Metaphysical Poets

Metaphysical Poets, writers of the late 16th to mid-17th centuries who shared a bold use of such figures of speech as striking and frequently extended similes, metaphors, or analogies (known as “conceits”). Particularly fine examples of such imagery can be found in the comparison of two lovers’ souls to a pair of compasses in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne and Andrew Marvell’s figuring of frustrated love as a set of parallel lines in “The Definition of Love”. One of the earliest and the most influential of the Metaphysical poets was John Donne, many of whose poems were written in the mid-1590s, though only printed posthumously in 1633. Others include Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; his younger brother George Herbert; Andrew Marvell; Thomas Carew; Thomas Traherne; Richard Crashaw; Henry Vaughan; and Henry King.

The first recorded use of the term “metaphysical” in referring to these poets is in a derogatory comment by the Scottish poet (and friend of Ben Jonson) William Drummond of Hawthornden. He complained that their revolutionary use of language had in fact “endevured to abstracte [poetry] to Metaphysicall Ideas, and Scolasticall Quiddityes”. Echoing this, John Dryden later wrote of Donne that “he affects the metaphysics ... and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy”; and in his Life of Cowley Samuel Johnson declared that “about the beginning of the 17th century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets”. Both Dryden and Johnson, like Drummond, were writing with a certain amount of hostility, and it is important to note that the term thus came into being as one of disapproval rather than merely description or praise. In fact, the reputations of those poets referred to as “metaphysical” suffered a decline from the end of the 17th until the beginning of the 20th century, initially being dismissed as barbaric (not to mention excessively prurient) by the writers of the Neo-Classical revival and subsequently being admired by some Romantic writers for their striking imagery but criticized for what was regarded as an over-intellectual approach to writing.

The reversal in the fortunes of the Metaphysical poets came with the publication in 1921 of H. J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century and an influential review of the volume by T. S. Eliot which appeared in the same year, “The Metaphysical Poets”. Eliot’s article argues that the best of the Metaphysical poets represented in Grierson’s anthology display a quality which was subsequently lost in English poetry, a unity of thought and feeling that is for him the essence of being a poet: “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility”. This celebration of Donne and his followers is accompanied by an attack on all those who followed, and is a covert manifesto for Eliot’s brand of Modernism: “It appears likely,” he writes, “that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.”

This brief survey of the critical fortunes of the Metaphysical poets is necessary if we are going to understand what the label refers to and what motivates its use. It is important to note, for instance, that Eliot praises the poets for precisely the quality (a unity of thought and feeling) that their earlier readers found lacking. Drummond, Dryden, and Johnson all criticized the “metaphysical” nature of the poetry; that is, its excessively philosophical, intellectual, and definition-based style, which they saw as resulting in a confusion of specialized terms and unconvincing “quibbles”. An example of this is the rapid succession of images which creates the argument of the first two stanzas of Donne’s “A Valediction: of Weeping”:

Writers trained in the humanist art of rhetoric saw language as a socially based technique of understanding and argument which takes place in specific contexts. They thus tended to be suspicious of poetry like Donne’s, which seemed to hark back to medieval scholastic philosophy (see Scholasticism: Common Methods). Contemporary readers, however, and the Metaphysical poets themselves, often identified a different set of influences on their writing: their terse constructions, apparently aggressive argument, and fondness for epigrammatic forms linked them with the Roman stoic writers, especially Martial; their concentration on sexual love at the expense of the more Platonic concerns of the Elizabethans had its roots in the Latin love poems of Ovid; and the structure and imagery of the religious verse (particularly that of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw) relies on medieval, Catholic techniques of meditation—although only Crashaw was a Catholic.

Much of the strength of the Metaphysical poets’ work lies in their construction of arresting poetical voices (personae) who attempt to persuade either themselves, or an interlocutor, or the reader, into a given position. Donne in particular opens several of his Songs and Sonnets abruptly: “Busie old foole, unruly Sunne” (“The Sunne Rising”); “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love” (“The Canonization”). In this he is characteristic of the Metaphysical poets in general, who despite the apparent “privacy” of some of their poems are concerned to engage their readers in a testing and argumentative relationship that reflects the sometimes tempestuous nature of the 17th century.