More Critical Survey of Poetry: Topical Essays TABLE OF CONTENTS Metaphysical Poets Introduction History of the concept by John R. Holmes Characteristics Metaphysical conceits Introduction Universal analogy Marinismo and Gongorismo In the eighteenth century, the term “Metaphysical poets” was coined to refer to Strong lines certain writers, primarily of religious verse, of the late sixteenth and early Doctrine in metaphysical verse seventeenth centuries who shared similar characteristics. Although scholars Bibliography. have suggested many alternative names (Louis Martz called their works the poetry of meditation, and Mario DiCesare’s anthology spoke simply of seventeenth century religious poets), the term “Metaphysical poets” remained useful to literary historians for more than two hundred years. The Metaphysicals were never a self-conscious group, for the most part having limited or no contact with one another—even though the literary world of London at the time was quite small. The list of who is considered a Metaphysical poet has fluctuated through changes in fashion and, of course, in the very definition of Metaphysical verse. Prominent names in most discussions of Metaphysical poetry include John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), Thomas Traherne (c. 1637- 1674), Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), Richard Crashaw (c. 1612-1649), Robert Southwell (c. 1561-1595), Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), and Thomas Carew (1594-1640). American critic Louis Martz has recognized two early American poets, Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) and Edward Taylor (c. 1645-1729), as sharing many characteristics with these English poets. Lists of those characteristics vary, but the primary quality critics have found in the works of these poets is reflected by their epithet, “metaphysical.” The poetry is often built around metaphysical speculation, usually of a formal, scholastic type (“scholastic” in the seventeenth century sense, referring to the “schools” of thought at the University of Paris, predominantly those of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure). Because scholastic thought is primarily theological, the poems are often religious in nature. However, equally common is a conflation of the religious and the erotic reminiscent of the troubadour poets. In Herbert, this combination became a self-conscious “war on poetry,” declared in a 1610 letter to his mother (first published by Izaak Walton in 1670). Herbert employed what the German poets of his time called kontrafaktur, inverting the clichés of secular love poetry to express the higher love of Jesus Christ. At the other extreme may be the love poetry of Donne, who risks what may seem blasphemy in using religious language to describe the speaker’s quite human love, in poems such as “The Canonization” and “The Relic,” wherein the speaker imagines himself and his beloved as “saints of love” venerated by the church and its faithful. Intellectual speculation in these poems, however, is not limited to metaphysics or theology, but extends to all learning of the day, including new scientific ideas and geometrical analysis. In “The Definition of Love,” for instance, Marvell used cartographic experiments in representing the sphere of the earth in two-dimensional drawings (the planisphere) as a metaphor for confining something as multidimensional as love within the “flat” boundaries of a definition. Such intricate and sometimes counterintuitive analogies, known as metaphysical conceits, were themselves a typical element of these poems, and a major source of the disfavor the Metaphysical poets met from the time Samuel Johnson coined the term “Metaphysical poet” in 1781 until T. S. Eliot’s influential review in 1921 of Sir Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921). History of the concept Although the specific designation “Metaphysical poet” was not used until 1781, the adjective “metaphysical” was applied to the works of these poets in their own time. The Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden spoke of a tribe of writers in his day filling poems with “metaphysical Ideas and Scholastic Quiddities.” In 1693, the most influential of restoration critics, John Dryden, scorned the verse of Donne because in it he “affects the metaphysics.” In the early eighteenth century, Alexander Pope identifies Cowley (and, parenthetically, Davenant) as a poet who “borrowed his metaphysical style from Donne.” In fact, it was in the context of Cowley, and not of Donne, that Johnson invented the term “Metaphysical poet.” In his essay on Cowley in Lives of the Poets (1779-1781), Johnson wrote “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed metaphysical poets.” For about a century and a half, Metaphysical poetry fell out of favor, although the Romantics, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, expressed a liking for them. It remained for Grierson’s work (and Eliot’s famous review of it) to revive an interest in these poets—and to provide at least one theory of why they had been ignored for so long. In his introduction, Grierson, after listing what he considers the major hallmarks of the Metaphysical poets, ends with the most important: “above all the peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination which is their greatest achievement.” This “passionate thinking” as Grierson put it, was the hint that led Eliot to theorize that Dryden’s generation lost or turned against that ability to feel thought. Eliot’s catch- phrase for the theory was “dissociation of sensibility.” Eliot’s theory—and it was never presented as more than a theory, a convenient story explaining the fall of the Metaphysicals from popularity—was simply this: “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Donne and his generation, according to the theory, were able to “feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose.” After Dryden, this was no longer possible. Hence Johnson’s criticism of the Metaphysicals, occurring after the supposed disintegration of thought and feeling, was understandably negative. Eliot’s theory was never universally adapted; indeed, Eliot himself seemed to turn from it a decade later in the 1931 essay “Donne in Our Time,” in which he asserts that Donne himself showed the split between thought and feeling. In his 1951 volume, The Monarch of Wit, J. B. Leishman systematically demolishes the theory with counterexamples. Nevertheless, the notion that the generation between World Wars I and II resonated with that of Donne allowed a resurgence of interest in Metaphysical poetry that continued into the twenty-first century. Characteristics The criteria by which Johnson faulted Cowley and his “race” of Metaphysicals became standard hallmarks of their poetry: (1) ostentatious learning; (2) metrical irregularity; (3) “metaphysical wit,” defined as novel connections in image and metaphor; (4) unusual diction; and (5) using “courtship without fondness” in their love poetry. Each of these supposed poetic vices have been considered virtues by critics who revived interest in Metaphysical poetry in the 1920’s. The first quibble, “showy” erudition, depends on the reader’s judgment of the poet’s motive. When Cowley likens human judgment to a telescope or “multiplying glass” in his “Ode of Wit” (1668), detractors such as Johnson might think he is either parading his learning or trying to be up-to-date. However, more sympathetic readers may read that as just being playful, or simply choosing the most effective analogy. The second charge, roughness of poetic rhythm, can likewise be met by inquiring how the poets actually read their verse. In the early nineteenth century, poet and critic Coleridge observed that ignoring function words, such as prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, will usually smooth out the most seemingly irregular of Donne’s verses. Nevertheless, many a reader has found Donne’s rhythms—and those of his fellow Metaphysicals—quite awkward. Donne’s contemporary Ben Jonson even quipped that Donne’s looseness of accent was a hanging offense. The third, an accusation of seeking novelty rather than appropriateness in metaphor, is virtually a repetition of the complaint that Metaphysical poets show off their learning. Johnson, with justice, observed that the Metaphysical notion of wit, which Johnson supposed was seeking to surprise the reader with something unthought of, was directly opposed to the reigning notion of wit best described by Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1711) as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The Metaphysical notion of avoiding the too-obvious analogy has at least as ancient a pedigree as Pope’s neoclassic one, however, as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus taught that hidden connections are better than the obvious ones. The quibble over diction, the fourth point, is simply a matter of taste. Metaphysical poets wanted their poetry to echo the rhythms of conversation rather than art, and so their lyrics often open abruptly with colloquial exclamations: “I struck the board, and cry’d, No more” (Herbert, “The Collar”); “Goe! Hunt the whiter Ermine!” (Davenant, “For the Lady Olivia Porter”); “Out upon it, I have lov’d” (Suckling, “Song”). “Rough” words such as Donne’s “snorted” (snored) for “slumbered” in “The Good Morrow” were not considered poetic enough for neoclassic writers. The last point, a supposed confusion of love and