This week in Christian history: Zwingli marries, George Herbert born, Ignatius of Loyola elected
George Herbert born – April 3, 1593
This week marks the anniversary of when George Herbert, a clergyman with the Church of England, best known for his poetry, was born in Black Hall in Montgomery, Wales.
Born to a prominent family and one of 10 children, Herbert would eventually be educated at Cambridge, where, after graduating, he became a university orator in 1620.
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Cambridge was also where he wrote most of his poetry, none of which would be published until shortly after his death in 1633 in a popular work known as The Temple.
“Herbert's poetry would influence fellow poets such as Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and then in later centuries Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and, perhaps Robert Frost,” noted the Poetry Foundation.
“He is remembered as a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of his or any other time.”
