Metaphysical poets
[1]Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of the new style of poetry was Drummond of Hawthornden, who in an undated letter from the 1630s made the charge that "some men of late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits, and those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some thousand years".
[2] Protestant Reformation Counter-Reformation Aristotelianism Scholasticism Patristics Second scholasticism of the School of Salamanca Lutheran scholasticism during Lutheran orthodoxy Ramism among the Reformed orthodoxy Metaphysical poets in the Church of England The Jesuits against Jansenism Labadists against the Jesuits Pietism against orthodox Lutherans Nadere Reformatie within Dutch Calvinism Richard Hooker against the Ramists Neologists against Lutherans Spinozists against Dutch Calvinists Deists against Anglicanism John Locke against Bishop Stillingfleet Johnson's assessment of "metaphysical poetry" was not at all flattering: The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and, to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and, very often, such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables...
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
John Dryden had already satirised the Baroque taste for them in his Mac Flecknoe and Joseph Addison, in quoting him, singled out the poetry of George Herbert as providing a flagrant example.
"[5] A further two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a "high Anglican and royalist literary history" on 17th-century English poetry.
Colin Burrow later singled out John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw as 'central figures', while naming many more, all or part of whose work has been identified as sharing its characteristics.
In addition, Helen Gardner's Metaphysical Poets (1957) included 'proto-metaphysical' writers such as William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh and, extending into the Restoration, brought in Edmund Waller and Rochester.
Johnson's remark that "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think" only echoed its recognition a century and a half before in the many tributes paid to Donne on his death.
Helen Gardner too had noted the dramatic quality of this poetry as a personal address of argument and persuasion, whether talking to a physical lover, to God, to Christ's mother Mary, or to a congregation of believers.
Two poets, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Thomas Carew, who were joined in the 1635 edition by Sidney Godolphin, had links with the heterodox Great Tew Circle.
He had friends within the Great Tew Circle but at the time of his elegy was working as a researcher for Henry Wotton, who intended writing a life of the poet.
Grierson noted in addition that the slightly older poet, Robert Southwell (who is included in Gardner's anthology as a precursor), had learned from the antithetical, conceited style of Italian poetry and knew Spanish as well.
And the circumstance that Crashaw's later life was also spent outside England contributed to making him, in the eyes of Mario Praz, "the greatest exponent of the Baroque style in any language".
[23] Crashaw is frequently cited by Harold Segel when typifying the characteristics of The Baroque Poem,[24] but he goes on to compare the work of several other Metaphysical poets to their counterparts in both Western and Eastern Europe.
As an example of the rhetorical way in which various forms of repetition accumulate in creating a tension, only relieved by their resolution at the end of the poem, Segel instances the English work of Henry King as well as Ernst Christoph Homburg's in German and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn's in Polish.
[30] Black hair and eyes are the subject in the English examples, while generally it is the colour of the skin with which Romance poets deal in much the same paradoxical style.
[31] Still more dramatically, Luis de Góngora's En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento (At the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament)[32] introduces a creole dialogue between two black women concerning the nature of their beauty.
But English writing goes further by employing ideas and images derived from contemporary scientific or geographical discoveries to examine religious and moral questions, often with an element of casuistry.
[34] Bringing greater depth and a more thoughtful quality to their poetry, such features distinguish the work of the Metaphysical poets from the more playful and decorative use of the Baroque style among their contemporaries.
[35] In the poetry of Henry Vaughan, as in that of another of the late discoveries, Thomas Traherne, Neo-Platonic concepts played an important part and contributed to some striking poems dealing with the soul's remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm and its spiritual influence.
Long before it was so-named, the Metaphysical poetic approach was an available model for others outside the interlinking networks of 17th century writers, especially young men who had yet to settle for a particular voice.
It may be remembered also that at the time Milton composed these, the slightly younger John Cleveland was a fellow student at Christ's College, Cambridge, on whom the influence of the Metaphysical style was more lasting.
It is typified by astronomical imagery, paradox, Baroque hyperbole, play with learned vocabulary ("an universal metampsychosis"), and irregular versification which includes frequent enjambment.
[42] In the political circumstances following the recent beheading of the king, it was wise to dissemble grief for him while mourning another under the obscure and closely wrought arguments typical of the Metaphysical style.
[44] Pope also wrote his "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" (1717) while still young, introducing into it a string of Metaphysical conceits in the lines beginning "Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age" which in part echo a passage from Donne's "Second Anniversary".
