Some Penguin Classics frankly puzzle, and a perfect example of this not-always-frustrating sub-category would have to be the plump new Complete Poetry volume of George Herbert, edited by Victoria Moul and John Drury, which comes only a skimpy ten years after the last edition of the previous Penguin Complete Herbert, edited by John Tobin, then as now a stellar English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who opened his own edition with the priceless line, “George Herbert is either our most major minor poet in English literature, or he is the most modestly exquisite of our major poets.”

So why is Tobin’s edition getting the old heave-ho? Especially considering the fact that Penguin still has creaking and wheezing editions of the Greek and Roman classics around from the 1450s?

There isn’t much to separate the two editions on their faces. Tobin gives us all of the English poems, selections from the Latin poems, and he reprints the entire Life of Herbert by Izaak Walton. He rounds his volume out with 120 pages of end-notes (and he refrains from starting those notes with the sub-title of Herbert’s great work “The Temple,” which is “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” – whereas Moul and Drury fairly trip over themselves to footnote that final word, like well-meaning relatives making loud dinner-table smalltalk when they hear Grandpa winding up one of his racy jokes in front of company). Moul and Drury give us all the English poems, all the Latin (and a few Greek ones) with facing-pages in the original languages, selections from the Walton Life, and 200 pages of end-notes. In the world of popular-reprint classics, it all seems fairly even.

I suspect the change might have more to do with John Drury’s status specifically as a Herbert scholar – a status he cemented back in 2013 with his absolutely first-rate biography of the poet, Music at Midnight. He’s got an amazing familiarity with Herbert’s work and style, so his 30-page Introduction, while it lacks the wit and sparkle of Tobin’s 12-pager, is weighty with solid insights:

Among Herbert’s most enjoyable qualities is his wit, particularly when it is deployed on his religion – so much part and parcel of his inner and outer worlds that on occasion he can treat it lightly. ‘Discipline’ shows him using it against God, no less, ‘Giddiness’ and ‘Vanity (I)’ against human perversities and failings, and ‘Divinity’ against theological speculation. His clever devising of forms to picture their content, as in ‘The Altar’ and “Easter-wings’, was derided by Hobbes and Dryden, but when these poems are read aloud it is clear that there is nothing forced about them – rather that their shapes assist both sense and feeling.

Drury’s not the first critic to advise me to read Herbert’s verse out loud, and every time I read that advice, I take it and dutifully read a dozen or so poems to my dogs. I’ve been doing this sporadically for a great many years, and the exercise has left me in very little doubt about that dichotomy Tobin poses at the beginning of his own essay. Take a poem at random, let’s say “Business”:

Canst be idle? Canst thou play,

Foolish soul who sinn’d today?

Rivers run, and springs each one

Know their home, and get them gone:

Hast thou tears, or hast thou none?

If, poor soul, thou hast no tears;

Would thou hadst no faults or fears!

Who hath these, those ill forbears.

Winds still work: it is their plot,

Be the season cold, or hot:

Hast thou sighs, or hast thou not?

If thou hast no sighs or groans,

Would thou hadst no flesh and bones!

Lesser pains scape greater ones.

But if yet thou idle be,

Foolish soul, Who died for thee?

A lovely little ditty, but … most exquisite of our major poets? Not on George Herbert’s best day. But even so, two top-notch Penguin volumes of this poet are twice the treasure.