More, Henry

(1614-1687)

   Born into a strong Calvinist family from Grantham, Lincolnshire, he was educated at Eton College School and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He graduated M.A. in 1639, the same year as he was ordained and elected a fellow, then spent almost the whole of his life at Christ's College, preferring a life of solitude and contemplation and music. He was one of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of antiCalvinist divines who strove to establish a strictly rational basis for ethics and religion based on Plato's philosophy. Although More shrank from political controversy, he did not hesitate to use the church liturgy both in public and private when during the Commonwealth it was a crime to do so. He wrote poetry, hymns, and deeply religious and philosophical works. He died at Cambridge and was buried in the Christ's College chapel. In 1647, he published Philosophical Poems, and his Divine Hymns were published in 1706. Some of his poems: "A Platonick Song of the Soul," "Charity and Humility," "Cupids Conflict," "Devotion," "Eternal Life," "Psychozoia, or, the Life of the Soul," "Resolution," "The Oracle."

   Sources: A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. James H. Trott, ed. Cumberland House Publishing, 1999. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). SeventeenthCentury Verse and Prose, Vol. II: 1660-1700. Helen C. White, et al., ed. Macmillan. 1951, 1952. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://li brary.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse. Alastair Fowler, ed. Oxford University Press, 1991. The Oxford Book of Christian Verse. Lord David Cecil, ed. Oxford University Press, 1940. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Treasury of Religious Verse. Donald T. Kauffman, ed. Fleming H. Revell, 1962.