Poets' Meeting: George Herbert, R.S. Thomas, and the Argument with GodGeorge Herbert (1593-1633) and R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), each a major English poet and an Anglican priest, lived in very different times, one before the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and industrialization, and one following. Yet the two men and their poetry bear striking resemblances: Both loved nature and music, both were pacifists, and both struggled with the claims of faith, the nature of the spiritual life, and the recurrent silences of God. This book demonstrates that when their lives and poems are studied side by side, each man enhances our understanding of the other. The first essay deals with their sense of calling as priests and poets. The work then explores topics that relate to their roles as parish priests: ministry, the Bible, the Eucharist, and prayer. Several essays follow dealing with broader questions of the human condition: faith, sin, love, reason and science, and nature. The work concludes by considering their poems about Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. |
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... God and God's action towards man , and above all between man's conception of the rela- tionship between Creator and creature and the actuality of that relation- ship . ( A Reading of George Herbert , p . 49. ) This was not mere ...
... God's love . The Cross demonstrates God's love , a thought which prompted from Herbert the propitiatory response that , as a sign of his own reciprocal love , each hour of his life would take up one of Christ's griefs , to share the bur ...
... God . - Herbert's question was how to measure God's love . To do so he reviewed the metaphors we might use to give some tangibility to that love , but he found them wanting . Poetic language having failed , he turned to the narrower ...
Contents
Preface | 1 |
The Vocations of Priest and Poet | 13 |
Country Parsons | 36 |
Copyright | |
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Poets' Meeting: George Herbert, R.S. Thomas, and the Argument with God William J. McGill Limited preview - 2003 |