Metaphysical Poets

Metaphysical Poets

Introduction
In the eighteenth century, the term “Metaphysical poets” was coined to refer to certain writers, primarily of
religious verse, of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who shared similar characteristics.
Although scholars have suggested many alternative names (Louis Martz called their works the poetry of

meditation, and Mario DiCesare’s anthology spoke simply of seventeenth century religious poets), the term
“Metaphysical poets” remained useful to literary historians for more than two hundred years.
The Metaphysicals were never a self-conscious group, for the most part having limited or no contact with one
anothereven though the literary world of London at the time was quite small. The list of who is considered a
Metaphysical poet has fluctuated through changes in fashion and, of course, in the very definition of
Metaphysical verse. Prominent names in most discussions of Metaphysical poetry include John Donne
(1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-1674),
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), Richard Crashaw (c. 1612-1649), Robert Southwell (c. 1561-1595), Abraham
Cowley (1618-1667), Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), and Thomas Carew
(1594-1640). American critic Louis Martz has recognized two early American poets, Anne Bradstreet
(1612?-1672) and Edward Taylor (c. 1645-1729), as sharing many characteristics with these English poets.
Lists of those characteristics vary, but the primary quality critics have found in the works of these poets is
reflected by their epithet, “metaphysical.” The poetry is often built around metaphysical speculation, usually
of a formal, scholastic type (“scholastic” in the seventeenth century sense, referring to the “schools” of
thought at the University of Paris, predominantly those of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure).
Because scholastic thought is primarily theological, the poems are often religious in nature. However, equally
common is a conflation of the religious and the erotic reminiscent of the troubadour poets. In Herbert, this
combination became a self-conscious “war on poetry,” declared in a 1610 letter to his mother (first published
by Izaak Walton in 1670). Herbert employed what the German poets of his time called kontrafaktur, inverting
the clichés of secular love poetry to express the higher love of Jesus Christ. At the other extreme may be the
love poetry of Donne, who risks what may seem blasphemy in using religious language to describe the
speaker’s quite human love, in poems such as “The Canonization” and “The Relic,” wherein the speaker
imagines himself and his beloved as “saints of love” venerated by the church and its faithful.
Intellectual speculation in these poems, however, is not limited to metaphysics or theology, but extends to all
learning of the day, including new scientific ideas and geometrical analysis. In “The Definition of Love,” for
instance, Marvell used cartographic experiments in representing the sphere of the earth in two-dimensional
drawings (the planisphere) as a metaphor for confining something as multidimensional as love within the
“flat” boundaries of a definition. Such intricate and sometimes counterintuitive analogies, known as
metaphysical conceits, were themselves a typical element of these poems, and a major source of the disfavor
the Metaphysical poets met from the time Samuel Johnson coined the term “Metaphysical poet” in 1781 until
T. S. Eliot’s influential review in 1921 of Sir Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the
Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921).
Metaphysical Poets 1
History of the concept
Although the specific designation “Metaphysical poet” was not used until 1781, the adjective
“metaphysical” was applied to the works of these poets in their own time. The Scots poet William
Drummond of Hawthornden spoke of a tribe of writers in his day filling poems with “metaphysical Ideas and
Scholastic Quiddities.” In 1693, the most influential of restoration critics, John Dryden, scorned the verse of
Donne because in it he “affects the metaphysics.” In the early eighteenth century, Alexander Pope identifies
Cowley (and, parenthetically, Davenant) as a poet who “borrowed his metaphysical style from Donne.” In
fact, it was in the context of Cowley, and not of Donne, that Johnson invented the term “Metaphysical poet.”
In his essay on Cowley in Lives of the Poets (1779-1781), Johnson wrote “About the beginning of the
seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed metaphysical poets.”
For about a century and a half, Metaphysical poetry fell out of favor, although the Romantics, especially
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, expressed a liking for them. It remained for Grierson’s work (and Eliot’s famous
review of it) to revive an interest in these poetsand to provide at least one theory of why they had been
ignored for so long. In his introduction, Grierson, after listing what he considers the major hallmarks of the
Metaphysical poets, ends with the most important: “above all the peculiar blend of passion and thought,
feeling and ratiocination which is their greatest achievement.” This “passionate thinking” as Grierson put it,
was the hint that led Eliot to theorize that Dryden’s generation lost or turned against that ability to feel
thought. Eliot’s catch-phrase for the theory was “dissociation of sensibility.”
