Henry More Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Henry More

In his own day Henry More was an important writer of prose tracts, read by many, and he was reputed by his eighteenth-century biographer Richard Ward to have been at one point in the Restoration the best-selling author in London bookstalls. His poetry, however, was popular mainly with his Cambridge students and, if one can believe his biographer, soldiers in the civil wars. More apparently never believed his poetry would elicit a large following, and to this day he has lacked even a small coterie of fervid readers who would, like John Donne's, fan embers of appreciation into flame. More also suffers because he wrote at the same time as John Milton, Robert Herrick, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden. More's nineteenth-century editor Alexander B. Grosart suggested More's poems deserve more attention than they have received. Indeed, Cambridge Platonism cannot be adequately understood without an appreciation of the poems, because anyone who attempts to fathom seventeenth-century Neoplatonism through only the prose of Ralph Cudworth and John Smith loses vital access to content that only Henry More's allegorical poetry can elucidate.

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