ABSTRACT

An Collins may be almost as little known today as she was in the seventeenth century, but then at about the same time that she was writing, a fellow poet, Thomas Traherne, was also nearly anonymous; and like Collins, he remained so until the twentieth century. But in the intervening centuries, while Traherne’s poetry remained in manuscript (his Roman Forgeries and Christian Ethicks, prose works, were published in the seventeenth century), selections from Divine Songs and

1 Sir Thomas Browne, “Hydriotaphia, Urne Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk,” Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 151.