Metaphysical Poets

5 Key excerpts on "Metaphysical Poets"

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  The Metaphysical Passion

  Seven Modern American Poets and the Seventeenth-Century Tradition

  • Sona Raiziss(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  Modern books abound with dedications, prefaces, references, titles, epigraphs linking Eliot with Harry Crosby, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and the Fugitives, Gene-vieve Taggard with Emily Dickinson, Crane with James Agee. Where there are so many points of contact there must also be some persistent characteristic that patterns these writers, how-ever scattered in place and generation. This personal and literary brotherhood suggests some common esthetic, instinctively or con-sciously recognized. For similar reasons it should be instructive to examine more closely the selections and comments of those editors and critics who have grouped the Metaphysical Poets. Eliot, for one, finds it difficult not only to define metaphysical verse, but also to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan . . . close to Chapman. . . . Crashaw . . . returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. 3 T H E P O E T S AND T H E I R S U B J E C T S 1 3 It is perhaps unlikely that any particular coterie of poets in any century constituted a consciously metaphysical school. The meta-physical is a tendency of mind, leading to a characteristic expres-siveness. Given certain social conditions in a period, its impulse is likely to affect the manner of many poets otherwise quite dif-ferent and to create one sort of bond among them. In the introduction to his anthology of seventeenth-century metaphysical poems, Grierson selects Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe as representing Metaphysical Poetry, in the full sense of the term.

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  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry

  • T. S. Eliot(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Mariner Books

    (Publisher)

  Under philosophical poetry we must, a priori, include Lucretius and Dante, poets whom we take to be poets and to be philosophical by immediate inspection and common consent. And we must not include all great poetry, for the adjective would become meaningless. And we must proceed from the side of poetry, not from that of philosophy. That is to say, we must restrict the inclusion to poetical work of the first intensity, in which the thought is so to speak fused into poetry at a very high temperature. Consequently we must leave out of account those works, even when very fine, such as Pope’s Essay on Man, in which the fusion is less perfect, or made at a lower temperature, and some works of Blake in which we are not sure that it takes place at all. 7 Now I am convinced that of “philosophy” in this legitimate sense, in the sense in which we can speak of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe as philosophical (though not so surely as “philosophers”), Donne and the poets whom we associate with him possessed not an atom. So far, we find no justification for using the term “metaphysical”. Some years ago I had a correspondence with Mr. Saintsbury, both in The Times and privately, on this very point. 8 Mr. Saintsbury wished not only to keep the term—and in this we are in accord—but to give it, by what hardly seemed to me better than a jeu de mots, a further and more exact significance based on its etymology. Metaphysics was, of course, originally only that work of Aristotle’s which came after his Physics. But the metaphysical, for Mr. Saintsbury, is that which comes after the natural; the Metaphysical Poets are those who seek something beyond or after nature, refinements of thought or emotion: ergo, they are metaphysical. Mr. Saintsbury’s definition of Metaphysical Poets as those who have and are chiefly interested in “second thoughts”, as he phrases it, is ingenious and worth considering

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  The Insistence of Art

  Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity

  • Paul A. Kottman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Instead of simply rehabilitating the School of Donne, Eliot aspired to make sense of the relationship between metaphysics and metaphysical poetry without reducing either to the other. To carry out this critical task it would be necessary to investigate the varieties of metaphysics as well as the varieties of metaphysical poetry. But Eliot only broached this task, while the New Critics largely neglected it. Hence metaphysical poetry, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.

  From another point of view, metaphysical poetry is a seventeenth-century genre that was retrospectively dubbed metaphysical by an eighteenth-century critic. As such, it has led a merely posthumous existence. Perhaps by reexamining its christening and subsequent critical reception we can begin to clarify the sense in which it lives on, awaiting a realization still to come.

