The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, 1636?-1674, from the original…

Thomas Traherne wrote poetry that celebrates the sacred hidden in everyday life. Discovered centuries after his death, his verses offer a window into a mind that saw divine wonder in a child's eye, in morning light, in the act of breathing itself. Traherne's voice is singular in 17th-century English poetry: neither the metaphysical wit of Donne nor the ornate courtly manner of his contemporaries, but something closer to pure ecstatic praise. His poems dwell in the luminous moment before experience becomes tarnished by custom, inviting readers to recover the world as if for the first time. This collection, carefully reconstructed from surviving manuscripts, preserves work that might have been lost entirely. Traherne died in 1674 nearly unknown, and his poems languished in obscurity until the early 1900s. Now readers can access this remarkable survivor: a poet who wrote with the joy of someone discovering that the universe is more beautiful than reason permits. For anyone who has ever felt that ordinary life contains extraordinary depth, these poems offer language to name that mystery.