Paradoxical Persona: Henry Vaughan's Self-Fashioning

Abstract

The extent to which Vaughan's authorial persona, from his earliest work to Silex Scintillans, reflects changes in his world in light of the Civil War and its aftermath has often been either underestimated or oversimplified by his modern readers. Implicit in the material I shall present in this essay is the view that religious quietude was not the whole of Vaughan's aim as a creative writer, though it may have been an important aspect of it. Nor was he merely an Anglican propagandist, though opposition to the tendencies in his enemies that issued in the Act the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales probably influenced his work. I shall first sketch in developments in Vaughan criticism over the last few decades and then deal with the paradoxes of his authorial persona. Canon E E. Hutchinson (in this case the ecclesiastical title, suggesting a continuity with Vaughan's Victorian critics, is perhaps apposite) published, in 1947, a critical biography of Vaughan based on his own researches and those of Gwenllian Morgan and Louise Guiney. Hutchinson begins his chapter on Silex Scintillans with the remark that for the purpose of assessing his best work ... we concentrate now on those poems which are unspoiled by topical allusions and which are, by comparison, independent of time and place and circumstance, and closes the chapter with the judgment that there is a about these poems of Vaughan that is their chief attraction. The vexations of the time that had so often fretted him and brought discord and harsh notes into his less successful poems have here faded into the background as he stays himself on the thought of the ultimate deliverance of the soul in the peace of the infinite and the eternal.' Hutchinson's view of overt political reference as a mark of Vaughan's less successful work and his concentration on poems of quiet serenity that could be read as timeless set the tone Vaughan criticism as the academic engine began to turn over again after the Second World War.