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.

With

Helen Wilcox

Victoria Moul

And

Simon Jackson

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Cornell University Press, 1977)

Thomas M. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Penguin, 2014)

George Herbert (eds. John Drury and Victoria Moul), The Complete Poetry (Penguin, 2015)

George Herbert (ed. Helen Wilcox), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Simon Jackson, George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (first published by Chatto and Windus, 1954; Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New York, 1981)

Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Harvard University Press, 1975)

James Boyd White, This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert (University of Michigan Press, 1995)

Helen Wilcox (ed.), George Herbert. 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021)