The poems on which George Herbert's reputation is based are those constituting the collection called The Temple. About The Temple there are two points to be made. The first is that we cannot date the poems exactly. Some of them may be the product of careful re-writing. We cannot take them as being necessarily in chronological order: they have another order, that in which Herbert wished them to be read. The Temple is, in fact, a structure, and one which may have been worked over and elaborated, perhaps at intervals of time, before it reached its final form. We cannot judge Herbert, or savour fully his genius and his art, by any selection to be found in an anthology; we must study The Temple as a whole.

To understand Shakespearewe must acquaint ourselves with all of his plays; to understand Herbert we must acquaint ourselves with all of The Temple. Herbert is, of course, a much slighter poet than Shakespeare; nevertheless he may justly be called a major poet. Yet even in anthologies he has for the most part been underrated. In Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse, which was for many years unchallenged in its representative character, George Herbert was allotted five pages – the same number as Bishop King and much less than Robert Herrick, the latter of whom, most critics of today would agree, is a poet of very much slighter gifts. For poetic range Herbert was commonly considered more limited than Donne; and for intensity he was compared unfavourably with Crashaw. This is the view even of Professor Grierson, to whom we are greatly indebted for his championship of Donne and of those poets whose names are associated with that of Donne.

And here we must exercise caution in our interpretation of the phrase ‘the school of Donne’. The present writer once contem- plated writing a book under that title; and lately the title has been used by a distinguished younger critic [A. Alvarez] for a study covering the same ground. The phrase is legitimate and useful to designate that generation of men younger than Donne whose work is obviously influenced by him, but we must not take it as implying that those poets who experienced his influence were for that reason lesser poets.