Heavenly Perspectives, Mirrors of Eternity: Thomas Traherne's Yearning Subject

Abstract

The chance appearance in a London bookstall of Thomas Traherne's manu scripts of poems and meditations1 early in the twentieth century coincided with Modernist interests in seventeenth-century poetry.2 This coincidence nat urally included Traherne in Modernist studies of lyric poetry. Modernist ahis toricism, however, relegated Traherne to a secondary place among already established poets such as Donne, Herbert, and Marvell: his work did not con form to standards that established poetry as classic, such as compressed met aphors, double entendres, telescoping images, and formal unity. In his essay Mystic and Politician as Poet (Listener 3 [1930]: 590-91), T. S.Eliot exercises his Modernist detachment from cultural context, deeming Traherne more a mystic than a poet,3 a writer attentive to contemporary religious and political ideology at the cost of language and form. Thus, Eliot dismisses Traherne from the pantheon of worthy poets. Ironically, while modernist requirements for in clusion into the canon eschew historical and cultural circumstance, the cul tural circumstance of Traherne's discovery is the very criterion that placed him