This is the second unpublished lecture TSE prepared for delivery at the British Institutes in six Italian cities, together with “The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry” ( 6.29). He wrote to John Hayward on 5 Apr 1940, after sending him a draft of the latter: “Tomorrow I proceed to tackle the other lecture, the Geo. Herbert etc. stuff: that ought to be much easier. After I have got them both done I shall start to rewrite.” The cities included Rome, Palermo, Florence, and Milan during the fortnight following his scheduled departure on 20 May, but the trip was cancelled on 15 May by the British Council on advice from the Foreign Office, which expressed concerns about TSE’s security. On 10 June, the date of his scheduled return, Italy declared war on Britain and France. 1
The untitled typescript of twenty-one pages, misdated 1939, is archivally titled (King’s).
In considering a subject like this, in the space of one lecture, I have found it necessary to impose two arbitrary limitations. The first concerns the history that can be covered. I shall only attempt to deal at all with the last three hundred and fifty years. In earlier periods we find a number of religious lyrics and popular carols, some of very considerable beauty. And our first great poet, Chaucer, has a definitely religious and Catholic background, as the last stanza of his long poem “Troilus and Criseyde” attests. 2 But in the latter part of the sixteenth century a new kind of religious selfconsciousness appears in English literature: and it is to this modern religious consciousness in poetry that I shall confine my attention. Second, I shall limit myself to considering the more lyrical types of poetry. To discuss the narrative and the argumentative types of poetry, including the work of Milton, and The Hind and the Pantherof Dryden, would be impossible in the time. 3 And finally, I shall confine myself to religious poetry arising out of specifically Christian belief, ignoring the religious feeling which, as in the Romantic period, expresses itself in other categories of cosmogony.
To begin then with the poetry of the age of Queen Elizabeth, what strikes us first is that its main current is humanistic and neo-classical, and shows very little that is definitely Christian in thought and feeling. What there is in the poetry of Edmund Spenser is superficial; and we could hardly tell, from the plays of the great Elizabethan dramatists, whether the authors were Christians or not. We know that Ben Jonson was a sincere Christian, 47from anecdotes of his life: we do not know it from his plays. We know, on the other hand, that Christopher Marlowe was probably a free-thinker; and that although religious conformity was enforced, there was a libertinespirit, centred in a group of which Sir Walter Ralegh was an important member, among some of the intellectuals of the Queen’s court. Her own religious beliefs tended to conform to her politics. Yet after her long reign was ended, and just as the dramatic impulse was beginning to fail, we find that for a time the most important poets are all writers of religious inspiration; and throughout the seventeenth century the greatest poets – I have mentioned Milton and Dryden – chose religious themes. In the reign of James I, John Donne, who had been the greatest writer of love lyrics, took religious orders and became Dean of St. Paul’s; and in this second period of his life his poetry is religious. And the greatest of the disciples and followers of Donne – George Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne – were all men who either confined themselves to, or excelled in, the writing of religious verse.
I should have to be not only a considerable scholar in the history of literature, but in the whole social history of that age, even to give plausible guesses at the cause of this surprising change. What happened in England was, of course, only a local phase of what was happening throughout Europe...
