Vaughan, << vawn, >> Henry (1622-1695), was one of the leading British poets of the 1600’s. His poetic career began with Poems (1646), a volume of imitative, nonreligious verse. After a religious conversion prompted by his reading of the English poet George Herbert and the death of a brother, Vaughan wrote Silex Scintillans (The Flashing Flint). It was first published in 1650 and enlarged in 1655. With this Latin title, Vaughan renounced flashy “poetical wit” and referred to the way God’s love can strike fire into even the stoniest human heart. He described such moments of spiritual illumination with imagery derived from nature and the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato. Silex Scintillans includes Vaughan’s great poem “The World,” a complex meditation on how he “saw Eternity the other night,/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”
Vaughan was born on April 17, 1622, in Wales and retired there about 1650. He lived out his life as a country doctor. Vaughan died on April 23, 1695.
See also Herbert, George; Metaphysical Poets; “Retreat, The.