  In the introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century , Grierson distinguished metaphysical poetry in “the full sense of the term” from the metaphysical poetry of “Donne and his followers to Cowley”: “Metaphysical poetry, in the full sense of the term, is a poetry which, like that of the Divina Commedia , the De Natura Rerum , perhaps Goethe’s Faust , has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the rôle assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.”6 Grierson excludes Milton from this list since “Milton was no philosopher. . . . He proved nothing. The definitely stated argument of [Paradise Lost ] is an obvious begging of the question.” On the other hand, Grierson acknowledges that Milton is metaphysical in a “large way” that “Donne and his followers to Cowley are not.”7 Grierson is less precise about the sense in which the term “metaphysical” applies to Donne and his followers. He associates “the metaphysical strain” with “the more intellectual, less verbal, character of their wit compared with the conceits of the Elizabethans; the finer psychology of which their conceits are often the expression; their learned imagery; the argumentative, subtle evolution of their lyrics; above all the peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination.”8

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  The Pleasure of Poetry

  Reading and Enjoying British Poetry from Donne to Burns

  • Nicolas H. Nelson(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  This period is not as well known as some others, such as the Renaissance with Shakespeare or the Romantic period in the early nineteenth century. Still, there is much to enjoy in the poetry of this era, much even that is surprisingly contemporary in its concerns. Some of the greatest poets in English, like John Milton and Alexander Pope, wrote during this time but are practically unknown today. Yet they are brilliant handlers of the language with a wonderful variety of poems, many of which are quite accessible to modern readers. The first part of this period, to the middle of the seventeenth century, is usually characterized as one dominated by the so-called Meta- physical Poets, a name that suggests they reveal a strong philosophical interest in their poetry. The most important Metaphysical Poets we will con- sider are John Donne and Andrew Marvell, but we will see that, despite the name, they are not always very serious or interested only in philosophical themes. Moreover, there are other poets at this time, like Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick, who do not fully share their concerns. The later period, once called the Neoclassical Age but now more accurately termed the Restoration (roughly from 1660 to 1700) and the eighteenth century, was dominated first by satire and later by themes of sympathy and sensibility. Still, as we shall see, other themes and kinds of poetry than these were written and enjoyed. Diversity is clearly one of this poetry’s main features. These two hundred years or so in England were often turbulent and oc- casionally marred by violent conflict. In the seventeenth century the country was moving from a largely feudal society to a freer, more capitalistic econ- omy and a somewhat more constitutional form of monarchy. It was sharply divided in the middle of the century by a civil war that pitted the king (Charles I) against the Parliament, Puritan against Anglican, community against community, and brother against brother.

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  Ethics in Culture

  The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media

  • Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  If the cerebral cortex is indeed what modern poetry should address and use first and foremost, then one can understand his appreciation of the metaphysical conceit as a creative mental device for extending the cognitive potential of the mind—especially its capacity to rearrange the grids and lattices of mental spaces that tradition had hard-wired into its system. This is obviously what the confusions and com-plexities of the modern world require more than anything else. Therefore the formula “values in and through poetry” is exchanged for the formula “poetry as value,” or, in Ezra Pound’s words: “It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandages” (22). And literature, and particularly its most condensed form, poetry, does exactly that. Eliot was certainly right to insist that the ‘metaphysical’ explorations of the seventeenth-century poets was not a mere leisure activity of half a dozen intellectuals with time on their hands, but an answer to cultural processes that required radical rearrangements of the cognitive apparatus. That this is so becomes obvious when one looks at the general situation— culturally, religiously, cosmologically, philosophically—these generations of writers found themselves in: To take a short-cut here I would like to use George Parfitt’s description of that cultural moment to which the Metaphysicals reacted: It is really not at all surprising to find that the seventeenth century contains both the assertion of traditional worlds and the beginnings of new ones, this being in the nature of things. […] The fact that the old and the new co-exists makes for increased complexity. (8) And this complexity is what the metaphysical conceits use and address in ever new variations.

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