This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert

"This Book of Starres" is one of those all-too-rare books in which an author's love of someone's work - in this case, the writings of seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert - leads him to guide the reader on a journey of exploration. James Boyd White takes the position that "literature of this quality can be read by an ordinary intelligent reader, bringing whatever he or she happens to be to the process. This is a claim for the accessibility, and also the importance, of the great works of our tradition, so often now insulated by a kind of professional barrier." Herbert's poetry presents a special set of challenges: it is to the modern ear archaic, difficult in thought and structure, and entirely theological in character. Yet no poet is more deeply admired by those who know him well. "This Book of Starres" engages its audience in a process of reading that shows this verse to be vivid and alive, speaking directly across the barriers of time and culture. It is the record of one person's life-changing involvement with Herbert's poetry; in this it is about not only how, but why we read great poetry.