Helen Wilcox has done a great service to the field with her excellent edition of George Herbert's vernacular verse. The English Poems of George Herbert succeeds mightily in its jacket aspiration to be “the definitive scholarly edition of Herbert's complete English poems,” and it attains this goal in the most unassuming way. To orient readers toward the work of one of England's finest devotional poets, Wilcox provides an incisive (and gracefully concise) introduction, wherein she describes Herbert's aesthetic, situates its exemplar, The Temple, in its literary and historical contexts and outlines ways of reading both Herbert's verse and her edition. One of the more intriguing tools Wilcox offers for appreciating The Temple is a glossary of key terms, which follows her pithy chronology and general note on the text. (The entry for “sweet,” for example, surveys the breadth of meanings the word evokes in Herbert's lyrics, tracing how sensory delights, rightly savored, can occasion spiritual joy.)

By far the most useful part of Wilcox's fine edition is the copious annotation that surrounds individual poems. Admirable scrupulousness—as well as empathy for readers wishing to find specific information quickly—leads her to introduce almost every poem with clearly marked headnotes covering the poem's texts, sources, and modern criticism. (In a few cases, miscellaneous poems closely related to each other share these headnotes.) Footnotes pinpoint moments where issues identified in the introduction or headnotes arise and regularly illumine new interpretive ground through skillful contextualization or definition. (That the Oxford English Dictionary gets a stunning workout in this edition is as much a testament to Wilcox's linguistic acuity as to Herbert’s.) But Wilcox is not just sharp; she is also thorough. For instance, even though her introduction discusses the importance of titles for Herbert, she still comments briefly on the title of each poem.

Wilcox's extensive commentary and thoughtful organization make her edition a welcome supplement to the standard scholarly edition of Herbert, F. E. Hutchinson's The Works of George Herbert (1941; corrected reprint, Oxford, 1964). However, the supplementary nature of Wilcox's volume may hamper its ability to become “the definitive scholarly edition of Herbert's complete English poems” in practice. This risk appears most evident in her volume's size. Whereas Hutchinson covers Herbert's oeuvre—poetry and prose in English and Latin—in nearly 700 pages, Wilcox covers just the English poetry in almost 800 pages. To be sure, this last fact is a boon: her pages bear the collective fruit of relevant scholarship produced in the six decades following Hutchinson's edition, making her labor invaluable to those seeking a deeper understanding of Herbert's art. Yet the heft of her edition can also be a liability: critics who want or need access to Herbert's Latin poetry, or his English or Latin prose, will still have to rely on Hutchinson, meaning that most critics will be compelled to carry two big volumes, a cumbersome (not to mention potentially expensive) venture.

While the limited scope of Wilcox's edition is its only real drawback, smaller editorial choices can interfere with the volume's user friendliness. First, Wilcox's descriptions of modern Herbert criticism are weighted heavily toward scholarship published over a decade ago (indeed, nearly 90 percent of the secondary texts listed in her bibliography were published before 1996). This focus leaves readers to wonder whether there have been as many influential contributions to longstanding critical debates in the last ten years as there have been in preceding decades or whether some Herbert scholars have more recently begun to consider issues not readily assimilable to older concerns. Second, the citation system Wilcox employs in her headnotes can be confusing if the scholar in question has published more than one work. Wilcox does explain her system in the section Abbreviations and Modes of reference, but its idiosyncrasies are admittedly hard to remember. Surely an established author-date system would have worked better.

Honest though these few criticisms are, they can also, upon reflection, seem petty. After all, why fault Wilcox for not editing the complete works of Herbert, when she has edited the English poems so masterfully? Why fault Wilcox for not digging more deeply into recent scholarship, when she already digests over 350 secondary texts? And why fault Wilcox for not using an established citation system, when it is possible to figure her own system out? The truth is, Wilcox is such a great editor that it is hard not to want more from her. But to state that sentiment directly is to expose its unfairness. Wilcox has already provided her readers with a superb guide to Herbert's monumental art. Her volume fuses two qualities not always easy to link: empathetic humanity and intellectual rigor. (Perhaps this marriage of values is what makes her edition so Herbertian, even more than its content.) The appearance of The English Poems of George Herbert, nearly 400 years after The Temple was first printed by Cambridge University Press, means that we are in Helen Wilcox's debt, and will be, happily, for decades to come.