Heart in Pilgrimage: a Study of George Herbert

The poet George Herbert was born in1593 and died just before his fortieth birthday in1633.While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he wrote to tell his mother that he had resolved that the poetry he wrote would always be 'consecrated to God's glory'. He wrote poetry throughout his life, but we only know of it now because, from his death bed, he sent the manuscript of the collection of his poems known as 'The Temple' to his friend Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. He asked him 'to bring that piece into the world if he thought good of it, else to burn it.' Ferrar thought so highly of it that he said 'he could not sufficiently admire it, as a rich Jewell, and most worthy to be in the hands and hearts of all true Christians.' Within a few months of Herbert's death Ferrar had had the poems published, and thirteen new editions were published during the next seventy years. Today fewer people know Herbert's poetry. Jane Falloon has written 'Heart in Pilgrimage' because of her desire that it should be more widely read and appreciated by non-academic lovers of literature. New readers will be astonished by its accessibility: his sentiments and humour are so modern and immediate: they will find that poem after poem gives them a feeling of wonder, delight, recognition of genius, sheer happiness, and shock. She has chosen twenty four of her favourite poems, and has added to each of them her own appreciation and critical analysis, combining her own commentary with that of such distinguished Herbert scholars as Helen Vendler, Elizabeth Clarke, T.S.Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Dr. Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom the book is dedicated. She has introduced this selection with chapters on the life of George Herbert, and also of his friend Nicholas Ferrar, without whose efforts these wonderful poems would have been lost to the world.