Less Well-Wrought Urns: Henry Vaughan and the Decay of the Poetic Monument

"Less Well-Wrought Urns" focuses on the concern of seventeenth-century poets with the durability of literature. Donne, Waller, and Herrick each reconsider the classical tradition that the poet created a work "more enduring than bronze," hinting that such durability was a poetic fiction. But Vaughan suggests that his poems may last as mere matter devoid of form. Vaughan imagines his poem "The Book" as a thing that, even as it falls apart, continues to yield or offer meaning. Such a theory suggests one of the appeals of material studies-that, in the absence of shared assumptions, it may be possible to forge a community based on attention to matter itself.