Thomas Traherne, Herefordshire’s greatest writer? An Introduction. 

A talk by Richard Willmott, a retired headmaster of the Dixie Grammar School and Chairman of the Traherne Association. Thomas Traherne lived in Hereford as a boy during the sieges of the Civil War. After studying at Oxford, he became rector of Credenhill and an extraordinarily prolific writer and poet. Only a small amount of his work was published in his lifetime (he died aged 37) and the story of the gradual identification and publication of his work between the 1890s and 1990s is a remarkable one: one work was rescued from a bonfire at a rubbish tip and identified many years later in Canada! The aim of the talk will be to introduce Traherne within his seventeenth-century context and hopefully encourage some of you to delve deeper into his writings.