Metaphysical Shadows

The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry

Sean H. McDowell

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781978795532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Metaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry examines the ways in which the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell continues to speak to working poets today. Modern Anglophone poets, from T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish in the 1920s and 1930s to Seamus Heaney, Maureen Boyle, Alfred Corn, Anne Cluysenaar, Kimberly Johnson, and Jericho Brown in the twenty-first century, have found in the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell a strikingly modern intellectualism, an emotional intensity, and a verbal richness that have inspired their own poems. Traces of this inspiration appear in echoes, allusions, direct responses, and similarities in approach and method as poets create new work in their own distinct voices. Such contemporary engagements furnish us with cues for how literary studies might approach the literature of the past without sacrificing it in the name of critique. They also demonstrate the continuing relevance of seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry in the twenty-first century. The poems of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell still have the power to cast shadows.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note to the Reader
• Metaphysical Shadows
• Part I: Varieties of Shadows
• Chapter 1: Echo and Allusion: “The Extasie” Behind Seamus Heaney’s “Chanson d’Aventure”
• Chapter 2: The Answer Poem: Anne Donne on the Isle of Wight
• Chapter 3: Shared Subjects: Andrew Marvell, Archibald MacLeish, and Brendan Kennelly
• Chapter 4: Modal Resemblances: “Metaphysical,” “Meditative,” and the Poetry of Donne, W. B. Yeats, and Ronald Johnson
• Part II: Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century Shadows
• Chapter 5: What Did Suffice: Scintillas of Vaughan in the Poetry of Anne Cluysenaar
• Chapter 6: Donne, Heaney, and the Boldness of Love
• Chapter 7: The Depth of Herbert’s Voiceprint in the Poetry of Alfred Corn
• Chapter 8: Verbal Relish in the Poetry of Donne and Kimberly Johnson
• Chapter 9: The Tradition and the Individual Talent: Jericho Brown and the Donnean Note
• Shadow Instruction
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author