Henry Vaughan
born April 17, 1622, Llansantffraed,
Breconshire, Wales
died April 23, 1695, Llansantffraed
Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic remarkable for the
range and intensity of his spiritual intuitions.
Educated at Oxford and studying law in London,
Vaughan was recalled home in 1642 when the first
Civil War broke out, and he remained there the
rest of his life.
In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of
Juvenal Englished was published, followed by a
second volume in 1647. Meanwhile he had been
“converted” by reading the religious poet George
Herbert and gave up “idle verse.” His Silex
Scintillans (1650; “The Glittering Flint,”
enlarged 1655) and the prose Mount of Olives:
or, Solitary Devotions (1652) show the depth of
his religious convictions and the authenticity
of his poetic genius. Two more volumes of
secular verse were published, ostensibly without
his sanction; but it is his religious verse that
has lived. He also translated short moral and
religious works and two medical works in prose.
At some time in the 1650s he began to practice
medicine and continued to do so throughout his
life.
Though Vaughan borrowed phrases from Herbert
and other writers and wrote poems with the same
titles as Herbert’s, he was one of the most
original poets of his day. Chiefly he had a gift
of spiritual vision or imagination that enabled
him to write freshly and convincingly, as is
illustrated in the opening of “The World”:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a Great Ring of pure and endless light
He was equally gifted in writing about
nature, holding the old view that every flower
enjoys the air it breathes and that even sticks
and stones share man’s expectation of
resurrection. The Romantic poet William
Wordsworth may have been influenced by Vaughan.
Vaughan’s poetry was largely disregarded in
his own day and for a century after his death.
He shared in the revival of interest in
17th-century metaphysical poets in the 20th
century. The standard edition is Works (1914;
2nd ed., 1957), edited by L.C. Martin.
