INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
If Eliot has been tne Messiah of the recent Metaphysical cultism, Coleridge was its John Baptist, carrying out the merits of the metaphysicals, preparing the way for the present revival. (Duncan, 1959: 33)
The twentieth century has displayed a distinct taste for the seventeenth century metaphysical literature, thought tensions and preblems. The affinity has been most clearly revealed in the i4etaphysical revival - revival of interest in a style found in its most distinguished and distinguishable fonii in the poetry of John Donne, Marvell, Vaughan, etc. The metaphysical revival began almost imperceptibly in the earlier nineteenth century, increased in vigour and importance and flourished in the twentieth century. Dougnlas Bush (1945: 135) has called the Metaphysical revival "the main single factor in effecting the modem revolution in taste". The revival shows no sharp breaks, but an abandance of fresh interpretation. In addition to its essential continuii^, the movement always had life and interest, because it was always changing. New generations of poets transmuted metaphysical tecnniques into a genuine modem poetic idiom. For the poets and critics, the new interpretation has been most rewarding. The most representative metaphysical poets were John Donne, Edward Herbert, George Herbert, John Cleveland, Andrew Marvell and Abraham Cowley. Richard Crashaw was a metaphysical poet but he was a special case. In the work of Henry Vaughan there are some important metaphysical elements.
It is necessary to indicate the precise nature of the term 'Metaphysical*. Men of the sixteenth century desired a change in poetry - poetry more sparkling, less emotional and more intellectual, less sweet and more piquant. Some others wanted obscurity which was shown by the satirists. These tastes are gratified and there came a transformation by what is called 'Metaphysical'.'But the seventeenth century writers were not aware of the term and did not have any idea that they were 'Metaphysical'. The metaphysical conceit grows up gradually. There is nothing metaphysical about Spenser's comparisons of two contesting i-Lnights to two
contesting beasts but there is sometning metaphysical in' /^V , Donne's comparison of a pair of lovers to 'a pair of ^^ compasses'. As the resemblances become more recondite, more intellectual and less emotional tney are m-^ving further in the metaphysical direction. '»Vhere comparisons are to be very recondite the things are compared must be sought for in the fields of experience very remote from one another. 3eing remote - they cannot be re-united without a clash or snock. In ancient, mediaeval and Golden poetry - such clashes as shocks are avoided for decorum. The poets welcomed this necessity. The rule of the decorum exists to avoid clashes or shocks to organized sensibility. It was an easy discovery that an occasional defiance of the rule resulting in s#hocK can give pleasure. Breaches of decorum v/ork in the same way, thougn the shock need not be comic. A more flippant and v^imsical use of the same method can be seen v^ere Ovid describes Olympus in terms of Rome. As Lewis (195A-: 54Jj points out
The metaphysicals were making no absolute innovation when tney deliberately produced poetic shocks by coupling v/hat was sacred, august, remote or inhuman with what was profane, humdrum, familiar, and social, so that God is asked to 'batter' a heart, Christ's 'stretched sinews' become fidlestrings, cherubs nave breakfasts. The novelty lay in doing this sort of thing more often and more violently, than previous poets had done. It is this 'discors concordia' that givesraetapiiysical poetr y its essential flavour.'
These po^-ts were not abolisning or ignoring poetic decorum but exploiting it in the reverse. Decorun was in their bones. "Hetapnysical poetry is tv/ice bom" (ibid: 54l). It uses discoro. . "It may be either 'parasitic' (it lives on non-metaphysical pot ^y) or as being of a 'higher logical order' (it jresuooooes o"Cht?r poetry}" (ibid: 542).
