metaphysical poets

metaphysical poets. Poets generally grouped under this label include Donne (who is regarded as founder of the ‘school’), G. Herbert, Crashaw, H. Vaughan, Marvell, and Traherne, together with lesser figures like Benlowes, Herbert of Cherbury, H. King, A. Cowley, and Cleveland. The label was first used (disparagingly) by Dr Johnson in his ‘Life of Cowley’ (written in 1777). Dryden had complained that Donne ‘affects the metaphysics’, perplexing the minds of the fair sex with ‘nice speculations of philosophy’. Earlier still W. Drummond censored poetic innovators who employed ‘Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities’. The label is misleading, since none of these poets is seriously interested in metaphysics (except Herbert of Cherbury, and even he excludes the interest from his poetry). Further, these poets have in reality little in common: the features their work is generally taken to display are sustained dialectic, paradox, novelty, incongruity, ‘muscular’ rhythms, giving the effect of a ‘speaking voice’, and the use of ‘conceits’, or comparisons in which tenor and vehicle can be related only by ingenious pseudo-logic.

With the new taste for clarity and the impatience with figurative language that prevailed after the Restoration, their reputation dwindled. Their revival was delayed until after the First World War when the revaluation of metaphysical poetry, and the related downgrading of Romanticism and Milton, was the major feature of the rewriting of English literary history in the first half of the 20th cent. Key documents in the revival were H. J. C. Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) and T. S. Eliot's essay ‘Metaphysical Poets’, which first appeared as a review of Grierson's collection (TLS, 20 Oct. 1921). According to Eliot these poets had the advantage of writing at a time when thought and feeling were closely fused, before the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ set in about the time of Milton. Their virtues of difficulty and tough newness were felt to relate them closely to the Modernists—Pound, Yeats, and Eliot himself.