Traherne, Thomas
Traherne, Thomas (1637 - 1674)
After lying in manuscript for over two centuries, two autograph volumes of poetry and prose by Thomas Traherne were discovered in a London bookstall in 1896 and were thought by A. B. Grosart to be the work of Vaughan. After Dr. Grosart died, the MSS came into the hands of the bookseller Bertram Dobell, who identified their author and published the Poems in 1903, the prose Centuries of Meditations (`century' meaning one hundred passages) in 1908. Then another volume, containing a considerable number of unpublished poems, was discovered in the British Museum and published by H. J. Bell as Poems of Felicity. Traherne's capitalization and punctuation are so individual and deliberate that the text has been modernized less than other texts of the period.