Let us first exa.nine metaphysical poetry entirely from a sev:;nteonth century joxnz of view and then trace out the revival from its beginning in the nineteenth century to the present. This includes an examination of changing critical attitude towards metaphysical poetry and a study of shifting interpretations of the metaphysical style in the poetry of W B Yeats, r^iiot and others. The seventeenth century metaphysical poets were never self-consiciously allied; neither were tney individuals working independently. Donne was the leavining force in the rise of the style. His poetry abounds in probing analogies and ingenious wit and recent critics have found in Donne, examples of ambiguity and unified sensibility. Following Donne's lead, iidward and George Herbert helped establish the secular and devotional lines in metaphysical poetry. In
The poetry of Donne and his followers was related to the philosophical, rhetorical and poetic theories of the Renaissance, which constituted still a force in seventeenth century literature. Logical structure, metaphor and wit are usually regarded as typical of Donne and his follov/ers. During the Renaissance many writers forged new links between rhetoric and logic. Part of the new interest in logic was due to Peter Ramus, who, in his artistic revision of Aristotle, stressed the subordination of other sciences to logic and greatly emphasized the logical process of investigation and disposition. There was a new e.-nphasis upon the so-called figures of thougnt, such as definition, distinction, cause and eiiect which could be dealt with under the heads of logic. Logical disposition, figures of thougn and the metaphysical conceit flourished in the A logic-conscious Ilenaissance climate.
Writing familiar to the metaphysical poets could 6
have given t;iem considerable support for their conceits. In fact Aristotle (cf. Welldon, 1886: 2b9) could be regarded as 'the Father of the Conceit'. He stressed the need for appropriateness in figures, but he also emphasized the pleasure given by strangeness, originality and surprise. He approved metaphors derived from well constructed enigmas and explained that it is proper to derive metaphors from objects vmich are closely related to the thing itself. For him it is a mark of sagacity to discern resemblances in things which are widely different, Aristotle was interested in wit as a stylistic device that could enliven and make more effective the matter in hand and was aware of its close relationship to an underlying logic. The ideal was the continual flash o±" novelty from surprising intellectual relationship.
Man ^•ras connected not only with stars, but also with the minerals, vegetable and animal realims. There were seven spheres, seven ages of man, seven days, seven sins, and seven notes in the scale. Renaissance thinkers were particularly eager to bring order into complexity by finding connexions not onJ v betv/een macrocosm and microsasm, but also between all created things. The metaphysical ijonceit was apparently a product of the Renaissance tendency to discover significant analogies almost everywnere. Carew Ln his iilegie ... recognised Donne's sovereignty of ti'i«L.?« 1921: 177) 'the Universal monarcny of Wit' (Carew, ibid: 180), and during the early seventeenth century, the metaphysicals were praised for their wit. The interest in wit was derived mainly from the Classical, mediaeval and early Renaissance rhetorical theory.
Though Donne and his contemporaries did not explicitly refer to a distinctive relation of thought and feeling, they did sometimes think in terms some-v^at similar to those employed by modem critics, such as Douglas Bush (1945: 135) who says that the re-discovery of Donne is - "the main single factor in effecting the modem revolution in taste". Donne and others emphasised the close relationsnip between body, mind and soul. Marvell's 'The Dialogue between the Soul and Body' is unique and a great poetic achievement. The dialogue form was not the invention of Marvell. In Mediaeval Latin poetry too tnere are many examples. The form was popular in the seventeenth century. In his 'Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure', the Soul brushes aside all temptations with the unwavering assurance. But in this poem, 'Dialogue between the Soul and Body', Marvell examines both sides of the questioi- reasonably. This Dialogue is based on important philosophical concepts. In this system of thought - developed by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Christ - there is a firm belief in fundamental distinction between mind and matter, soul and body. For the seventeenth century thinkers 8
