George Herbert Poetry Competition, 2008

In September 2008, a George Herbert Festival was held in the Welsh market town of Montgomery, where Herbert was born more than four hundred years earlier. During one busy weekend, poetrylovers were offered guided walks around the town and castle, artistic and historical exhibitions, a presentation by the “Bemerton Group” which included new musical settings of poems from The Temple, and a festival service held in the parish church, in the shadow of the splendid Renaissance tomb erected by Magdalen Herbert in memory of her husband, George’s father. One of the high points of the festival was an evening of poetry and music in the ballroom of Powis Castle, hosted by the Earl of Powis, John Herbert, the poet’s closest living descendant. The evening concluded with the announcement of the winning and commended poems from the Festival Poetry Competition, for which entrants had been invited to write new poems inspired by Herbert’s own lyrical style. The following is the report of the judges of this competition, Rev. Prof. David Jasper (Professor of Literature and Theology at Glasgow University) and Prof. Helen Wilcox (Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales). The report was presented orally at Powis Castle and, through a discussion of the entries, investigates the ways in which the competition both revealed and sustained Herbert’s continuing influence on contemporary poetry. 1 Included in the report are the texts of the commended entries, and it concludes with the winning poem, “Joseph of Arimathea” by Tony Lucas.