Though long overshadowed by Donne and Milton, Herbert has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. The poems he made achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a luminosity and a metaphysical grandeur unexcelled in the history of English writing. Herbert is one of the finest religious poets in any language, though even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were his primary concerns. Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems", the shapes of which reveal their subjects. In George Herbert (1593-1633), profound religious sensibility is richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order.
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