reality was divided into these two substances. Marvell's Dialogue supports their relationship. The Dialogue sets the two opposite poses. The idea that the soul endures exile in its house of clay is as old as Plato and it is seen in all Christian writings. But in Marvell's Dialogue, the claims of the body, as the injured party in this enforced fellowship, are given equal weight along with the soul's more familiar complaints. Their arguments are so carefully poised that Marvell m the end could not seperate soul and body metaphysically. In the body's last speech the passions of hope, fear and so fortn are expressed in terms of bodily ailments as cramp and palsy, emphasising the close interrelation of the two substances. Here the body asserts that the soul is animating and thus making it I capciole of sin, acts like a bulder v*io uproots trees from A their natural state and fashions them to an artifical order and regularity. The term Metaphysical was used as a label in the succeeding centuries. After Dryden and Dr Johnson it was believed that Donne and his followers, were 'I'^etaphy- sical' in the true sense. Dr Johnson was the first prominent literary critic to use the term Metaphysical In his assessment of the poetry of Abraham Cowley. It Ls also well-known that tne metaphysical poets do not lave affiliations to a particular, system of philosophical reliefs, and their poetry is characterized by certain attitudes, states ol mind, tecnnical and stylistic features. Joan Bennett (1966: 293) correctly says that "the v/ord metaphysical i*efers to style, rather than subject-matter; but style refers to an attitude to experience". Apart from speech rhythms and the use of superficially unpoetic language, metaphysical poetry sbounds in probing analogies, ingenious wit, ambiguity and unified sensiblity, and expression of common things in an ingenious manner. With its clear religious background it is related to the philosophical, rhetorical and poetic theories of the Renaissance and in it knotty problems, personal experiences, sunbiguity and the relation of thought and feeling find an expression.
Dr Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1968: 12) made it out that novelty was the motive force of thej metaphysical poets. "Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before" (ibid: 12). The use by Dr Johnson of an expression such as 'metapiiysical distress' makes us understand that it might mean 'unnatural,' 'unreal,' etc. The gravamen of Dr Johnson's charge was that the metaphysicals yoked together heterogenous ideas, Dr Johnson censured the metaphysicals for their laboured particularities, and in his Lives of the Poets says, "Their atteifipts were always analytic: they broke every image into fragments" (p. 12). As i::iiot (1921: 287) has remarked that the metaphysicals possessed a mechanism of sensibility that 10
could devour any experience; they not only explored the cerebral cortex and nervous system but the digestive tracks.
In Grierson's antnology, Ben Jonson does not find a place although the members of the'Tribe of Ben' do. In fact Grierson does not assign to Ben Jonson a place of central importance in the tradition of metaphysical wit^^and feels with Gregory Smith that the "direct indebtedness of the courtly poets to Ben Jonson is small" (1921: 111). "The courtly and metaphysical poets", Grierson (ibid: xxxlv) argues, "had access to Jonson's own Italian models" and conclusively says that "their great master was Donne". There are however, two passages in Grierson's Introduction to his .anthology of Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems which indicate the central importance of Ben Jonson in the poetry of seventeenth century.
It has become fashionable to echo Eliot's (1932: 286) remark about "the direct sensuous apprehension of thought" and the "recreation of thought into feeling", found in the metaphsicals and more recently it has become even more fashionable to dismiss the un fied sensibility as an incomprehensible private mytn ol i:^liot. In any case, Eliot has understood the metaphysical poets at leat somewhat better than the metaphysicals could have understood nis theories about their work. 11
Mark Von Dor en | l93iJ: 3 ) in an article on the metaphysical poets suggests that the letter 'Y' might as well be taken as tne symbol oi metaphysical poetry. The two arms of 'Y' stand for Arts and Science, or Poetry and Life or Serious Poetry and Light Poetry. They helicopted naturally from one Universe of discourse into another. The metaphysicals are capable of IXising the Comic and the Serious, and they are poets talking.
Cleanth Brooks (I948;'i ) and a good many other muucm critics have regarded ambiguity as a distinguishing characteristic of metaphysical poetry. The term ambiguity has acquired a special status in twentieth century criticism. According to Babette Deutsh (1965: pp 21-22)
ambiguity occurs when double or multiple meanings attach to words or situations. All figurative language is somewhat ambiguous. While ambiguity is never desirable for its own sake, in poetry, as distinct from scientific discourse and much other prose, it may be useful. By contemplating several meanings can illuminate more fully the complexities of the experience that the poem offers.
