Toward a Herbertian Poetic: Vaughan's Rigorism and "The Publisher to the Reader" of Olor Iscanus

Toward a Herbertian Poetic: Vaughan's Rigorism and "The Publisher to the Reader" of Olor Iscanus by Jonathan Nauman Recent scholarship on the poetry of George Herbert has emphasized the connection between The Temple and the psychology of courtiership, the economics of preferment, and the sociology of the Pembroke coterie. But an examination of Herbert's poetics and the influence of this poetics in the seventeenth century and afterwards shows that the poet's sociopolitical environment did not constrain the varied and complex functions and reception of The Temple. Herbert's most careful seventeenth and eighteenth-century readers valued his work as a "communicated record of recognizable religious experience" — experience recognizable to low as well as high church readers, to Tory and Whig alike.1 It was this broad appeal of The Temple that gave credibility to Barnabas Oley's and Izaak Walton's portrayals of Herbert as an ecclesiastical exemplar for the Royalist cause. The Cavalier faction's literary ethos, its amorous soldiers and hectoring satirists, tended merely to reinforce Puritan claims about the moral decadence of their opposition. But Herbert's spirituality had been spontaneously admired both by episcopal Anglican and by Puritan readers, during the Stuart regime, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate . Neither faction dismissed the spirituality of the author of The Temple. Henry Vaughan's emulation of Herbert in Silex Scintillans has generally been seen as an early and formative example of the Royalist dynamic of Oley and Walton; but it would be just as true to say that Vaughan's Herbertian rigorism, his scrupulous inclination to write sacred verse only, "tended to detach him (no easy thing) from interest in politics."2 Wartime suffering and tragedy led the Anglo-Welsh poet to repudiate the immorality and spiritual emptiness of his ambitious imitations ofJonson, Donne, Randolph, and Habington — all sympathetic figures to contemporary Royalism — in favor of pursuing a new poetic modeled by the politically unaffiliated "Hierotheus and holy Herbert." This rigorist poetic mandated that "gifted persons" should relay the ecstatic force of achieved spiritual insight, opening a door in heaven to visions of splendor and oracle in the manner of Vaughan's Herbertian Poetic81 St. John the Divine'sRevelation.1 The hermetic "keyes and set ascents" (p. 461) of nature could have an experiential human counterpart if talented poets would only become "Converts" oí "the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert" (p. 391). In this article, I hope to clarify the significance of Vaughan's Herbertian poetic by addressing the critical dispute over whether Vaughan's claims about The Temple are likely, on biographical grounds, to be the theory informing his sacred verse. I will be tracking and responding to arguments about the prefaces and the dating of Vaughan's works, focusing especially on those which have been brought to bear on the publisher's preface to Vaughan's Olor Iscanus (1651). My basic contention will be that the twentieth-century "anti-conversionist" dismissal of the Herbertian rigorist explanation for the unauthorized publication of OlorIscanus actually replaced that explanation with suggestions rather less probable. The title page of OlorIscanus announces that the volume, "Formerly written" by Henry Vaughan, has been "Published by a Friend." Thence follows a dedication signed by the poet and dated more than three years prior to the actual registration of Olor Iscanus. "The Publisher to the Reader" comes next: It was the glorious Maro, that referr'd his Legacies to the Fire, and though Princes are seldome Executors, yet there came a Csesar to his Testament, as ifthe Act ofa Poet could not be repeal'd but by a King. / am not Reader Augustus vindex: Here is no Royall Rescue, but here is a Muse that deserves it. The Author had long agoe condemn'd these Poems to Obscuritie, and the Consumption of that Further Fate, which attends it. This Censure gave them a Gust of Death, and they have partly known that Oblivion, which our Best Labours must come to at Last. / present thee then not onely with a Book, but with a Prey, and in this kind the first Recoveries from Corruption. Here is a Flame hath been sometimes extinguished: Thoughts that have been lost and forgot, but now they...