SOURCE: "Important Characteristics of Vaughan's Style," in Henry Vaughan, Twayne Publishers, 1978, pp. 31-45.

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.

As mentioned above, Henry Vaughan is regarded as a Metaphysical poet. He is considered an heir to the "school" of Donne and Herbert on the strength of his best-known work, Silex Scintillans. The hallmarks of Metaphysical writers are their personal intensity, intellectual awareness, and their habit for minute analysis of experiences, feelings, ideas, perceptions. Their verse—in contrast to that of the Cavaliers with whom Vaughan served his poetic apprenticeship—is marked by stanzaic and metrical irregularity, by colloquial diction...