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."

An English literary scholar, Thomas was Head of the Department of English at Westhill College, affiliated with the University of Birmingham, for over a quarter century. His areas of specialization include seventeenth-century literature, twentieth-century drama, religious poetry of all periods, and Shakespeare's works. In the following chapter from his book on Vaughan, Thomas argues "that it is impossible to understand Vaughan's spiritual vision without recognising the enormous impact w...

Kermode is an English critic whose career combines modern critical methods with expert traditional scholarship, particularly in his work on Shakespeare. He characterizes all human knowledge as poetic, or fictive: constructed by humans and affected by the perceptual and emotional limitations of human consciousness. Because perceptions of life and the world change, so does human knowledge and the meaning attached to things and events. Thus, there is no single fixed reality over time. Similarly, true or �...

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 England led by I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and William Empson. Although the various New Critics did not subscribe to a single set of principles, all believed that a work of literature had to be examined as an object in itself through the close analysis of symbol, image, and metaphor. For the New Critics, literary w...

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 the first edition of Silex Scintillans finding it to reflect the Augustinian concept of in terior "illumination."

An Australian-born American scholar of English literature, Simmonds is also the editor of Milton Studies, a play-wright, and the author of an important study of Vaughan's accomplishment, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (1972). In this work, he declines to follow "the usual custom of treating the secular and sacred verse as separate categories; rather, he examines Vaughan's poetic, intellectual, and religious development and their "essentially organi...

An English educator and translator, Leishman was the author of The Metaphysical Poets (1934) and Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1961). In the following excerpt from a reprint edition of the former, he surveys Vaughan's poetry and highlights several key thematic characteristics.

Hutchinson was an English academic and scholar who wrote what is recognized as the most complete biographical and critical treatment of Vaughan to date. His Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation was composed using research materials—notebooks, files, genealogies, copies of legal documents, magazine articles, and correspondence—assembled by Gwenllian Morgan and Louise Guiney, both of whom died before their own proposed biography of Vaughan could be written. In the following excerpt from his...

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 excerpt from his monograph on Vaughan, he examines key characteristics of Vaughan's style, paying particular attention to the influence of the poet's Welsh heritage, the Bible, and Hermetic philosophy.

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 poems from the two editions of Silex Scintillans as well as Poems and Olor Iscanus. His purpose is threefold: to demonstrate that Vaughan 's secular verse is characterized by craftmanship that is distinctly similar to and nearly as skillful as that of the religious poetry, that (contrary to the claims of o...

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 (1934; revised 1953). In the following excerpt from that work, she offers a thematic overview of Vaughan's poetry, comparing it with that of Herbert.

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 distinguished Festschrift, he explores the sources of the theme of pre-natal existence in Vaughan's poetry and the influence of that theme upon Wordsworth. He concludes that though the evidence for Vaughan's direct influence upon Wordsworth is inconclusive, Vaughan inherited a rich tradition of literatu...

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 two editions of Silex Scintillans (which he calls Part I and Part II) to demonstrate their thematic "unity and continuity" as reflections of the poet's spiritual beliefs. Pettet concludes, "Part II is both a continuation from Part I and distinct from it, though we must not exaggerate ...

In the following excerpt, Oliver takes issue with Frank Kermode's 1950 essay on Vaughan, contending that "Vaughan makes a mystic's use of the poet's language." (Kermode had held that Vaughan "is from the beginning a poet with his roots in poetry rather than in religious experience….")

More was an American critic who, along with Irving Babbitt, formulated the doctrines of New Humanism in early twentieth-century American thought. The New Humanists were strict moralists who adhered to traditional conservative values in reaction to an age of scientific and artistic self-expression. In regard to literature, they believed a work's implicit reflection of support for the classic ethical norms to be of as much importance as its aesthetic qualities. In the following excerpt from an essay o...

Grosart was a nineteenth-century English clergyman and editor of numerous collections of works by British authors from the period 1400 to 1800. He published editions of the works of Richard Crashaw, Samuel Daniel, Sir Philip Sidney, and several other literary figures. In the following excerpt from his prefatory essay in volume two of Vaughan's collected works, Grosart compares Vaughan's accomplishment favorably to that of George Herbert.

Blunden was associated with the Georgians, an early twentieth-century group of English poets who reacted against the prevalent contemporary mood of disillusionment and the rise of artistic modernism by seeking to return to the pastoral, nineteenth-century poetic traditions associated with William Wordsworth. In this regard, much of Blunden's poetry reflects his love of the sights, sounds, and ways of rural England. As a literary critic and essayist, he often wrote of the lesser-known figures of the ...

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 and the Goblin (1872) are considered classics of fantasy literature. These works have influenced C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other seekers of divine truth, adventure, and escape from mortal limitations. During his long, prolific career, MacDonald also wrote in several other ...

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 Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. He introduced a number of terms and concepts that strongly affected critical thought in his lifetime, among them the ide...

In the following excerpt, Durr illuminates the nature of the mystic experience and its relationship to reality, and offers high praise of Vaughan as one of the few individuals in human history who have possessed the faculties and genius to formulate the mystical vision of Reality "in words of poetic effect."

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, he is best known for his poem "The Hound of Heaven" (1893), which displays his characteristic themes of spiritual struggle, redemption, and transcendent love. Like other writers of the fin de siècle period, Thompson wrote poetry and prose noted for rich verbal effects and a devotion to th...

Lyte was an English clergyman and minor poet who published The Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations of Henry Vaughan along with the following assessment of Vaughan's achievement shortly before his death in 1847.

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 critical works on individual authors, styles, and periods. In the following excerpt from the second (1890) edition of his History of Elizabethan Literature (reprinted several times during its publishing history), Saintsbury briefly dismisses Vaughan as a poet lacking sustained poetic skill, depth, and originality.

Guiney was an American poet, literary essayist, and Vaughan scholar who edited and published an edition of The Mount of Olives in 1902. In 1895 she began corresponding with a fellow admirer of Vaughan, Gwenllian Morgan, and together they made plans to publish an edition of Vaughan's poetry, with biographical essays by the editors. This work was not completed during the lifetime of either woman; but after their deaths, the notes they had compiled in preparation were used by F. E. Hutchinson in his de...

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 was hailed as "the matchless Orinda" by her contemporaries. In the following set of iambic pentameter couplets, which preface Olor Iscanus (1651), Orinda eloquently celebrates Vaughan's accomplishment as a poet.

Williams was a friend and admirer of Vaughan. In the following poem, which prefaces Thalia Rediviva (1678), he praises Vaughan as one blessed by the poetic Muse to lead readers into the path of Virtue. (Williams's "an immortal offering" concludes an allusion to Vaughan's translation of Claudian's "Phoenix" in Thalia Rediviva.)