ABSTRACT
Until 1903, Thomas Traherne was known only as the author of the Protestant polemic Roman Forgeries and Christian Ethics, a well-written but basically conventional manual of morality. The first edition of his Poems was published by Bertram Dobell in 1903. His prose Centuries of Meditations appeared in 1908, followed by his Poems of Felicity, from a manuscript transcribed by his brother Philip, in 1910. Since then, the Traherne canon has been sporadically increased, by the acquisition of printed works and manuscripts not previously ascribed to him, and by a dramatic fresh discovery (see Allchin et al., below). He is now acknowledged as one of the greatest metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. Although Traherne is largely a twentieth-century discovery, the first critical priority is to remember that the most successful readings are those which set him most firmly into historical context.
