George Herbert and the Dangers of Invention

Where Renaissance theorists define invention either as discovering and imitating the best models for writing or as creating a better and more virtuous world, George Herbert redefines poetic invention as the usurpation of God’s creative power. In order to avoid such presumption in his own poetry, he insists that the task of the godly poet must be imitation in its most literal, letter-by-letter sense: copying God’s own language, as if by hand. The metaphor of writing as copying reaches its fullest expression in Herbert’s wordplay-heavy poems, in which the poet breaks words into their composite letters to discover God’s truth.