SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan, 1622-1695," in Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, second edition, Cambridge at the University Press, 1957, pp. 71-89.

Bennett was an English educator who wrote studies on the works of Virginia Woolf (1945) and George Eliot (1948). She is also the author of Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (1934; revised 1953). In the following excerpt from that work, she offers a thematic overview of Vaughan's poetry, comparing it with that of Herbert.

Vaughan was fascinated by the phrases of other poets. This is not unusual in a young poet; but the habit of borrowing continued with Vaughan to the end. At first his borrowings strike no roots, they are picked blossoms that have caught his fancy, later they are young shoots that bloom anew in his poems. In his two collections of secular poems, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646) and Olor Iscanus (1651), the most...