Thomas Traherne

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Traherne, Thomas (1637-74), son of a shoemaker in Hereford. It seems possible that both his parents died while he and his brother Philip were infants, and the boys were brought up by a wealthy innkeeper, Philip Traherne, twice mayor of Hereford. They evidently had a good education, but no record exists of their attending Hereford Cathedral School. Thomas went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner in March 1653, and took his BA in October 1656. In 1657 the parliamentary commissioners appointed him rector of Credenhill, Herefordshire, but he seems not to have resided there until 1661. He was ordained in 1660, and the following year took his Oxford MA. At Credenhill he joined the religious circle centring on Susanna Hopton at Kington, for whom he was to write the Centuries. During this period he evidently travelled to Oxford to work on Roman Forgeries in the Bodleian. Probably in recognition of this work he gained his BD in 1669, and also his appointment the same year as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, lord keeper of the great seal, which necessitated his moving to London. He was buried at Teddington.

Traherne led a 'single and devout life', according to A. *Wood. He left five houses in Hereford in trust for the poor people of All Saints parish. He told *Aubrey that he had visions, seeing, on one occasion, the phantom of an apprentice who was asleep in the same house, and on another a basket of fruit sailing in the air over his bed. Traherne's Centuries and many of his poems were discovered in a notebook (now in the Bodleian) which was picked up for a few pence on a London bookstall in the winter of 1896-7 by W. T. Brooke. Bertram Dobell identified Traherne as the author, and edited the Poetic Works (1903) and the Centuries of Meditations (1908). More poems, prepared for publication by Traherne's brother Philip as 'Poems of Felicity', were discovered in a British Museum manuscript and published by H. I. Bell in 1910. A further manuscript of Select Meditations has since come to light, and is in the collection of the late J. M. Osborn. In his lifetime Traherne published Roman Forgeries (1673), which exposes the falsifying of ecclesiastical documents by the Church of Rome, concentrating in the mid-9th-century collection known as the 'False Decretals' which had, in fact, already been decisively discredited by several 16th-century scholars. His Christian Ethicks (1675) was prepared for the press before he died. But his major achievement comprises the Centuries,  the poems and the Thanksgivings, written in exuberant, unconventional verse, and at times foreshadowing *Whitman, which appeared in 1699. He expresses a rapturous joy in creation unmatched by any other 17th-century writer, and his memories, in the Centuries, of his own early intuitions are the first convincing depiction of childhood experience in English literature. He is also among the first English writers to respond imaginatively to new ideas about infinite space, and at times virtually equates infinite space with God. The boundless potential of man's mind and spirit is his recurrent theme, as is the need for adult man to regain the wonder and simplicity of the child. In both, his thought is influenced by *Neoplatonism, especially by the Hermetic books.

Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (2 vols, 1958); Christian Ethics, ed. C. L. Marks and G. R. Guffey (1968); G. Wade, Thomas Traherne (1944); K. W. Salter, Thomas Traherne, Mystic and Poet (1964).

"Metaphysical" Religious Poetry: Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan