In Cambridge, for example, settings of his poetry are regularly sung - in hymns - all over the university and city, and anthems based on his poetry rank among the favourites of many singers who love John Blow, Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten. Herbert's poetry continues to be encountered and understood within the choral and even liturgical traditions today. But though the poetry of George Herbert was popular, and circulated widely after its publication in The Temple in 1633, it was many years before it was extensively set for choral performance, and many of the best settings are by twentieth-century composers. John Donne writes, in 'The Triple Foole', about the experience of hearing his own verse sung back to him in this way, though if it ever happened, he was probably more gratified than galled (as he claims). English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often found its way into music: for example, the lyric verse of Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser (?1552-1599), Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), and others was set and sung in the courts of Elizabeth I and James VI and I.
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