Villiam Erapson (19^7: l) who has intensely explored seven varieties of ambiguity, defines it as "any verbal nuance, hov/ever slignt, wnicn gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of langu:ige". There was a general belief in Catnoiic countries that the ambiguity 12
in conceits, puns and various pleasantries in religious works caught the reader's attention, aided a comprehension, chased away tne devil, opened the way for divine inspira tion and was completely corapatable with saintly aims.
Ambiguity or paradox sets the tone in Donne and in Marvell. For example
A bracelet of bright haire about the bone, (Donne's 'The Relique', C P: p 76).
The Grave's a fine and private place; But none I think do there embrace, (Marvell's 'To his Coy Mistress', M,L.P. p 30)
These lines have the characteristic metaphysical shock value. The juxtaposition of 'bright hair' and 'bone' in Donne's line and 'fine' and 'grave' in Marvell's exemplify both wit and forcefulness. The metaphysicals' habit, then, of intersprinkling various kinds of wit with serious treatments of one's soul and one's mistress was the product of an old, widespread tradition that experienced a significant florescence during the late Renaissance. Perhaps partly because of Donne's Catholic background, he participated entnusiastically in a tradition that regaixied conceits and witty devices as legitimate enhancements of the most serious subjects. 13
During his early years George Herbert regarded wit and seriousness congenial complements. Classical rnetoric, the numanists, the courtiers, the Jesuits and others' helped to give the metaphysicals the authority and example for pursuing their ov/n particular penchant for intermingling the witty and the hignly serious, wit vrais regarded as decorous means of expressing deep truths eifectively. The merging of vd.t and seriousness reveals a broad view and an integration of diverse elements that later periods have sometimes found strange. The seventeentn century metapnysicals, while they seldom regarded wit as actually frivolous, were interested in finding the spirit behind the wit.
In metaphysical poetry the emotional and intuitive elements are subjected to a hignly intellectual consideration and rational relationships through the use of logical modes of organization, wit, and tenuously logical metaphors that are frequently extended are usually emphasized. This poetry assumes that the poet and his readers share an interest in certain abstract syste.-us of thougnt, particularly the conceptions of the interlocking relationships leuween the physical and supersensible, through a system of correspondences. The logical metaphor, characteristic of metaphysical poetry, is one in which the 'tenor*, usually an emotional or intuitive experience, is exa;iiined in terms 14
of precise and complex 'vehicle'. The metaphor frequently links two qualitatively different realms such as the physical and the spiritual. Through correspondences and incarnational and sacramental symbolism, metaphysical poetry attempts to grasp and hold together a bursting universe, v/nether metaphysical poetry displays a unified sensibility or not, it is characterised by a particularly close relationship between feeling and thinking, life and learning.
Carew in his 'Elegie on Dr Donne' had praised Donne for planting bloossoms of 'fresh invention in the Muse's Garden,' but during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century the blossoms dropped sadly and went to seed. They finally flowered again during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contemporary revival of Donne and the other seventeenth century metaphysicals began with the publication of Sir Herbert Grieson's edition of Donne in 1912; and the recent critical theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were presented in some essays by i^liot in the early 1920s. Grierson's edition marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival.
Donne is not an i;nmobile and mute monument in the literary museum of iinglish: he leaps across the centuries and speaks in an idiom which makes him a contemporary of 15
twentieth century creative artists. This is the point of view articulated by F.R. Leavis (1936: 18) vAio wrtjte in 1936 The extraordinary originality that made Donne so potent an# influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense.
Other members of 'The School of Doone' share with Donne this contemporaneity (cf. Leavis, 1936).