Eliot’s theoryand it was never presented as more than a theory, a convenient story explaining the fall of the
Metaphysicals from popularitywas simply this: “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in,
from which we have never recovered.” Donne and his generation, according to the theory, were able to “feel
their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose.” After Dryden, this was no longer possible. Hence
Johnson’s criticism of the Metaphysicals, occurring after the supposed disintegration of thought and feeling,
was understandably negative.
Eliot’s theory was never universally adapted; indeed, Eliot himself seemed to turn from it a decade later in
the 1931 essay “Donne in Our Time,” in which he asserts that Donne himself showed the split between
thought and feeling. In his 1951 volume, The Monarch of Wit, J. B. Leishman systematically demolishes the
theory with counterexamples. Nevertheless, the notion that the generation between World Wars I and II
resonated with that of Donne allowed a resurgence of interest in Metaphysical poetry that continued into the
twenty-first century.
Characteristics
The criteria by which Johnson faulted Cowley and his “race” of Metaphysicals became standard hallmarks of
their poetry: (1) ostentatious learning; (2) metrical irregularity; (3) “metaphysical wit,” defined as novel
connections in image and metaphor; (4) unusual diction; and (5) using “courtship without fondness” in their
love poetry. Each of these supposed poetic vices have been considered virtues by critics who revived interest
in Metaphysical poetry in the 1920’s.
The first quibble, “showy” erudition, depends on the reader’s judgment of the poet’s motive. When Cowley
likens human judgment to a telescope or “multiplying glass” in his “Ode of Wit” (1668), detractors such as
Johnson might think he is either parading his learning or trying to be up-to-date. However, more sympathetic
readers may read that as just being playful, or simply choosing the most effective analogy.
The second charge, roughness of poetic rhythm, can likewise be met by inquiring how the poets actually read
their verse. In the early nineteenth century, poet and critic Coleridge observed that ignoring function words,
History of the concept 2
such as prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, will usually smooth out the most seemingly irregular of
Donne’s verses. Nevertheless, many a reader has found Donne’s rhythmsand those of his fellow
Metaphysicalsquite awkward. Donne’s contemporary Ben Jonson even quipped that Donne’s looseness of
accent was a hanging offense.
The third, an accusation of seeking novelty rather than appropriateness in metaphor, is virtually a repetition of
the complaint that Metaphysical poets show off their learning. Johnson, with justice, observed that the
Metaphysical notion of wit, which Johnson supposed was seeking to surprise the reader with something
unthought of, was directly opposed to the reigning notion of wit best described by Pope in An Essay on
Criticism (1711) as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The Metaphysical notion of
avoiding the too-obvious analogy has at least as ancient a pedigree as Pope’s neoclassic one, however, as the
pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus taught that hidden connections are better than the obvious ones.
The quibble over diction, the fourth point, is simply a matter of taste. Metaphysical poets wanted their poetry
to echo the rhythms of conversation rather than art, and so their lyrics often open abruptly with colloquial
exclamations: “I struck the board, and cry’d, No more” (Herbert, “The Collar”); “Goe! Hunt the whiter
Ermine!” (Davenant, “For the Lady Olivia Porter”); “Out upon it, I have lov’d” (Suckling, “Song”).
“Rough” words such as Donne’s “snorted” (snored) for “slumbered” in “The Good Morrow” were not
considered poetic enough for neoclassic writers.
The last point, a supposed confusion of love and intellect, is implicit in Dryden’s initial comments on Donne,
in effect accusing him of creating poetic lovers who attempt to reason women into love with them, instead of
wooing. One answer to this charge is Eliot’s concept of the dissociation of sensibility.
Metaphysical conceits
What Johnson called metaphysical wit is most characteristically expressed in the form of the metaphysical
conceit. In modern usage, the literary term “conceit” generally refers to an extended comparison, though as
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo pointed out, the word “conceit” could be used in the seventeenth century as a simple
synonym for “metaphor.” Typical conceits before the Metaphysicals treated clichéd comparisons, such as
love as a storm at sea in Rima 189 of Petrarch (1304-1374). The specific poem was well known in the
sixteenth century through translations by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser.
