Unlike the major figures of the "Metaphysical Revival," John Donne and George Herbert, whose works were widely known and discussed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas Traherne is almost wholly a discovery of twentieth-century scholarship. In his own lifetime he published only one book, Roman Forgeries (1673), and, as a clergyman he did not rise to prominence. So obscure is his background, in fact, that scholars once argued about what family and even what part of the country he came from. Biographers have not gone far beyond Anthony Wood, who in Athenæ Oxonienses (1691, 1692) claimed that Traherne was of modest parentage from the Welsh border area, that he attended Brasenose College, Oxford, took an M. A. in 1661, and was soon assigned a living in a parish near Hereford. Later, he was made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, a connection which was to...