Synopses & Reviews
Though he never published any of his English poems during his lifetime, George Herbert (1593and#150;1633) is recognized as possibly the greatest religious poet in the language. Few English poets of his age still inspire such intense devotion today. In this richly perceptive biography, John Drury for the first time integrates Herbertand#8217;s poems fully into his life, enriching our understanding of both the poetand#8217;s mind and his work.
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As Drury writes in his preface, Herbert lived and#147;a quiet life with a crisis in the middle of it.and#8221; Drury follows Herbert from his academic success as a young man, seemingly destined for a career at court, through his abandonment of those hopes, his devotion to the restoration of a church in Huntingdonshire, and his final years as a country parson. Because Herbertand#8217;s work was only published posthumously, it has always been difficult to know when or in what context Herbert wrote his poems. But Drury skillfully places readings of the poems into his narrative at biographically credible moments, allowing us to appreciate not only Herbertand#8217;s frame of mind while writing, but also the society that produced it. A sensitive critic of Herbertand#8217;s poems as well as a theologian, Drury does full justice to the spiritual dimension of Herbertand#8217;s work. In addition, he reveals the occasions of sorrow, happiness, regret, and hope that Herbert captured in his poetry and that led T. S. Eliot to write, and#147;What we can confidently believe is that every poem . . . is true to the poetand#8217;s experience.and#8221;
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Painting a picture of a man torn between worldly ambition and spiritual life,and#160;Music at Midnightand#160;is an eloquent biography that breathes new life into some of the greatest English poems ever written.
Review
"Targoff argues that recent scholarship on Donne has overstressed social and political concerns ('apostasy and ambition') at the expense of the 'great subject' that interested him: 'the parting between body and soul.' Arguing that Donne engaged in protracted 'brooding' on this subject throughout his literary career, the author pursues this theme through Donne's works, beginning with a helpful look at his epistles (in prose and verse).... Successful are the treatments of Donne's extended prose, including the
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, in which Targoff smartly traces 'Donne's idea of proleptic putrefaction--that through physical deterioration now, he might reduce his time as a corpse later.' Particular praise is due the last chapter on the frequently taught final sermon
Deaths Duell, where Donne remains, writes Targoff, 'fraught with anxiety about the logistics of his material reassemblage.' She offers a strong new interpretation of the frontispiece to the
Duell. Teachers of Donne's prose will find much of value here; students of the verse will also be assisted, though likely not persuaded, by the new reading of the
Second Anniversarie proffered."
Review
"Clearly this is a book of basic significance for a study of Donne. . . . There is much to learn from it."
Review
"An original, persuasive, useful, and thoroughly readable contribution to Donne studies."
Review
"Targoff's argument is lucid, sharply focused, and immediately convincing: this is the Donne whom I was taught and who continues to engage and move my students."
Review
“Posthumous Love sets out a compelling case about a large and important point about English Renaissance love literature—one that perhaps should have been obvious for a long time but has never been brought into such sharp focus. The material may be familiar, but Ramie Targoffs treatment is genuinely fresh, and her well-researched book traces a clear narrative arc from Petrarch to the carpe diem poems of the seventeenth century, with nuanced assertions about the sonneteers of the 1590s, the poetry of Donne, and Shakespeare in between.”
Review
“Targoffs poignant theme is early modern love in time. In this radiant book, consciousness of love in time drives not only the choice of material but also its presentation: Targoff wastes not a second of the readers own time as her luminous prose presents moving material in crisply packaged, perfectly targeted scholarship. Posthumous Loves insight is striking; its mode is a model.”
Review
“Targoffs brilliance as a literary critic is to ask questions of Renaissance English poetry that seem fundamental and inescapable once shes raised them. Here, the question is why English poets ignored the precedents in Dante and Petrarch for portraying a love that lasts beyond death and chose instead to insist on loves mortal limits. Targoffs answers, in Posthumous Love, yield astonishingly fresh new readings of Shakespeare, Wyatt, Marvell, and Donne.”
Review
and#8220;Readers who are tempted into the book by its focus on the life will finish with something far richer than more conventional biographies offer. . . . It is hard to imagine a better book for anyone, general reader or seventeenth-century aficionado or teacher or student, newly embarking on Herbert.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Powerfully absorbing.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Drury manages wonderfully in bringing text and context profitably together. His book is especially valuable, and enjoyable, in its deft and insightful expositions of Herbertand#8217;s formal and stylistic brilliance.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Being an English country minister has inspired many writers, none of them more lapidary, precise, witty and surprising than George Herbert, the frail intellectual who preached to the parish of Bemerton from 1630 to 1633. An account of an Anglican priest and his poetry that will probably never be bettered.and#8221;
Review
"A welcome, rich, and illuminating biography."
