Henry Vaughan Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Arthur L. Clements

Critical Essay by Arthur L. Clements

SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan: 'I saw Eternity the other night'," in Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 129-72.

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 illustrate the kind of study of individual poems necessary for determining the nature and extent of Vaughan's mysticism."

As with Donne's and Herbert's poetry, critical opinion concerning meditation and contemplation in Henry Vaughan's poetry is strongly divided. First, there are those critics, most notably Louis Martz, who argue ably and knowledgeably that Vaughan is a meditative poet; secondly, those, like Helen White, Itrat Husain, R. A. Durr, Cleanth Brooks, H. J. Oliver, and Anthony Low, who adduce considerable scholarship to establish Vaughan not primarily as a meditative...
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