Theraetapnysicals wer e not relevant to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jut with the twentieth century it is different. "The experience of flux and transition in the seventeenth century seems to have given us an tinder- standing denied to the eighteenth century, to the Victorians and even to the Romantics" (A Survey of literature from Donne to Marvell, R.G. Cox p. 43). In the eighteenth century qualities of clearness, correctness, polish, etc. are more sougnt after than beauty, grandeur, etc. Poetry becomes the vehicle of politics; satire is the chief medium and a patron is a dictator of polish. The metaphysicals are organic, the Augustans, logical. The rieroic Couplet becomes the inevitaDle technique of the poetxc spirit of the times. The eighteenth century poetry is modelled after Latin poets like Juvenal, etc. 16
W,hen we come to the Romantic period, right from the start, the Romantics stood outside Christianity and outside tradition. Bowra ( 1963: 276 ) in his Lectures on the Romantics^ point out that the lopsidedness of their achievement is due to rejection of a tradition. Individual achieveratn, however great fails unsupported by the backbone of-tradition. The metaphysical verse was ' curious ' , the Augustan was v;ritten to please those who paid. The Romaiitic was a revulsion from a raamonized and industrial v/orld. Hence the seventeenth century metaphysical poets were not relevant to the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets. They were, hov;ever, v. well-known and the Second Chapter of this thesis records some of the reaction of the eighteenth and nineteenth century critics. Grossarfi had edited the v/orks of some of the meta.ohysical poets in the seventies of the nineteenth cantary and Edmund Gosse had published his important " Life and Letters of John Donne " in 1899, They v/ere, however, recognised as having relevance to the tv;entieth century creative needs only when Grierson bro!,.;ht out his edition of the poems of John Donne in l9l2. W B Yeats immediately recognized in Donne the poetic voica of a • Contemporary ' Yeats's title remitids us of Ban Jonson'is ' Discoveries ".
In tr'e sevent lanth century, "the other ^raAt f or a-itive ijifl'xence, apart, froia Jo'i'ie, ;a3 ^'^on -Tonson. It is iiot i.hat, 17
as some older histories oi literature used to assert, tnere was a 'School of Donne' and a 'School of Jonson,' rather than almost any seventeenth century poet will show signs of having learnt both, though the proportion and the nature of the blend may difier widely. Jonson's non-dramatic verse does not siiov/ such an originality or such a decisive breach with contemporary fashion as Donne's. Yet it has unmistakable metaphysical qualities, without attempting the obviously dramatic effect of •'-'onne's broken rhythm, Jonson yet contrives within the smooth regularity of his verse, a directness and energy of statement closely related to speech. His detachment and his epigrammatic conciseness combine to produce an efiect of wit, though it is not always of the metaphysical kind and does not employ Donne's type of conceit, iiliot's (1921: p. 291) description of wit in involving "a recognition, implicit in tne expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience v/hich are possible", indicates the grounds on v/nich Donne and Jonson, for all tneir differences, may be seen as contributing to a common tradition. That Donne and Jonson, in spite of obvi us differences, have something akin may be seen from tne fact that there exists a group of elegies of which the autnorsnip remains undecided between the two poets. The important fact, however, is that it was possible for the two styles to combine and interact. 1^
T J liLiot initiated a discovery of the sevent -enth 'century metaphyslcals in th^ ;:c'.om Ajo, This discovery represents a dramatic break v/ith the iiiunediate past for f the Romantics and the Victorians had found the raetaphysicals harsh and often un-poetical and had therefore neglected them. He regards the metaphysicals as central to the tradtion for Modern poetry. This had far reaching implications for Modern poetry and Criticism. It was Eliot who, through his critical essays published in ' The Criterion ' and later collected in several anthologies, forcefully presented the idea that the Elizabethan, Jacobean and metaphysical poets used an idiom which has a modern ring about it. He also believed that their concerns had similarities with issues and problems facing the twentieth century man. He presented the view that the seventeenth century creative artists are a part of ai living tradition and are, in fact, our contemporaries.
