Wanting to Be Another Person: Resurrection and Avant-Garde Poetics in George Herbert

Abstract

George Herbert’s poetry frames the body in the light of an eventual resurrection as a way of deranging any conventional sense of self or identity. Herbert is interested in the hypothesis that beneath the ambitions, emotions, and personal history of his socially conditioned self, there is another self that inheres in the body and that is in some sense “truer” than his social self. Herbert thus uses his poetry to seek a self (and a voice) that is different than the highly acculturated social person “George Herbert.” For Herbert, formally experimental poetry is a way of articulating the voice of this other self. Herbert drives his poetry to the point where his “own” voice is drowned out by a voice that is associated with the body. The chapter also examines what Herbert’s poetic theory of identity implies about an understanding of the emotions which are a key focus of many of Herbert’s poems. The chapter ends by examining the impact Herbert had on readers. By moving from a vision of poetry as representation or as beautiful object to a vision of poetry as social praxis that creates communities, Herbert anticipates avant-gardist movements of the early twentieth century