physician translator author poet
Henry Vaughan was born on April 17, 1621, in Newton St. Bridget, Brecknockshire, Wales, Great Britain.
His paternal grandfather was the owner of Tretower Court. His paternal grandmother was the natural daughter of Thomas Somerset, who spent some 24 years in the Tower of London for his adherence to Catholicism.
Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas received their early education in Wales and in 1638 matriculated at Jesus College, Oxford.
Unlike his brother, who remained to receive a degree and become a noted philosopher, Henry left Oxford without a degree to pursue a law career in London.
Later in life he practiced medicine, and he probably studied it during these years. Vaughan apparently began writing poetry in the same decade.
It seems likely that Henry Vaughan fought on the king's side in the Welsh campaign of 1645, and was present at the battle of Rowton Heath.
In 1646 he published his Poems, half of which consisted of a translation of Juvenal's tenth satire.
The next year he wrote the preface to a second volume, Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk), which did not appear until 1651; like the earlier volume, it comprises secular poems and translations and shows little inspiration.
Some of the best poems in it are "The Morning Watch, " "The Retreat, " "Childhood, " "The Dawning, " and "Peace. "
Vaughan is a poet in whom it is easy to trace the influence of others, particularly the wit of John Donne and the quiet, understated, dramatic technique of George Herbert, to whom he credited his religious conversion.
At its weakest Vaughan's verse is too plainly derivative, and not infrequently a poem remains valuable today for no more than a stanza or a line.
At his best, however—a best that created some of the most beautiful lyrics in English poetry— his voice is profoundly personal, and his ability to maintain the emotional tension of a poem can be impressive.
His genius can best be suggested by the opening of "The World, " in which a mystical vision is successfully conveyed in the boldest tone of understatement: "I saw eternity the other night/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm as it was bright…. "
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
(Less worldly than Donne or Herbert, to whyom he is indebt...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
(Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II is presented ...)
In 1648 Henry Vaughan seems to have undergone a religious conversion, perhaps connected with the death of a brother that year. The major poetry of Vaughan, all religious in nature, was published in 1650 and 1655 in the two parts of Silex scintillans (Sparkling Flint).
Much of his power derives from a mystical Christian Neoplatonism that he does not share with his poetic masters and that reveals itself in images of dazzling light, in cosmic visions, and in a fusion of Platonic concepts, such as the descent of man from the "sea of light" of his childhood to an alienated adulthood, expressed in biblical motifs, images, and language.
Henry Vaughan was regarded, says Wood, as an " ingenious person, but proud and humorous. "
As she survived into Vaughan's boyhood, there may have been some direct Catholic influence upon his early nurturing.
He spent some 24 years in the Tower of London for his adherence to Catholicism.
His courtship with the wife is reflected in "Upon the Priory Grove", in his first volume of poetry, Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646).