Regarding the metaphysical revival T S Eliot says that the present day movement is partly a return to the ideals of the seventeenth century. A sense of tradition is an awareness of the presentness of the past which makes the poet acutely conscious of his contemporaneity. " True originality is merely development '• ( Eliot, 1919: 14 ). Judging by this standard, Eliot is a truly original poet and his indebtedness to the seventeenth century metaphysicals 19
has developed and extended the metaphysical tradition. The reason why Donne has sucn a powerful appeal to the modem poets is that there is in his poetry a puzzled and humorous shuffling of pieces. We are inclined to read our own more conscious awareness of the apparent irrelevance and unrelated things. The element of dr>ama, the sense of hiimour, brain work, intelligence, conceit, conciseness, paradox, in short, wit in the metaphysical poets captivated the modems.
Donne's image of the pair of compasses in 'A Valediction!
Forbidding Mourning' has become notorious like Elliot's (C.P.JS, 1917: 13) "Patient etherized on a table" in his 'Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock! Both the modem age and the times of Donne suffered from doubts and perplexities. In the seventeenth century there is a tension between the mediaeval and the contemporary, the flesh and the spirit, Catholicism and Protestantism, though and feeling. There is tension A in the modem minds because of nuclear fission.
De Quincey insisted that the seventeenth century metaphysical poets were essentially rhetorical in that they place "the principal stress upon the thoughts and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of style". ( 1339:'^0: 99-100 ) Attacking Dr Johnson's essay on Cowley, de Quincey maintained that "the artifice and machinery of rhetoric furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure 20
as any other",, (ibid. p.99-i<9<5 ).
Metaphysical poetry often expressed the truth of human experience in all its flux, complexity, and ambiguity and this poetry was similar to much modem poetry, Mataphysicals were frequently able to view an experience both emotionally and intellectually at the same time. Many worlds or countries of the mind lay close together - the world of Scholastic learning, the world of Scientific experiment, the worlds of Classical mythology and demonology, of the Sacred and profane love, of pagan and Christian morals, of activity and contemplation and a cultivated mind had the freedom of them ail. They drew freely upon anthropology, mythology, religion, psychology, logic and literature in several languages.
The metaphysical wit has very strongly appealed to the Modem Age as the complex problems faced by the metaphysicals and the modems were quite similar. The metaphysical poetry is characterized by vivid particularity, explosive force and ironic indirectness and dramatic violence. In ages of moral and intellectual confusion, poetry is bound to be so. It cannot have a logical and Intel: .ctual structure because such a background is questioned. Hence Symbol and Imagery forri the sinews and bone of a fragmentary poetry, i'letaphysicals extended tne boundaries of poetry and innovated in that they composed poetry wnicn did not rouse the stock responses. Donne's "Busy Old tool, unruly sun", ^1
.( Sun Rising. M.L.P. 1969: 3 ) after the Spenserian, " Bridegroom shaking his dewy mane " ( Epithalanutrm ) strikes as original as Eliot's evening " Like a patient etherized upon a table " ( The Love Song ).
The metaphysicals and the modern write to evoke not stock responses but shock responses from their readers. For instance, there are images in Marvell's love poem ( M L P t^&SL 1969: 73 ), ' To His Coy Mistress ' which are imagined as ' birds of prey ' who ' devour time '. Marvell also used the images of ' grave, worm, iron gates, dust and ashes 'i. Comaparable to them in shock effect are images like • a patient etherised upon a table ', ' a pair of ragged claws ' in Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. In both the cases the images not only prevent an easy stock response, but also refer to unpleasant or contrary aspects, thus providing an ironic co;a:aentary on the situation presented in the poem.
