Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
*Starred Review* The greatest religious poet in the English language, George Herbert (1593–1633) was a scion of powerful Anglo-Welsh aristocrats who elected, eventually, to be a country parson. Given the finest of educations at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he emerged as one of the foremost Latinists of his time and, still under 30, University Orator, a  stepping-stone to lofty diplomatic posts. He became disillusioned, however, and resigned, took holy orders, and concluded his days as rector of little Bemerton in south central England. All along, he wrote poetry in Latin as well as English. The year after his death, the English poems were published as The Temple, one of the most successful and influential books of the seventeenth century. To relate Herbert’s life, Drury constantly draws on his poetry in what is as much a work of literary analysis as biography. Fortunately, Herbert’s poems, full of common knowledge, not aristocratic or scholarly sophistication, and whose core terms and references are biblical, yield plenty of intimate, real-life information. Once one knows the Christian matrix of Herbert’s writing, his poems are startlingly, affectingly clear, and one can attend to their great though always humble wit, their limpid and cleanly moving music. Drury gives us that knowledge in this engrossing and restorative book. --Ray Olson