While most of the selections fall under the heading of religious poetry, the important secular verse of Marvell and Crashaw is included. Eighty poems by Herbert have been selected from The Temple, and two early poems from Isaak Walton's Lives are also included. Crashaw is represented by sixteen poems from Steps to the Temple, Delights of the Muses, and Carmen Deo Nostro; Marvell, by eighteen selections from Miscellaneous Poems; Vaughan, by forty-five poems from Silex Scintillans, Parts I and II; and Traherne, by twelve poems from the Dobell Folio, The Third Century, and the Burney Manuscript. All of the texts have been freshly edited, and spelling has been modernized. Textual Notes specify the procedures followed and give reasons for certain new readings. The poems are fully annotated in order to clarify unfamiliar allusions and images. A broad range of critical viewpoints is represented in essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Anthony Low, L. C. Knights, E. B. Greenwood, Joseph H. Summers, Douglas Bush, Helen C. White, Austin Warren, Richard Strier, Frank Kermode, William Empson, M. C. Bradbrook, M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Edward S. Le Comte, Karina Williamson, Dennis Davidson, Robert Ellrodt, E. C. Pettet, S. Sandbank, Arthur Clements, H. M. Margoliouth, and Stanley Stewart. An Annotated Bibliography covers historical and cultural background, the lives and works of the individual poets, and several important aspects of religious belief especially relevant to the poems.

Author Biography

Mario A. Di Cesare is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the S.U.N.Y. Foundation, and the Robert Frost Library. Among his publications are Vida's Christiad and Vergilian Epic; The Altar and the City: A Reading of Vergil's Aeneid; A Concordance to the Complete Writings of George Herbert (with Rigo Mignani); The Tanner Manuscript of George Herbert's "The Temple" (prepared in collaboration with Amy Charles); and numerous scholarly articles.