49-) English Literature

49-) English Literature 

John Vaughan  

Death and legacy

Henry Vaughan was acclaimed less in his lifetime than after his death, on 23 April 1695 aged 74. He was buried in the churchyard of St Bride's, Llansantffraed, Powys, where he had spent most of his life. The grave is visited by enthusiasts and has been the inspiration for other poets, including Siegfried Sassoon, Roland Mathias and Brian Morris.

The question of whether William Wordsworth knew Vaughan's work before writing his ode "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" has puzzled and fascinated those seeking the origins of English romanticism. Both poems clearly draw on a common tradition of Neoplatonic imagery to heighten their speakers' presentations of the value of an earlier time and the losses experienced in reaching adulthood. Yet Vaughan's loss is grounded in the experience of social change, experienced as loss of earlier glory as much as in personal occurrence. A war to which he was opposed had changed the political and religious landscape and separated him from his youth; his idealizing language thus has its rhetorical as well as historical or philosophical import."

Vaughan is recognised as an "example of a poet who can write both graceful and effective prose". He influenced the work of poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson and Siegfried Sassoon. The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick also named Vaughan as a key influence.

Recent attention to Vaughan's poetic achievement is a new phenomenon. Even though he published many translations and four volumes of poetry during his lifetime, Vaughan seems to have attracted only a limited readership. The second edition of his major work, Silex Scintillans, included unsold pages of the first edition. When, in 1673, his cousin John Aubrey informed him that he had asked Anthony Wood to include information about Vaughan and his brother Thomas in a volume commemorating Oxford poets (later published as Athenæ Oxonienses, 1691, 1692) his response was enthusiastic. He thanked Aubrey in a 15 June letter for remembering "such low & forgotten things, as my brother and my selfe." In a letter to Aubrey dated 28 June, Vaughan confessed, "I never was of such a magnitude as could invite you to take notice of me, & therfore I must owe all these favours to the generous measures of yor free & excellent spirit."

In spite of Aubrey's kindness and Wood's resulting account of Vaughan, neglect of the Welsh poet would continue. Wood expanded his treatment of the Vaughans in the second edition of Athenæ Oxonienses (1721) to give Henry his own section distinct from the account of his brother, but Vaughan's work was ignored almost completely in the eighteenth century. Such attention as Vaughan was to receive early in the nineteenth century was hardly favorable: he was described in Thomas Campbell's Specimens of the British Poets (1819) as "one of the harshest even of the inferior order of conceit," worthy of notice only because of "some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages like wild flowers on a barren heath."

Renewed appreciation of Vaughan came only at midcentury in the context of the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival of interest in the Caroline divines. Seeking a usable past for present-day experience of renewed spiritual devotion, Edward Farr included seven of Vaughan's poems in his anthology Gems of Sacred Poetry (1841). Awareness of Vaughan spurred by Farr's notice soon led to H. F. Lyte's edition of Silex Scintillans in 1847, the first since Vaughan's death. Yet wide appreciation of Vaughan as a poet was still to come.

Vaughan's Complete Works first appeared in Alexander B. Grosart's edition (1871), to be superseded by L. C. Martin's edition, which first appeared in 1914. Martin's 1957 revision of this edition remains the standard text. Together with F. E. Hutchinson's biography (1947) it constitutes the foundation of all more recent studies. Letters Vaughan wrote Aubrey and Wood supplying information for publication in Athenæ Oxonienses that are reprinted in Martin's edition remain the basic source for most of the specific information known about Vaughan's life and career.

Musical settings

Several poems by Vaughan from Silex Scintillans have been set to music, including:

"The Evening-Watch: Dialogue between Body and Soul" by Gustav Holst (1924)

The Eucharistic poem "Welcome, sweet and sacred feast" set by Gerald Finzi as the anthem Welcome, sweet and sacred feast in Three anthems, Op. 27 (1953)

Peace, set as the first of Hubert Parry's Songs of Farewell (1916–1918): "My soul, there is a country".

Several poems set by Daniel Jones in his cantata The Country Beyond the Stars

"Christ's Nativity" and "Peace" set by the American composer Timothy Hoekman in his 1992 sequence of three songs entitled The Nativity for soprano and orchestra

"They Are All Gone into the World of Light" set by the British composer Howard Goodall in his 2004 choral work "As Angels in some brighter dreams" and first performed by The Shrewsbury Chorale on 5 June 2004

Works

Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646), includes a translation of a Satire by the Latin poet Juvenal.

Olor Iscanus (1647, published 1651)

Silex Scintillans (1650 and 1655)

Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652)

Flores Solitudinis (1654)

Hermetical Physics (1655), translated from the Latin of Henry Nollius

The Chymists Key (1657), translated from the Latin of Henry Nollius

Several translations from the Latin contributed to Thomas Powell's Humane Industry (1661)

Thalia Rediviva (1678), a joint collection of poetry with his brother Thomas Vaughan, after Thomas's death