Review
"Druryand#8217;s book is a careful blend of life, poetry, history, and textual analysis. For the first time, Herbertand#8217;s poems are embedded in his life. . . . Drury excels at demonstrating that Herbertand#8217;s poetry manages to be beguilingly simple and strikingly complex. . . . Druryand#8217;s scholarly and immensely readable biography . . . presents the most fully realized Herbert to date."
Review
"Every Christian should be familiar with the poems of George Herbert. . . .The bookand#8217;s strength lies in Druryand#8217;s ability to explain Herbertand#8217;s theology and draw out the Christian meaning in the poems. . . . The book is academic enough for scholars, but easily accessible to the lay reader with a bit of patience."
Review
“Engaging. . . . Targoff knows the virtues of reckoning with the unknowns and their place in the lyric tradition. . . . Targoffs argument moves nimbly between ideology, analysis of reception and solid readings of individual poems. . . . Elegant.”
Review
andldquo;Offers a deeply sympathetic, sensitive introduction to Herbert.andrdquo;
Review
“Excellent. . . .
Posthumous Love taught me a great deal about a body of work I thought I knew well.”
Synopsis
John Donne, one of the most brilliant poets and preachers of the English Renaissance, lived a life full of dramatic changes of fortune, and his writing reflects his wide range of experiences. His collected works vary from passionate love poems to devotional sonnets, from quiet meditations to caustic satires, and from decorous elegies to thundering sermons. For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donnes life into a complete image of the poet and priest that does not depend on a radical division between the two. In
John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donnes entire oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. Any experience, whether it be illness, sex, or reading a book, that ignored either its spiritual or physical component was for Donne inevitably incomplete or unsatisfying. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donnes obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.
Synopsis
For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donneand#8217;s works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.
Reappraising Donneand#8217;s oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donneand#8217;s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.
and#8220;Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne.and#8221;and#8212;Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge
Synopsis
For Dante and Petrarch, posthumous love was a powerful conviction. Like many of their contemporaries, both poets envisioned their encounters with their beloved in heavenDante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura. But as Ramie Targoff reveals in this elegant study, English love poetry of the Renaissance brought a startling reversal of this tradition: human love became definitively mortal. Exploring the boundaries that Renaissance English poets drew between earthly and heavenly existence, Targoff seeks to understand this shift and its consequences for English poetry.
Targoff shows that medieval notions of the somewhat flexible boundaries between love in this world and in the next were hardened by Protestant reformers, who envisioned a total break between the two. Tracing the narrative of this rupture, she focuses on central episodes in poetic history in which poets developed rich and compelling compensations for the lack of posthumous lovefrom Thomas Wyatts translations of Petrarchs love sonnets and the Elizabethan sonnet series of Shakespeare and Spencer to the carpe diem poems of the seventeenth century. Targoffs centerpiece is Romeo and Juliet, where she considers how Shakespeares reworking of the Italian story stripped away any expectation that the doomed teenagers would reunite in heaven. Casting new light on these familiar works of poetry and drama, this book ultimately demonstrates that the negation of posthumous love brought forth a new mode of poetics that derived its emotional and aesthetic power from its insistence upon loves mortal limits.
Synopsis
George Herbert (1593-1633) was one of the great English poets and possibly the greatest religious poet in the language. He still inspires intense admiration, and his verse is available in many editions and countless anthologies. Herbertand#8217;s poems naturally inspire curiosity about his life, and the first biography of Herbert (by Isaak Walton) appeared as early as 1670. Yet no biography of Herbert is currently in print. John Druryand#8217;s and#147;Music at Midnightand#8221; will take its place as the best biography of Herbert ever written, and one of the best biographies of a Renaissance poet. As a churchman himself, Drury does full justice to the spiritual dimension of Herbertand#8217;s work. In accessible and elegant prose, Drury tells the story of Herbertand#8217;s life, times, and literary achievement. None of Herbertand#8217;s English poems were published in his lifetime, and it is impossible to know what he wrote when. Drury finesses this problem by placing his readings of the poems into his narrative at biographically credible moments. It is an effective strategy that makes a truly satisfying book for the reader; when we read the poetry in a plausible biographical context it means even more than it did before.
About the Author
Ramie Targoff is professor of English and Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion and John Donne, Body and Soul. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Herbertand#8217;s World
Part One
1.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Childhood
2.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Westminster
3.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; A Young Man at Cambridge
4.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; 1618
5.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Deputy to Orator
6.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Francis Bacon
Interlude: The Williams Manuscript
Part Two
7.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Lost in a Humble Way
8.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Bemerton: Being a Country Person
9.and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Herbertand#8217;s Days and Years
Part Three
10.and#160; Heirs and Imitators
11.and#160; Herbertand#8217;s Readers
12.and#160; The Bread of Faithful Speech
13.and#160; Music at the Close
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index of Works
General Index