Thomas Traherne and the Location of Intrinsic Value

Abstract

Thomas Traherne's poems and his 'Centuries of Meditation' are full of delight and rapture at the rare and startling beauty of nature and the world of creation : and sometimes he goes further and claims that the whole of nature is his, and he its sole heir. These and other claims of his are hard to square with the orthodoxy of belief to be expected in a seventeenth century Anglican priest, and might even suggest to the reader that the poet is speaking through the mouth of Christ.