Henry Vaughn’s poetry, especially “Unprofitableness” and “The Night,” remind me very much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, particularly “Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur”. More than two hundred years before the Victorian poet Hopkins, Vaughn professes wonder and awe, an unironic appreciation of divine beauty, and gratitude for a god for bestows him with all this spiritual and aesthetic pleasure. Vaughn does not engage the contest between Protestantism and Catholicism. Is it possible that he writes to transcend this political debate? Is his apolitical poetry actually kind of political in its insistence on what really matters?