George Herbert in the Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments.

Jonathan F. S. Post and Sidney Gottlieb, eds. George Herbert in the Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments. (George Herbert Journal Special Studies and Monographs.) Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University, 1995. viii + 223 pp. $12. ISBN: 1-888112-51-4.

Most of the essays in this volume were presented in 1993 at the conference held at the Clark Library to commemorate the 400th anniversary of George Herbert's birth. With two exceptions, the essays focus either on Herbert's poetry and "our contemporaries" or on Herbert in relation to other seventeenth-century authors or readers. The exceptions are the opening essay, "a general reading of Herbert" (vii) by Jonathan F.S. Post, and an essay on Herbert and food consumption by Michael Schoenfeldt.

Each of the four essays following Post's introduction are intriguing in their own right and because they play off one another in both planned and unplanned ways. For example, Peter Sacks writing on Herbert and such contemporary poets as Anthony Heeht, Frank Bidart, and Louise Gluck; Joseph Summers writing on his correspondence and conversations with Elizabeth Bishop; and James Boyd White writing on how he came to read Herbert in light of Robert Frost - all explore Herbert's plain style and use of ordinary English as a major source of his appeal to recent poets. In the case of Frost, White suggests the influence may have been indirect by way of Emerson. Helen Vendler's essay, essentially her response to Sacks, Summers, and White at the Clark Library conference, notes in addition to the parallel interests in Herbert's style the tendency of each contributor to come at Herbert's relationship to contemporary authors from distinctly autobiographical angles, as she has done herself. One result of this tendency is an attempt to clarify Herbert's relationship to contemporary writers by means of reader's intuition, rather than by tracing direct influence. For example, Vendler regards Wallace Stevens, among "all the modern American poets, [as] the one who seems to me most to resemble Herbert"; yet, she acknowledges, "this resemblance . . . is hard for me to articulate, even to myself" (87). On the basis of insight similarly intuited and revealing, Louis Martz shows parallels in the treatment of suffering in the work of Herbert and Proust and in the use of ambiguity in Herbert's poetry and in The Invisible Object, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. The final essay in the section, "Herbert and Our Contemporaries," by Michael Schoenfeldt, demonstrates in convincing detail how "food traces for Herbert the inner contours of the devotional subject' (105). Despite Schoenfeldt's tendency to pluralize a "post-Galenic and post-Cartesian" "we" (127) separate from Herbert's contemporaries, the preoccupations with food and the body that Schoenfeldt delineates often have a decidedly 1990s ring.

The essays in the second section, "Herbert and His Contemporaries," also have certain parallel concerns. The essays by Cristina Malcolmson on Herbert and coterie verse and by Sidney Gottlieb on Herbert and Robert Overton are contributions to the growing body of research on the early seventeenth-century lyric and the "manuscript system" (Arthur F. Marotti, as quoted by Gottlieb, 199). Helen Wilcox, like Gottlieb, is interested in the history of reader reception. Specifically, she examines the sparse but tantalizing evidence for seventeenth-century readings of Herbert by women such as Sarah Cowper, Anne Clifford, Anna, Mary, and Susanna Collett, Virginia Ferrar, Ann Collins, and Katherine Philips. While these three essays cover fairly new territory in Herbert studies, Donald Friedman revisits the difficult issue of postponed vocational decisions in the careers of both Herbert and John Donne. His essay is particularly illuminating in its discussion of the contrasting ways "vocation" may have been understood by his two subjects.

The quality of the essays in this collection is uniformly high, and it makes valuable contributions not only to our understanding of Herbert in his seventeenth-century context but especially to our understanding of Herbert's relationship to writers of the second half of the twentieth century, a topic somewhat neglected in Herbert scholarship and criticism.

JOHN BIENZ Mount Union College