George Herbert

Ann Slater

In George Herbert (1593-1633), profound religious sensibility is richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems", the shapes of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were his primary concerns. Herbert is one of the finest religious poets in any language, though even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness. The poems he made achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a luminosity and a metaphysical grandeur unexcelled in the history of English writing. Though long overshadowed by Donne and Milton, Herbert has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. In this new edition of Herbert's works, the distinguished scholar and translator Ann Pasternak Slater shows through detailed textual notes, a reordering of the poems, and an extensive introduction just how great a writer Herbert is.

The Complete English Works

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural craft as a novelist above the generally admired criteria of characterisation and psychological realism inherited from the nineteenth century novel. This study aims to show exactly how ingeniously and wittily his novels are constructed, and how vitally his art is allied to his profoundly moral vision. It is an energetic apologia for an author commonly accepted as a comic stylist, and denigrated as a reactionary bigot of unspeakable opinions.

Evelyn Waugh

John Howard Wilson

Donat Gallagher

Essays originally presented at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference, held at Hertford College, Oxford, Sept. 24-27, 2003.

Ann Slater

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