ABSTRACT
In the evolving critical attitudes toward Herbert, Palmer’s formidable edition of ‘The English Works of George Herbert’ (Boston, Mass., 1905) is a major signpost by any standards. To have represented it here through an extract of a few pages, however, would grossly have detracted from its achievement; and it might have been eschewed altogether – strictly by default – but for Palmer’s felicitous summary of his critical stance thirteen years later, in his ‘Formative Types in English Poetry’, which devotes one chapter each to Chaucer, Spenser, Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning. Herbert’s presence in such a company is eloquent in itself; yet even more pertinent is Palmer’s reiteration of three salient aspects of his great edition: the renunciation of Walton’s ‘charming romance’ as a viable interpretation, the division of Herbert’s life into four periods, and the emphatic assertion of structure or form. See further above, pp. 30 f.
Source: Palmer, from George Herbert, in ‘Formative Types in English Poetry’ (Boston, Mass., 1918), pp. 15–31.
