Henry Vaughan Summary

The British poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), one of the finest poets of the metaphysical school, wrote verse marked by mystical intensity, sensitivity to nature, tranquility of tone, and power of wordi... Read more

Katherine Philips, who wrote under the pseudonym Orinda, was a seventeenth-century English poet whose work was highly regarded during her lifetime and by John Keats during the nineteenth century. She ... Read more

Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term... Read more

Martin was an English scholar who edited the definitive edition of Vaughan's canon, the two-volume Works of Henry Vaughan (1916). In the following excerpt from an essay contributed to a disting... Read more

Marila was a prominent American scholar of English Renaissance poetry and the poetry of John Milton. He edited The Secular Poems of Henry Vaughan (1958). In the following excerpt, Marilla examines poe... Read more

Bennett was an English educator who wrote studies on the works of Virginia Woolf (1945) and George Eliot (1948). She is also the author of Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (19... Read more

Pettet is an English scholar who has written at length on the accomplishments of Shakespeare, Vaughan, and John Keats. In the following chapter from his study Of Paradise and Light, he compares the tw... Read more

Brooks was the most prominent of the New Critics, an influential movement in American criticism which also included Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and which paralleled a critical movement in Englan... Read more

Martz is an American educator and prominent scholar of English and American poetry. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in PMLA in 1963, he examines Vaughan's poetry in ... Read more

Friedenreich was an American educator who published essays on various English poets and dramatists, including Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, William Shakespeare, among others. In the following exce... Read more

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in a different form in Studia Mystica in 1987, Clements seeks "to clarify the question of mysticism in Vaughan's poetry and to... Read more

A Scottish man of letters, MacDonald was a key figure in shaping the fantastic and mythopoeic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such novels as Phantastes (1858) and The Princess an... Read more

Saintsbury was a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century English literary historian and critic. Hugely prolific, he composed histories of English and European literature as well as numerous critic... Read more

Thompson was one of the most important poets of the Catholic Revival in nineteenth-century English literature. Often compared to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, especially Richard Crashaw,... Read more