조지 허버트의 종교시에 나타난 보편적 의식

Abstract

T. S. Eliot, in his essay on "Religion and Literature," commented that "For the great majority of people who love poetry, 'religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry. . . . which is the product of a special religious awareness, which may exist without the general awareness which we expect of the major poet." He offered the name of George Herbert in the list of the poets whose religious and devotional genius had represented the special and limited awareness. The names of such poet as Vaughan, Southwell, Crashaw and Hopkins were among them. In an address delivered in Swansea some years later, however, Eliot stated with some emphasis his opinion that Herbert is a major, not a minor poet. Eliot might have raised Herbert's status, for he found the general awareness, that is, the universality in George Herbert's poetry later. In this respect, I have examined the general awareness in some of Herbert's poems to the minutest details in this essay. Eliot did not recommend primarily the exquisite craftsmanship, the extraordinary metrical virtuosity, or the verbal felicities, but the content of the poems which make up The Temple. He pointed that The Temple is not to be regarded as a collection of poems, but as a record of the spiritual struggles of a man of intellectual power and emotional intensity. He also called upon "Mr. Knight's testimony in evidence that Herbert is not a poet whose work is significant only for Christian readers; that The Temple is not to be taken as simply a devotional handbook of meditation for the faithful, but as the personal record of a man very conscious of weakness and failure, a man of intellect and sensibility who hungered and thirsted after righteousness." Eliot's recommendations and his awakening of other testimony on the universal awareness in Herbert's poetry encouraged me to scrutinize some of Herbert's poems on the basis of the content of those poems.