Henry Francis Lyte - Significance

Significance

Leon Litvack has written in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that although Lyte's "poetic energies were directed at scripturally and evangelically minded audiences, his lyric gift was universally appreciated. The example of ‘Abide with me’ is instructive: intensely personal and contemplative, yet nationally popular—even being sung (always, after its publication in 1861, to W. H. Monk's tune, ‘Eventide’) on secular occasions such as at football matches, and especially, since 1927, at the English cup final." The 20th-century hymnologist Erik Routley referred to the "much-loved H. R. Lyte" who "though scriptural and evangelical in his emphases, always writes good literature and is rarely deserted by an exquisite lyric gift. Perhaps the centrally 'romantic' hymn of all hymns is the intensely personal yet, as it has proved, wholly universal hymn, 'Abide with me.'"