*t Studies in the Eag ZisA Paissance

ELR bibliographical articles are intended to combine a topical review of research with a reasonably complete bibliography. Scholarship is organized by authors or titles of anonymous works. Items included represent the combined entries listed in the annual bibliographies published by PMLA, SP, YWES, and MHRA from 1945 through, in the present instance, 1971, supplemented by a selective list of general studies and additional annual bibliographies. Preliminary enumerative bibliography and editorial work are done by Terence P. Logan, Director, and Elizabeth H. Hageman at the Renaissance English Bibliography Center, Uni- versity of New Hampshire, which is supported by funds from the Graduate School and the Department of English, University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.

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R E C E N T STUDIES I N TRAHERNE

J E R O M E S. DEES

M. MARGOLIOUTH’S edition of the Centuries, Poems, arid Thanks- givings, 2 vols. (1958) is standard. The standard edition of Christian Ethicks is by Carol L. Marks and George Robert Guffey (1968). George Guffey has edited a facsimile of Meditatiorzs on the S ix Days o f Creation, 1717, ARS No.

119 (1966). There is no modern edition of Roman Forgeries, and much of Traherne’s work remains in manuscript. A Concordance to the Poetry o f Thomas Traherne by George R. Guffey (1974) is based on this edition.

The following discussion uses three abbreviations: D = the Dobell Folio holograph (now Bod.~s.Eng.poet.c.42); F = “Poems of Felicity” in Philip Traherne’s hand (B. M. Burney ~ s . 3 9 2 ) ; CYB = Church‘s Year Book (Bod.Ms.Eng.th.e.51).

I. GENERAL

A. Biographical. All of the known “Materials for Traherne’s Biography” are collected in the “Introduction” to Margoliouth‘s edition; these and his brief “Summary Biography” depend in part on Angela Russell’s “The Life of Thomas Traherne,” R E S , N.S. 6 (1955), 34-43. Lynn Sauls, “Traheme’s Hand in the Credenhill Records,” Library, 24 (1969), 50, offers minor corrections. Gladys I. Wade’s Thomas Traherne (1944) subjects the known facts to speculations based on her assumption that the personal references in Centuries and

190 English Literary Renaissance the poems may be taken literally. Many critical studies include brief discussions of the biographical materials.

B. General Critical Studies. The only English work to examine Traherne’s entire corpus, published and unpublished, is Stanley Stewart’s T h e Expanded Voice: T h e A r t .f Thonias Traherne (1970). Stewart finds in Traherne’s work an inipulsc to expaid to the point of dissolution the boundaries limiting human experience of the divine, chiefly the boundaries of time and space. He stresses Traherne’s response to contemporary intellectual currents: Roman Forgeries has a greater “sharpness and precision” than other seventecnth-century polemical treatises; Christian Ethicks is “more deeply a part of the Pyrrhonian crisis than has generally been recognized”; not only the Psalms, but also biblical conimentaries provide models for Traherne’s meditational mode. Much of Stewart’s analysis is struc- tural. The organization of Centuries, he says, is “alogical,” with boundaries between discrete mcditations “quite tenuous”; Traherne’s basic principle of structure is “addi- tive,” the plan altering as meditation unfolds. The speaker in Traherne’s works tends to be a “literary composite,” and many of his works, especially CYB and Centuries, seek a “shared authorship” with the reader.

Few scholars have made sufficient use of the most balanced evaluation of Traherne, Robert Ellrodt’s L’inspiration personnelle et l’esprit du tenrps ehez les pobtes nr6taphysiqnes anglais, preinii-rc partie, tome II (1960). In his considcration of the entire range of Tra- heme’s thinking, Eurodt brings to bear a vast knowledge of Neoplatonic philosophy on such issues as Traherne’s egocentricity and solipsism, his theories of knowledge and perception, his notion of spirit as act, and his concepts of eternity and infinity. Ellrodt compares Trahcrne to Donne, Herbert, Cowley, Marveu, and Vaughan, distinguishing between “poi-te niCtaphysique” and “pokte mftaphysicien.”

Itrat-Husain’s T h e Mystical Element in the A!etaphysical Poets ofthe Seventeenth Century (1948; rpt. 1966) explains Traherne’s mystical thought in layman’s terms. K. W. Salter’s Thonzas Trahcrne: Mystic and Poet (1964) looks mainly at the Centuries in terms of Evelyn Underhill’s five stages of mysticism and stresses Traherne’s scholastic affinities; see, however, the rcview by Carol L. Marks, RN, 19 (1966), 60-62. The chapters on Tra- herne in Helen C. White’s The Metaphysical Poets: A Stirdy in Religious Experience (1936; rpt. 1962) provide 3 concise introduction, though some of her judgments need qualifica- tion in light of subsequent discoveries.

A. L. Clemcnts, “Thomas Traherne: A Chronological Bibliography,” LC, 3 5 (1969), 36-51, is virtually complete through 1967, including unpublished dissertations and masters’ theses, book rcviews, and selections in anthologies. It may be complemented by George Robert Guffey’s Traherne and the Seventeenth-Century Platonists, 1900-1966, Eliza- bethan Bibliographies Supplements, XI (1969). The books by Wade (I, A), Jordan (11, A), Sherrington (11, B), and Willy (“See also,’’ I, B) contain selective bibliographies.

11. S T U D I E S O F I N D I V I D U A L WORKS

The books above by Stewart, Ellrodt, Salter, and White discuss Centuries and the poems and should be consulted.

A. Centuries .f Meditations. In T h e Paradise Within: Studies in Varzhan, Traherne, and Milton (1964), Louis L. Martz reads the Centuries in terms of Augustinian theories of

lerome S. Dees 191 illumination and finds Traherne’s literary method, especially the device of repetition, similar to that of the Confessions. He proposes a five-part structure for the Centuries analogous to the “three-fold way” of Bonaventure’s “Augustinian synthesis” Itinerarinm mentis in Deum. In a review in JEGP, 64 (1965), 732-38, John M. Wdace voices reserva- tions. Gerard H. Cox takes issue with Martz in “Traherne’s Centuries: A Platonic Devo- tion of ‘Divine Philosophy’,” MP, 69 (197i), 10-24; he feels that the basis for organization in the Centuries is a Platonic synthesis such as Theophilus Gale’s. For Cox, however, structure is obscured by detail, and Centuries “must be judged an interesting failure.”

Richard Douglas Jordan argues in The Temple qfEternity: Thomas Traherne’s Philosophy o f Time (197.2) that Traherne’s concept of time as a successive duration of acts existing in eternity reflects a Christian tradition going back to Boethius. Traherne’s philosophy of “eternity-time” underlies his typology of the four estates, which provide the principle of structure for the Centuries. In The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (1968), Joan Webber considers the style of the Centuries as an expression of the self in “communication and communion” with others and with God. She finds the “urgency” of Traherne’s themes “wholly and uniquely revealed everywhere in his style.”

B. Poenrs. Most recent discussions of Traherne’s poetry have been influenced by John Malcolm Wallace’s contention in “Thomas Traherne and the Structure of Meditation,” ELH, 25 (1958), 79-89, that the poems of D “constitute a complete five-part meditation which fulfills all the major conditions of a Jesuit exercise.”

A. L. Clements’ The Mystical Poetry o f Thomas Traherne (1969), while limited to the poems in D, is nevertheless the most detailed and learned study of the poetry. Viewing the poems in context of world-wide mysticism, Clements finds in D a three-part structure conforming to the three stages of the Christian Myth of Regeneration: Innocence, Fall, and Redemption. Clements observes a “double voice” in the poems: the “assumed” voice of a man still traveling via niystica and the voice of one who has already “found his way home.” A chapter on “Traherne’s Poetic” suggests that the poet’s use of the “catalog” is an attempt to attain a “cliildlike, literal” language which is a t the same time symbolic. There are lengthy analyses of such poems as “The Preparative,” “My Spirit,” and “Thoughts” I-IV.

In Mystical Symbolism in the Poetry o f Thomas Traherne (1970), Allison Sherrington devotes chapters to seven classes of traditional mystical symbols, showing where Tra- herne is unorthodox and how his symbolic valuations “vary to suit his varying purposes.” She finds that Traherne “makes remarkably little use of the structural possibilities of the symbol . . . in the architecture of a poem.”

