6 - The Psalter in verse and poetry

Summary

‘FIDELITY RATHER THAN POETRY’

Thomas Becon, so often a repeater of traditional ideas, declared the book of Psalms to be ‘the treasure house of the Holy Scripture’ because ‘it containeth whatsoever is necessary for a Christian man to know. There is nothing in the law, nothing in the prophets, nothing in the preaching of Christ and his apostles, that this noble minstrel, king and prophet [David] doth not decant ate and sing with most goodly and manifest words' (Works, III: 144v). As both essential teaching and as poetry, the Psalms were central to early English literary ideas of the Bible in ways that the prose Bible could not be.

Though the division is crude and in some cases inappropriate, the verse Psalters may be divided into two groups, versifications and poetifications, according to whether the teaching or the poetry is paramount. Another way of describing the division is between versions for the people and versions for the literati. The versifications for the people fit interestingly with the prose translations, for, despite being in a blatantly literary form, there is a strong anti-literary or anti-aesthetic element to them, and they were generally scorned by the literati.

Not only were the Psalms believed to be central expressions of biblical truth, but there was also a long tradition of their popular use, and, being relatively brief, they could more easily be published in a form suited to the private individual than a whole Bible or even the NT. Almost all the Psalters were published in cheap formats that were easy and convenient to own.