Introduction: Choice Observations on George Herbert

The Fourth Triennial Conference of the George Herbert Society was held in Phoenix, Arizona – more specifically at the Doubletree Inn, located in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix – on October 16-18, 2014. The Society gratefully acknowledges the assistance in organizing the Conference supplied by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) through its Director, Robert Bjork. Special thanks to Michele Peters for her indefatigable work in making the Conference run like a train.

The Valley of the Sun is known for its summer heat, but happily the last 100 degree day was behind us, and we enjoyed warm, dry air for the duration. In fact, the triennial banquet was held outdoors on Milagro’s Patio. Twenty-six members participated, including one from Canada, one from England, and two from Japan. Twenty-four papers were delivered, divided into eight sessions, with four sessions on both Friday and Saturday. Consequently there was no need for simultaneous sessions, which permitted every participant to hear every paper. A promising feature of the Conference was the session made up entirely of graduate students. One paper was delivered jointly by graduate students from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, while the other two were by students from Arizona State University and the University of Waterloo in Canada respectively.

The Friday night banquet offered a Southwestern theme, in the spirit of which I, as Organizer of the Conference, made a short welcome speech in limited and very rusty Spanish. The theme was carried farther still in the welcome from the Assistant Director of ACMRS, Sharona Frederick, who not only welcomed us but educated us on Herbert’s influence on Spanish-speaking writers in South America. We learned that both the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the Argentinean writer of both poetry and prose, Juan Luis Borges, were influenced by Herbert.

The highlight of the banquet was the awarding of the first George Herbert Society Prize for an outstanding dissertation on Herbert. The recipient was Simon Jackson, whose dissertation at Christ’s College, Cambridge, “The Literary and Musical Activities of the Herbert Family,” was praised both for its intellectual depth and its stylistic grace. The award was presented by Sidney Gottlieb, Editor of the George Herbert Journal, on behalf of the selection and evaluation committee, which also included Jonathan F.S. Post and Helen Vendler. Sid has also insisted that I add a further note to my recounting of the conference by acknowledging the subsequent announcement that this prize will henceforth be designated as the Chauncey Wood Dissertation Award of the George Herbert Society, an honor for which I am deeply grateful.

The Conference theme, and now the theme of this volume of selected essays, is “Choice Observations.” Unlike some conference themes, this one does not describe something to be found in Herbert’s writings, but rather a way of looking at them. The phrase comes from Herbert’s prose work The Country Parson, and instructs parsons to handle biblical texts in two parts: “first, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text; and secondly, some choyce Observations drawn out of the whole text.” For our Conference we have taken Herbert’s entire oeuvre as our “bible,” and asked for choice observations on any part of the work so long as the critic goes beyond “plain and evident declaration of the meaning of the text.” The results were gratifying, and the papers selected for inclusion here show both skill and variety as their authors dig under Herbert’s smooth technical prowess to address his ambiguities, his subtle internal and external contradictions, his hidden messages – in a word, his difficulty. That so many observations have been made, so many of them so very choice, shows that many of the depths of Herbert’s writings remain unplumbed.

The volume opens on a positive note with Kate Narveson’s informative rehearsal of early Stuart “practical divinity.” She shows us how the very fleeting glimpses of spiritual joy in The Temple can and must be reconciled with his completely confident presentation of the assurance of salvation in his poem “Assurance.”

Adele...