Foreward

Foreward The following essays pay tribute to Vaughan's continuing value as a poet. That they should appear in a special issue of the George Herbert Journal is, of course, entirely appropriate given the Welsh poet's conscious action of affiliating with the author of The Temple, but in soliciting contributions I have not sought to make this fact a guiding principle of selection. Indeed, the main feature uniting these studies is simply the fruitful attempt made by individual authors to follow their own scholarly instincts and to say something new about Vaughan. As a result, significant phases of the poet's career go unmarked. There is virtually no discussion of the early secular lyrics, and familiar issues like Vaughan's hermeticism, his importance asa "nature" poet, and even the rich particularities of his relationship with Herbert receive little or no attention. The essays speak instead to a variety of other concerns. It is not the least of the virtues of the studies by Cedric Brown and Mary Jane Doherty that we now have, respectively, the most informed readings to date of "Daphnis: An Elegaic Eclogue" and Floros Solitudinis, two works that reflect considerable literary ambition on Vaughan's part but are often ignored or relegated to footnotes in modern critical discussions of the poet. Partly out of a desire to see the canon of Vaughan's writings extended, I have placed these essays at the beginning, but both also strike notes that resonate into the collection. Professor Brown's inclusion of Vaughan among seventeenthcentury poets "who are most aware of history" anticipates the separate discussions by Janet Halley and Boyd Berry involving politics and the self in Silex Scintillans. Professor Doherty's elevation of the Vita Paulina to a central place in Vaughan's religious development foreshadows a similar concern by Professor Halley, however differently each treats the problem of authority. If these four scholars interpret Vaughan's response to history in different ways — prophetic, liturgical, ironic, and psychological — they nonetheless agree in viewing Vaughan as intensely involved in problems of reconciling private attitudes with public action. The remaining three shorter studies address specifically literary issues. Susanne Woods places Vaughan's versification succinctly and provocatively within a broad seventeenth-century dynamic. Jeff Johnson argues for a new imagistic order unifying "The Night." And Richard Kennedy has deepened our knowledge of Vaughan's sustained interest in Owen Felltham. As the essays collected here amply illustrate, Vaughan is no longer read only for his visions of paradise and light, but his elegant distillation of Felltham's "Of the worship of Admiration" in "They are all gone into the world of light" reminds us that it is partly because of his exceptional response to mediated wonder that both the general and specialized reader can still discover pleasure in his poetry. Jonathan F.S. Post University of California — Los Angeles ...