Publisher's Synopsis
Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne are the subjects of Margaret Willy's survey. Both Crashaw and Vaughan admired the poetry of Herbert, and Vaughan came profoundly under his influence. At his best, however, as Miss Willy points out, Vaughan speaks with his own distinctive voice--that of 'one whose apprehension of reality is different from Herbert's (especially in their respective attitudes to nature); who is more lyrical in the soaring of his religious exaltation or grief; and who, at his moments of intensest spiritual vision, "sees Invisibles" with a quality of mystical rapture quite outside Herbert's scope'.
In the study of Traherne (who called himself 'Felicity's perfect lover') Miss Willy concentrates mainly on his philosophy of dedicated joy as it emerges from his prose in Centuries of Meditations.
Margaret Willy has already written perceptively of Traherne in Life Was Their Cry (1950), which also included studies of Chaucer, Fielding and Browning. She has published two volumes of poems, The Invisible Sun(1946) and Every Star a Tongue (1951), and a topographical study of Devon, The South Hams (1955), and has recently edited Poems of Today: Fifth Series (1963). She lectures at the City Literary Institute and Goldsmiths' College, and edits the journal English.