The tendencies inaugurated by T S Eliot are still strong and the poets who came later on the English literary scene are the inheritors of some nortions of the seventeentbK century tradition. They too recognized the relevance of Donne and his friends to our age. Even the educated common •man recognized the relevance of Donne and his friends to our age. Even the educated cormnon man recognijse in Donne, a conf-enial soul. In her account of the reading of Donne's sermons on the occasion of four hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Donne, Helen Gardner ( 1982: 108 ) says. 22
The listners seemed to have no difficulty in following, nor did the reader find any difficulty in reading. Although the listeners listened seriously, they gave no appearance of being harassed or humiliated. On the contrary many faces showed serious enjoyment.
In these lines Helen Gardner is recording the reactions of the educated common man of the seventies of this century.
It is well known that the metaphysical style begins with Donne and continues "till the middle of the seventeenth century" (de Sola Pinto, 1951: 253). The metaphysical idiom is "found in Shakespeare's later plays and sometimes in those of other dramatists" (ioid: 83), but there is hardly a trace of it in the "pure but colourless" ^Kliot, 1920: 207), diction of Philip Massinger. Eliot groups Donne with Chapman, Middle ton, Webster and Toumeur, and referring to the passage from Toumeur and Middleton he says: These lines of Toumeur and Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight alternation of language, words perpetually jixxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually elngeschachtelt into meanings, which evidences a very high develop ment of the senses, a development of the tjiglish language which we have perhaps never equalled, (ibid: 209) Ben Jonson was not a member of 'The School of Donne'; he was a pov/erful centre of another constellation of poets who included Carew, Lovelace, Waller, Herrick and Randolph. His followers were proud to call themselves - 'The Tribe of Ben'. Although not formally 'Metaphysical', Ben Jonson is 23
a very important part of the contemporary poetic picture and as F R Leavis says (1936: pp 17-18) In considering the idiomatic quality of the Caroline lyric, its close relation to the spoken language, we do not find it easy to separate Donne's influence from Jonson's. In The Sacred Wood Elliot groups the Metaphysicals vd.th other writers. "The quality in question (i.e. metaphysical quality) is not peculiar to Donne and Chapman. In common with the greatest Marlowe, Webster, Toumeur and Shakespere, they had a quality of sensuous thought or of thinking through the senses or of the senses" (1969: 23).
Referring to the relation between the metaphysical and the tradition of iinglish poetry Veronica? Ferrest Thomson (1976: 82) says: "The main stream oi English poetry in this century flowed from Donne". The idea of Dissocia tion of Sensibility, first used by Eliot in his essay on 'The Metapnysical Poets* (l92l) and his Lecture on r-iilton (1947) has been responsible for twentieth century revision of Poetic Tradition. This led to many important tendencies sucn as the reaction to the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. Early twentieth criticism shows that the twentieth century poets nourish themselves from the past. It has shov/n them their isolation and their pre-occupation witn their predecessors ana that there are ways ol looking at the past v^ich provide possibilities. The v^^ole effort formed into a definite 24
shape in iiliot's famous doctrine of the Dissociation of Sensibility. "The dramatic verse of the late Elizabethans and early Jacobeans expresses a degree of development of Sensibility which is not found in any of the prose. In Chapman there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought or a recreation of thought into feeling which is exactly what we find in Donne". (Eliot, 1921: 286). The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne and the time of Tennyson and BrxDwning. Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think: but they do not feel tneir thoughts - as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne v/as an experience: it modified his sensiDility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the orainary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The poets of the seventeenth century and the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth possessed a mechanism of sensibility wnich could devour any Kind of experience. In the seventeenth century a Dissociation of Sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. iv'e have now to remind ourselves that Eliot claimed for the poets of the seventeenth century the very qualities of Dante, Savalcanti, etc. and believed that the dissociation came after these later poets. 25
The problem of Dissociation of Sensibility is certainly a controversial one. It is, therefore, not possible for us to arrive at any conclusion. However, it is true that the Metaphysicals and the modems have more capacity to amalgamate different kinds of experience, and to fuse intellectual and emotional imagery. Miss Tuve (19^7: ^4) demonstrates that Donne's images have a logical function. It was a direct affront to the basis of the theory that he was a poet of modem image but it can scarcely have surprised anybody vdio had read Donne ope-eyed. This capacity may therefore be considered as one of the distinguishing features of the metaphysical poets. It can also give support to the idea that both the metaphysicals and the moderns form part of the same tradition.
