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  • Introduction:“Make One Place Ev’ry Where”: Herbert and Local Habitation
  • Christopher Hodgkins

As Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise observes in opening her essay, below, “Places in George Herbert’s poetry are seldom named, are seldom specific” (p. 48). Countries like England, France, Spain, Italy, and America make very brief appearances, but more particular localities are rarely mentioned, nor are the individuals nor families who inhabit them, nor their traditional lore. Though Herbert lived in a great age of locodescriptive poems (Lanyer’s on Cooke-ham, Jonson’s on Penshurst, Denham’s on Cooper’s Hill, Marvell’s on Appleton House) one would never know it to read The Temple; and compared to the rural scenes of a latter-day “metaphysical” like Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Binsey Poplars” or “In the Valley of the Elwy,” Herbert’s poetry seems determinedly “utopian,” at least in the sense that “utopia” can mean “no place.” And while fathers, mothers, and children come in for a fair amount of notice in Herbert’s English poetry, the Father is usually God, the Mother the British Church, and “Child” is God’s term of affectionate address for a doubting or a devoted Christian. Shakespeare’s Theseus says that the poet “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.18-19); Herbert seems to do rather the opposite, converting local habitations and names into airy Somethings.

Yet, wonderfully, there is nothing bland or generic about Herbert’s work, which crackles with colloquial, conversational immediacy, psychological complexity, and a famed concreteness of image and idiom which make him kind to the ear, tasty on the tongue, and alternately gripping and easing to the heart. One feels that Herbert’s local habitations and their inhabitants remain nameless not because he lacked poetic skill for vivid, specific delineation, but because he [End Page v] carefully cultivated a kind of universality in mentions of people and places. Our post-Romantic sensibilities may wish that Herbert had sought God more often in the local details rather than through or beyond them – indeed Hopkins shows just how well this can be done – but that is not what Herbert was about. He was always reading personal and physical realities as the Book of God’s Providence in which he constantly sought to spell the divine Word.

Still, Locating George Herbert asks what it means that Herbert takes us to “cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts” (“Redemption,” l. 11) instead of to London, and that his poem “Home” is about heaven, not Montgomery or Bemerton. The authors of these essays decline to punish him with loss of rhyme for such generality, or for neglecting to tell us the genus and species of “The Flower.” For indeed particular relatives, places, and local customs leaven the poetry of The Temple just as certainly as do the church architecture and liturgy so regularly referenced throughout. But although those sacred objects so specifically titled (for instance “The Altar,” “The Church-floore,” “The Windows”) soon dissolve in the course of each eponymous poem into a state of heart or mind, the actual local habitations and names of Herbert’s life remain as invisible as yeast throughout, but nevertheless permeate the whole work. So in this collection we have made it our task to find out such implicit particulars: the network of family relations who likely served as inspiration and first audience for his lyrics, the locales that formed his fortunes and his imagination, and the traditions that shaped him, and that he shaped in return.

These essays began life as papers and plenary addresses delivered at the “Locating George Herbert” conference, which met at Gregynog Hall in the heart of Herbert’s home country near Montgomery in Powys, Mid Wales. We enjoyed an unusual degree of hospitality and access to Herbert’s nearby home places and domestic connections. Some of the papers actually were presented in the Herbert family residence in the keep of Powis Castle, where we were welcomed by John Herbert, the Earl of Powis, directly descended from Herbert’s oldest brother Edward. We walked the ruins of Edward’s nearby Montgomery Castle, which he surrendered to the Parliamentary army...

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