Whether a lyric poem is addressed to a friend, to a lover or to God, its most intimate relationship of all is with the second person singular. It provides, or purports to provide, a privileged glimpse into the speaker’s private thoughts, which are sometimes the writer’s own; but its attention to personal address also has the effect of directing attention away from the poet. For this and other reasons, it defies easy distinctions between private and public. The following chapter will examine a number of issues arising from this continuum, each of which has a particular relevance to seventeenth-century conditions. What does it mean to write with God as your implied reader, in an age so conscious of the difference between religious denominations? How do coteries act to provide a halfway house between an audience of two and a wider, undifferentiated public, and how do the conditions of manuscript circulation reinforce this? How do writers of this era perform, celebrate and fictionalise relationships with their forebears, their contemporaries and their addressees? How did the Civil War inspire poets’ injunctions towards public action, or celebrations of the retired life?

The career of the first poet to be considered, George Herbert, has often been read as epitomising a retreat from public to private. Beginning with Herbert’s first biographer Izaak Walton, commentators on Herbert’s life have noted a seeming imbalance between the glittering prizes of his early years – Public Orator at Cambridge, Member of Parliament – and his modest latter-day role as a parish priest. Walton, and some subsequent biographers, have seen this move towards religious retirement as prompted in the first instance by a failure of worldly hopes. But looking at his English literary remains – the Latin ones tell a rather different story – Herbert’s commitment to religious devotion and devotional writing does coexist with a certain intolerance of secular activity.