The first point that strikes the reader who comes to Donne is the surprising directness of the speaking voice conveyed by his rhythms and diction. "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love". ( Canonization C.P.D. 19711 47). Here the tecnnique and conception are essentially dramatic. It is rather a realistic expressiveness, such as is developed by the dramatists, above all Shakespeare.
It would not be correct to presume that the metaphysicals were the only influence on the modem poets. Modem poets are aware of living in an exciting world and are responsible to the forces shaping this world. Indeed they did not have 26
world. They explored the various moods of modem man, made journeys to the inner world, and employed the resources of myth and legend in their poetry. They created complex and rich verbal artifacts and learnt the patterns of expression current in various cultures. They extended the thematic as well as the expressive frontiers of poetry. W B Yeats and T 3 £)liot explored Indian and Oriental cultural traditions. Yet the metaphysical poets constitute one of the most important sources of enrichment to the poetic language of the twentieth century English Literature: they actually entered the creative psyche of most modem poets. This thesis atte:apts to chart the areas of modem English poetry vniich contains the metaphysical element.
The second Chapter examines the forces in the background of the mataphysical as well as modem poetry. This is a very large area and scholars have directed attention to different aspects of life and culture of the relevant centuries. The present researcher has discussed only the forces which have bearing on linglish poetry. Similarities between the intellectual climate between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries have also been discussed and some comments on the poetic idiom of the relevant centuries have been made.
The Third Chapter discusses tne metaphysical element in the poetry of W B Yeats. Yeats was one of the first to 27
receive Grierson's edition ot the poems of John Donne and was pix>foundly influenced by that volume. He had already discarded his earlier poetic habits and had read Shakespeare and Ben Jonson creatively. His poetry had consequently acquired a new clan. The discovery of the metaphysical poets confirmed many of his stylistic tendencies. The metaphysical element has been demonstrated as operative in different poems of W B Yeats,
The Fourth Chapter discusses the metaphysical stylistic elements in the poetry of T S Eliot. The relevance of Donne and other seventeenth century metaphysicals was stressed forefully when Eliot elaborated his conceot of tradition.
The Fifth Chapter examines the metaphysical poetic features in the poetry of the twenties: Ronald Bottral, William iinpson, Edith Sitwell, etc. because in their poetry one finds the element of cerebration.
The Sixth Chapter examines the metaphysical elements in the poetry of W H Auden. Auden was the pioneer of a new poetic movement in the thirties which extended the frontiers of poetic language and -sensibility. During his days in Oxford, he came into contact with various intellectual currents and shared the climate which rehabilitated the metaphysicals. He was enthusiastic about Herbert and Donne. So far as my knowledge goes, no 28
attempt has been made to Identify metaphysical features in the poetry of Auden.
The Seventh Chapter deals v/ith the poetry of Stephen Spender. Eliot has shovna that the metaphysical poets could be made relevant to the modem poetic sensibility, Stephen Spender was exposed to the metaphysical poets during his college days, although he had a number of other influences. So far as I know, no systematic attempt has been made to identify metaphysical stylistic features in Spender's poetry.
C Day Lewis was a leading member of the poetic movement associated with W H Auden and Stephen Spender. He too, used an idiom which has some metaphysical features. The Eighth Chapter locates those features in the poetry of Le\d.s.
The Concluding remai^cs present the insights which have resulted from the close analysis of the impact of metaphysical poets on modern poets.
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