Thomas Traherne

Thomas Traherne was an English poet, Anglican cleric, theologian and religious writer who lived from about 1636 to 1674. The intense, scholarly spirituality of his writings has led some parts of the Anglican Communion to commemorate him on 10 October or 27 September, the anniversary of his burial. He is best known today for the Centuries of Meditations, a collection of short paragraphs reflecting on Christian life and ministry, philosophy, happiness, desire and childhood, first published in 1908 after being rediscovered in manuscript ten years earlier; his poetry was likewise first published in 1903 and 1910. His prose works include Roman Forgeries, Christian Ethics, and A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God. His writings frequently explore the glory of creation and an intimate relationship with God, conveying an ardent, almost childlike love of God, and have been compared to similar themes in the later work of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins; his treatment of the natural world evokes Romanticism two centuries before the Romantic movement.