Voices of the Dramatic Persona: An Exploration of George Herbert’s Self-Writing in The Temple

Abstract

Dramatic form was frequently applied in the meditation of devotional poets in the Baroque age. As a representative devotional poet of that age, Herbert also used the dramatic form and constructed a dramatic persona in some poems. Through the dramatic persona, Herbert projected himself and his own experiences, which include his body sufferings, his confession and self-analysis and his quelled emotion; and therefore, the dramatic persona in The Temple can be called Herbert’s self-writing. Such self-writing shows the turn to the inwardness, the self-consciousness and the individual, which are one feature of the Baroque writers and their writing in the Baroque age.