Henry Vaughan

Born in Wales in 1621, Henry Vaughan was a poet, translator, and physician who spent most of his life in Brecknockshire. He studied at Oxford and then law in London before the English Civil War drew him back home. He is often grouped with the metaphysical poets, and modern readers especially remember him for the way his writing joins religious feeling with close attention to landscape and childhood memory.

Vaughan first published secular verse, including Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished in 1646, but his reputation rests mainly on his devotional poetry. His best-known book, Silex Scintillans, appeared in 1650, with a second part in 1655. Sources on his life note the strong influence of George Herbert, which helped shape Vaughan's turn toward more inward and spiritual writing.

He was also known as a medical practitioner in the later part of his life. Alongside his religious intensity, critics have often valued the calm, luminous quality of his language and his feeling for the natural world, which helped keep his poetry alive well beyond the seventeenth century.