09 on the Metaphysical Poets.doc

The Metaphysical poetry.

The most important metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne and Richard Crashaw.

T.S. Eliot, the poet responsible for the 20th c. reemergence of the Metaphysical poetry as one of the most important English poetical “schools” of thought (“The Metaphysical Poets”), associates it with an effort to “incorporate [one’s] erudition into sensibility”, so that the language manages to effect “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling”. Eliot sees the High Elizabethan and High Jacobean mode, best exemplified by the Metaphysical poets, as the last “perfect” stage of literature, before a catastrophe that led to the progressive “dissociation of sensibility”:

          The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which

          had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of

          Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the

          intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they

          think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A

          thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is

          perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the 

          ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or

          reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with

          the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; m the mind of the poet these

          experiences are always forming new wholes.

Supposedly unlike the poets of the fallen time,

          [t]he poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,

          possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They

          are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more

         than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino.

However,

          [i]n the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have 

          never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of

          the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men

          performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the

          effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects

          improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some

          of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the

          language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.  (Eliot, “Metaphysical

          Poets”)

The term “metaphysical poets” was first used by Samuel Johnson (1744). The hallmark of their poetry is the metaphysical conceit (a figure of speech that employs unusual and paradoxical images), a reliance on intellectual wit, learned and sensuous imagery, and subtle argument. Although this method was by no means new, these men infused new life into English poetry by the freshness and originality of their approach. Nowadays a term used to group together certain 17th-century poets, usually John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, though other figures like Andrew Marvell are sometimes included in the list. Although in no sense a school or movement proper, they share common characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate stylistic manoeuvres.
        Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their poetry, which investigates the world by pointing towards the relation – and exploring that relation – between rational, logical argument on the one hand and intuition or “mysticism” on the other, both stemming from and grounded in the close observation of “natural” (meaning non-“intellectual”, sensory) phenomena, often depicted with sensuous detail. Dryden, who disapproved of Donne's stylistic excesses, particularly his extravagant conceits(or witty comparisons) and his tendency towards hyperbolic abstractions, might have been the first to apply the term to 17th c. poetry when, in 1693, he criticized the earlier poet: “He affects the Metaphysics... in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts”.  He. Johnson consolidated the argument, noting that “about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets”, and going on to describe the supposedly far-fetched nature of their comparisons as “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. Examples of the practice Johnson condemned would include the extended comparison of love with astrology (by Donne) and of the soul with a drop of dew (by Marvell).

        Reacting against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and rigorous. (Johnson decried its roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles.) It has also been labelled the “poetry of strong lines”. In his important essay, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), which helped bring the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries back into favour, T. S. Eliot argued that their work fuses reason with passion; it shows a unification of thought and feeling which later became separated into a “dissociation of sensibility”

A word of caution, or what is metaphysics:

“the branch of philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the ultimate nature of being and the world.

The word derives from the Greek words μετά (metá) (meaning "beyond" or "after") and φυσικά (physiká) (meaning "physical"), "physical" referring to those works on matter by Aristotle in antiquity. The prefix meta- ("beyond") was attached to the chapters in Aristotle's work that physically followed after the chapters on "physics", in posthumously edited collections. Aristotle called some of the subjects treated there "first philosophy."

A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into what types of things there are in the world and what relations these things bear to one another. The metaphysician also attempts to clarify the notions by which people understand the world, including existence, objecthood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility”

Features of metaphysical poetry:

·         Use of ordinary speech mixed with metaphors, puns and paradoxes

·         The exaltation of wit, which in the 17th century meant a nimbleness of thought; a sense of fancy (imagination of a fantastic or whimsical nature); and originality in figures of speech

·         Abstruse terminology often drawn from science or law

·         Often poems are presented in the form of an argument

·         In love poetry, the metaphysical poets often draw on ideas from Renaissance Neo-Platonism – for instance, to show the relationship between the soul and body and the union of lovers' souls

·         The poems often aim at a degree of psychological realism when referring to emotions

·         Based on tensions, contradictions and incongruities, the poems do not avoid referring to the gross and the earthly – or the high-brow, often within the same text

·         Central importance of metaphysical conceits:

-          a (metaphysical) conceit is a figure of speech usually classified as a subtype of metaphor – an elaborate and strikingly unconventional or supposedly far-fetched metaphor, hyperbole, contradiction, simile, paradox or oxymoron causing a shock to the reader by the obvious dissimilarity, “distance” between or stunning incompatibility of the objects compared; (lovers and a compass, the soul and timber, the body and mind)

-          these metaphors are expansive and syncretistic, combining paradox, wit, symbolism or allegory, double meanings, word puns, analytical tone and logical reasoning – so as to enhance the final emotive power of the conceit

-          the basis of the conceit is explicit or implicit comparison, in the 17th c. poetry gradually and intricately unfolding throughout the whole text, slowly building up its complexity – and shock value

-          before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term conceit was a synonym for "thought" and roughly equivalent to "idea" or "concept." It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark.

-          metaphysical conceits usually draw upon very detailed imagery, often drawn from, careful observation of the “natural” world, everyday affairs – or narrow fields of knowledge (geometry, physics, etc.)

-          Though conceits appear playful, they are never trivial – in fact, they seem to have had epistemological – and often soteriological – significance. The Metaphysical poets explored all areas of knowledge to find in the esoteric or even the commonplace startling, unusual and telling analogies, revealing the occult organizations of the universe (hence “metaphysical”), the immanent world of secret correspondences. The wit is thus often inseparable from knowledge – gnosis – and/or salvation. 

-          As far as poetics goes, "[t]he metaphysical conceit can strike from our minds the same spark of recognition that the poet had, and can give us an understanding of a real but previously unsuspected similarity that is enlightening. It can speak to both our minds and our emotions with a great force." (C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature)

-          one of the most famous conceits is John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," a poem in which Donne compares two souls in love to the points on a geometer's compass.

Metaphysical conceits are expansive metaphors marked by paradox, wit, symbolism, double meanings, analytical tone, and logical reasoning. However, the complexity and form of metaphysical conceits is difficult to understand just by description. John Donne, who is considered the first metaphysical poet, created text book example of a metaphysical conceit in the second half of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" :

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Donne wrote this famous conceit comparing two departed lovers to a compass. By compass, he means a drawing compass – one that makes geometric circles, not the kind of compass that points to the magnetic poles. Through the strange, but fitting comparison, he tries to capture the idea that as one lover, or compass leg, moves further away, the one remaining stationary will "lean and hearken" after it. The idea of a circle is important, too. Circles have all sorts of symbolic meanings: eternity, completeness, and perfection to name a few. Comparison between unlikely and dissimilar things is a common feature of these figures of speech. The final line about growing erect as it comes homes has fairly obvious double meanings.

However, this example lacks the use of paradoxes found in many other metaphysical conceits. Once again, Donne's poetry shows an outstanding example in "Batter my heart, three person'd God":

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The entire poem is both a metaphysical conceit and paradoxical; Donne is asking God for spiritual salvation and destruction simultaneously. Even in the later part where the overtone is love and marriage (contrasting to the bending, breaking and burning through the first part), he asks for "divorce" and to "break that knot again".

Through highly irregular comparisons that seemingly have nothing in common, metaphysical conceits are able to paint an exact emotion or idea. The metaphysical poets of the 17th century are often associated as the primary users of these, but they were not the only ones: Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly. In Richard II, the playwright compares two kings competing for power to two buckets in a well, for instance.

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