What are the ways that a poet relates to the words of other writers? Echoes perhaps from texts, points of conversation, or phrases captured through attention to rivals, friends, acquaintances and heroes. It's the language category literary critics broadly lump together as 'discourse'. Scintilla 24 serendipitously pursues these subtle indications of word ex- change in the work of Henry Vaughan, both in his contemporaries and in the ongoing effect that his language has had on poets that have followed. An abiding concern of the journal has been to trace the connectedness of the twin Vaughan brothers, Henry and Thomas, to the land they called their home, the undulating hills, wildlife, and breathtaking beauty, history and myth of the Usk Valley in Breaconshire. Their shared experiences, the devastation of loss in the civil wars, the destruction of so many familiar social, political and religious structures, left their mark as the men strug- gled to maintain an identity and continuity of faith. The men's reinvention of themselves in these shifting circumstances, Henry as the 'Silurist' and Thomas as 'Eugenius Philalethes', pressed their creative energy, forcing them to explore their sense of identity, adversity, and creativity itself in their writing. Scintilla 24 probes such subtle conjunctions, crossing boundaries between past and present, between place and vision, our phys- ical environment and our inner lives, between metaphysical experiences and the language of science, poetry, and healing.
Philip West listens attentively to the echoes in Henry's poetry that cor- respond with his contemporary and fellow Royalist, the playwright James Shirley. West traces surprising similarities which approach, if they do not quite achieve, a sense of literary intercourse between the two writers. Vaughan has frequently been noted to have a magpie tendency in his po- etic borrowings, so West's examination of the concentric London literary circles both writers moved within are suggestive not only of Vaughan's early influences and perspective but of the wider cultural environment that would inform his later work. In a similar vein, Robert Wilcher gives focus to Vaughan's borrowings by examining his biblical allusiveness, particularly those used in his epigraphs. Vaughan, Wilcher notes, moves from employing the Bible as an authoritative source, to a more assured sense of an audience who share his familiarity with its words, a world im- bued with a knowledge of scripture. Jonathan Nauman examines further Vaughan's interest in the devotional writing of St. Paulinus of Nola, devel- oped out of Vaughan's admiration of George Herbert. Nauman outlines an intriguing number of careful (and carefully concealed) literary interests of George Herbert that, coming at a later day, his disciple Henry Vaughan explores more deeply. François de Sales, the 16th century Roman Catholic Bishop of Geneva who, though a Catholic evangelist, engaged in ironical discussions with such arch partisans as Theodore Beza. His writing pro- vided surprising devotional inspiration for Herbert that led the way for Vaughan's attention to St. Paulinus. Finally, William Tate explores the work of another metaphysical poet, from 20th century America, Richard Wilbur, a first for Scintilla. Finding links to George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins among other poets and writers, Tate examines Wilbur's sanctification of work, what Herbert describes as 'drudgerie divine', service both to man and God.
Contemporary poetry continues to feature in Scintilla and we are de- lighted to offer a wealth of new work exploring themes and motifs which resonate with the activities and preoccupations of the Vaughans.
