In the editorial introduction to a book called George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (1978), Mario Di Cesare discusses how he put the book together. His talking points are revealing.
First, Di Cesare finds the title “metaphysical” for the five poets less convincing than “the school of Herbert.” The book only puts Herbert’s name in the title, and he is an explicitly Christian poet. His one poetic work, The Temple, is built around the visual and liturgical patterns of the church.
Second, Di Cesare decides to include “secular poems” (his own words) for Marvell and Herrick, despite the book’s title. Why? This book may be the only text students have for these poets, and the “secular” poems he’s chosen are of “great merit.”
Third, Di Cesare calls his notion of religion “broad and accommodating.” By this, he means that he doesn’t think a poem is bad because it’s got religion in it, nor does he think a poem is necessarily good because it’s religious. He calls both opinions “pitfalls.”
Fourth, and here’s the main point, Di Cesare calls “imagination” a “natural human faculty, not dependent on man’s belief.” This is problematic, as illustrated by how he describes the historical context of the poems in his own edition. “Since religion was a major element in the ordinary lives of these five poets, any disjunction between religion and other forms of human activity…would be quite artificial.”
What’s missing here is an admission that Herbert et al. would not have seen this blending of religion and other forms of human activity as something they chose to do…but simply as the way the world works. Herbert et al. were not pluralists. Di Cesare’s claim that imagination is “natural” nor “dependent on man’s beliefs” is not something Di Cesare’s selected poets would have agreed with.
And there lies the rub. One can’t be natural about religious (or any) poetry. Or again. To be natural is itself a religious approach.
Experiments in Criticism 