Stanley Stewart (see I, B) proposes for poems in D a structure different from that of Wallace or Clements. Stewart assumes that D represents Traherne’s final intention and brings up once more the possibility that Philip made use of a third, still lost, MS in putting together F. The contrasting possibility, that F represents Traherne’s latest intentions and shows him moving in “new directions,” is presented by Jean-Jacques Denonain in Thhnes etformes de la pobsie dtaphysique: Etude d’un aspect de la litterature anglais an dix- septihme si$cle (1956) and rciterated by Ben Drake in “Thomas Traherne’s Songs of Innocence,” MLQ, 3 1 (i970), 492-503. Malcolm M. Day’s examination of Traherne’s use of paradox and abstraction in “ ‘Naked Truth‘ and the Language of Thomas Tra- herne,” SP, 68 (ig71), 305-25, complements Martz on “repetition” (11, A) and Clements on the “catalog.”

192 English Literary Renaissance C. Selected Topics. Much recent criticism clarifies Traherne’s position against the seven- teenth-century background. The influence of the “new science” is examined by Rosalie L. Colie in “Thomas Traherne and the Infinite: The Ethical Compromise,’’ HLQ, 21 (i957), 69-82. Robert Ellrodt’s “Scientific Curiosity and Metaphysical Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” MP, 61 (1964), 180-97, classifies ways in which poetic inspiration is affected by correspondences between “several attitudes to science” and “psychological differences.”

The fullest discussion of Traherne’s relation to the Cambridge Platonists is Carol L. Marks’s “Thomas Traherne and Cambridgc Platonism,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 521-34. Emphasizing Traherne’s “individual variations” in terms of his views on the creation, on the freedom of the will, on the value of human reason, on space and idinity, and on the effects of the doctrine of plenitude, Marks concludes that “in his mature years Traherne reinforced his early intuition through study of Neoplatonisni.” The subject is discussed with different emphases by Robert Ellrodt (I, B).

The major lines of influence on Traherne have been clearly drawn in the series of articles by Carol L. Marks listed below (III, A). To these should be added her “Thomas Traherne and Hermes Trismegistus,” RN, 19 (1966), 118-31. Lynn Sauls indicates in PQ, 50 (1971), 161-74, that a “profuse” use of Puente’s Meditations has implications both for the study of Traherne’s style and for the ordering of his canon.

The issue of Traherne’s Pelagianism (see Salter, I, B) is set to rest by Patrick Grant’s “Original Sin and the Fau of Man in Thomas Traherne,” ELH, 38 (ig7i), 40-61. Malcolm M. Day suggests in “Traherne and the Doctrine of Pre-existence,” SP, 65 (1968), 81-97, that Traherne believes in a qualified concept of pre-existence.

D. State of Criticism. Twentieth-century criticism of Traherne falls naturally into three phases: initial enthusiasm for his Wordsworth-like lyric poetry; a change in the forties and fifties to a preference for his “prose-poetry”; a preoccupation in the last decade with (a) Traherne’s intellectual position in the seventeenth century and (b) the structural principles in his works. Despite the work done in (a) the impact of the “new science” on Traherne is still not clear, and his relation to “Baroque” art and music has bcen almost totally neglected. Surprisingly, no full study of Traherne’s prose style exists. There has been no published study of his experiments with rhythm in the Thanksgivings. His relation to Herbert is inadequately understood, as is his place within English religious “enthusiasm.” Scholarly editions of Roman F o r p i e s and CYB are needed; and further study of both should enhance our knowledge of Traherne’s art and intellect. The most immediate need is for a study which will synthesize the large amount of recent scholar- ship into an evaluation of the poetry. The fact that thirteen dissertations were written on Traherne in the last seven years covered by this bibliography certainly indicates lively interest in his work.

111. C A N O N

A. Major Works. The only problems offered by the canon are in the difficulty of dating the MSS. The recently discovered MS of “Select Meditations,” described by James M. Osborne in TLS, October 8, 1964, p. 928, and still unprinted, is generally agreed to be earlier than the Centuries. The remaining unpublished MSS are described briefly in Mar-