J. R. Hervey, 1889–1958

Abstract

The poetry of J. R. Hervey is now largely forgotten, although it received favourable attention in his lifetime. Hervey was an Anglican clergyman from the Georgian generation, but his poetry generally avoids Georgian floridity. Instead, borrowing from contemporary models, from priestly predecessors like John Donne and George Herbert, and from older sacerdotal sources like bible and prayer book, Hervey created a resilient and flexible body of verse. Flexibility never implies triviality, however. The Romantic priest in Hervey probes the matters of life and death in a continuous search for poetry of universal significance. Though not always successful, his output nonetheless contains poems confirming the estimation in which his younger New Zealand contemporaries held him.