utmost Art: Complexity in the verse of George Herbert. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1966.

Stein, Arnold. George Herbert’s Lyrics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968.

Summers, Joseph H. George Herbert: His Religion and Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954; Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981.

Tuve, Rosemond. A Reading of George Herbert. London: Faber & Faber, 1952.

Vendler, Helen. The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.

Wall, John N. ed. George Herbert: The Country Parson; The Temple. Preface by A. M. Allchin. New York: Paulist P, 1981.

White, Helen C. The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience. New York: Macmillan, 1956.

Wilcox, Helen, ed. The English Poems of George Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007; repr. 2013.