*Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert*

By the Very Revd John Drury.  I mentioned the book favorably in passing once before, but I don’t think I drove home how much I liked and learned from it.  For me it is a clear choice for best book of the year so far.

Here is a pithy bit from Amazon:

Though he never published any of his English poems during his lifetime, George Herbert (1593–1633) is recognized as possibly the greatest religious poet in the language. Few English poets of his age still inspire such intense devotion today.

I was not interested in Herbert per se, so that is further testament to the quality of Drury’s achievement. This volume passes at least one bottom line test for book quality, namely whether I ordered many other books by the same author.  I did.

You can order the book here.  You can find Herbert’s poems here.  This book also shows how much overly restrictive copyright law damages other works of literary criticism, Herbert of course is fully in the public domain.

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