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functioning distinct from waking, sleeping, and dreaming. His descriptions of Felicity closely parallel this “fourth” state of consciousness, as this book argues, and suggest a new appraisal is needed of his place in cultural history. Traherne has been the subject of extensive study since Bertram Dobell’s discovery and publication of his poetry and prose early in the twentieth century. These and other rediscovered Traherne texts have elicited a wide range of religious and philosophical explanations, from the rational to the mystical, the orthodox to the heterodox. The hundredth anniversary in 2003 of Bertram Dobell’s publication of his poetry has furthered interest in Traherne. An annotated bibliography appeared in 2005, modeled on John R. Robert’s standard bibliographies on John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw; a new and much-needed biography by Julia Smith is underway; and a collection of essays providing new readings of Traherne came out in 2007. Furthermore, a seven-volume edition (with an eighth volume of commentary) of Traherne’s works is being published by Boydell and Brewer Ltd. under the editorship of Jan Ross. The actual experience of what Traherne calls Felicity, however, which is the defining feature of his most celebrated works, has not been fully studied.
Traherne was, of course, conscious of the fact that his conception of a state of lively fullness that situated “All Things” within every human being would astound others. As he confesses in the Commentaries of Heaven,
But his conviction that he was on to something vital remained unshaken, for “seated in a World of Delights and Treasures,” he explains, “I should be carefull to prize them, which was in the Root and seed, all that my Religion required” (The Works of Thomas Traherne 2: 410).