The Metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them. Their rigorous, energetic verse appeals to the reader’s intellect rather than emotions, discarding intuition and mysticism in favour of rational discussion. Their inventive, elaborate style was characterised by learned imagery and subtle argumentation, and the "metaphysical conceit", a figure of speech that employs unusual and paradoxical images such as in Andrew Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew. Although such devices were not new, these poets managed to make the most of them with their fresh and original approach, infusing new life into English poetry.
They were first labelled "metaphysical poets" by Samuel Johnson in The Lives of the Poets (1744), though John Dryden had already pointed out the "Metaphysics" of Donne’s poetry in a critique some fifty years earlier. Both Dryden and Johnson were highly disapproving of the metaphysical poets, regarding their style as too abstracted and far-fetched in its witty comparisons. Johnson said
"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."
However, the group was to have a significant influence on 20th-century poetry, especially through T. S. Eliot whose essay The Metaphysical Poets (1921) helped bring their poetry back into favour.
Donne, moreover, is metaphysical not only in virtue of his scholasticism, but by his deep reflective interest in the experiences of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity with which he writes of love and religion.
In poetry such as Spenser's, the musical flow, the melody and harmony of line and stanza, is dominant, and the meaning is adjusted to it at the not infrequent cost of diffuseness—if a delightful diffuseness—and even some weakness of phrasing logically and rhetorically considered.
The metaphysicals are the masters of the 'neutral style', of a diction equally appropriate, according as it may be used, to prose and verse.
Feeds |
Contact