SOURCE: "Herbert and Muir: Pilgrims of Their Age," in Renascence: A Critical Journal of Letters, Vol. XV, No. 3, Spring, 1963, pp. 127-32.

In the following essay, Joselyn identifies similarities in the poetry of George Herbert and Muir.

When R. P. Blackmur described Edwin Muir as a "Herbert without a parish or a doctrine or any one temple to construct," he characterized both the negative and positive qualities of Muir's religious verse. Although almost all of Muir's poetry may be characterized as religious in a broad sense, much of it is not religious in the same way that Herbert's work is, for it possesses characteristics which are distinctly modern. Eight poems in the Evergreen edition of the Collected Poems demonstrate the resemblances as well as the differences of the two poets and provide an accurate illustration of the peculiar amalgam of seventeenth century and contemporary religious sensibility which we see...