Such a comparison stated baldly or succinctly would just be a simile, “love is like a storm at sea,” or, if
expressed more directly a metaphor, “love is a storm at sea.” However, Petrarch’s figure becomes a conceit
by expanding the comparison and multiplying details: the lover’s sighs are the winds, his tears the rain, the
lady’s scorn for him the dark clouds, and so on. Petrarch’s conceit is not, however, metaphysical. The
conceits of the Metaphysical poets differ from the conceits of Petrarch and his many English imitators of the
sixteenth century by doing just what Johnson scorned: making comparisons that were novel rather than
traditional.
The most-discussed metaphysical conceit, Donne’s comparison in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” of
a loving husband and wife as two legs of a compass, is a convenient example. The speaker of the poem is a
husband chafing under the necessity of leaving his wife behind as he goes off on business. (Donne’s friend
and biographer, Walton, asserted that the poem was written by Donne to his wife on setting off to France in
1610.) In urging his wife not to mourn, the speaker reminds her that they are one, so that they can never be
truly separated even if one should leave the other. Or if one insists on seeing husband and wife as two only in
a limited sense, he says, turning to the famous conceit: “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 the other do.” Donne
does not stop there, and it is his elaboration which makes the analogy typically metaphysical. As Donne works
Characteristics 3
through the analogy, he proves its aptness by making all of his observations on the compass apply equally
well to the husband and wife. She is the “fixed foot,” while he is the one that moves; yet the farther he is
from her, the more she “leans and hearkens after” himand indeed, the farther the moving foot of a compass
goes, the more the fixed foot leans. When the moving foot is brought back to the fixed foot, the fixed foot
“grows erect”and of course the husband’s return would cause the wife to rise from her seat. Finally, the poet
observes, the only way a compass can make a perfect circle is if the fixed foot remains fixed. Similarly, the
wife, by being steadfast, brings the husband home. “Thy firmness makes my circle just.”
Universal analogy
Whether or not Johnson was right in attributing the elaborateness of such Metaphysical images to a lust for
novelty depends on how apt the reader finds the analogy. Johnson thought the typical Metaphysical image to
be not at all apt. In Metaphysical poetry, he asserted, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
together.” How “natural” a comparison seems to the reader may be a function of the reader’s culture, poetic
tradition, and to some extent, mere taste. For example, the well-known hardness of flint, yielding to no other
substance, sprang easily to Petrarch’s mind when describing the unyielding heart of the beloved, deaf to the
lover’s pleas. So the Petrarchan cliché of the “flint-hearted lady” seemed “natural” to Renaissance poets and
readers, no less poetic for being conventional.
In the sixteenth century, however, arose an anti-Petrarchan sentiment that was tired of clichés. Parodies of
Petrarch’s comparisons ridiculed their conventionality. William Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 meets the
traditional lover’s hyperbole of his beloved’s eyes being brighter than the sun with “My mistress’ eyes are
nothing like the sun,” and goes on to offer similar reductive satire of other stock images. Donne’s elegy “The
Comparison” presents typical analogies for his beloved, inverts them into disgusting images for someone
else’s beloved, and concludes, “She, and comparisons, are odious.”
Johnson apparently assumed that all metaphysical conceits were similar inversions of tradition in search of
novelty, but there is another possibility that critics have explored since the middle of the twentieth century.
Roughly the same time as Metaphysical poetry was gaining popularity, a Platonic idea known as universal
analogy was also being revived. Giordano Bruno argued in De gli eroici furori (1585, “on heroic madness”)
that, far from being attempts to yoke disparate ideas, metaphysical conceits (concetti) stem from the poet’s
recognition of a hidden kinship in the nature of things, not immediately recognized in surface appearances.
That doctrine, known to later philosophers and divines as a theory of “correspondences,” was known in the
seventeenth century as “universal analogy.”
In a series of articles in the early 1950’s, Mazzeo presented the doctrine of universal analogy, especially in
Bruno’s formulation, as a poetic that explains Metaphysical poetry better than any of the then-current
theories. Whether the Metaphysical poets were adherents of this philosophy, or even conscious of it, its very
existence offers an alternative possibility to the unflattering notion that these poets simply wanted to try
analogies that had not been used before or to see how far they could stretch a patently absurd comparison.
Readers need not see them, as Johnson apparently did, as overgrown adolescents trying to shock their readers.
Marinismo and Gongorismo
While Metaphysical poets were identified as a type in the English-language tradition, the phenomenon of
highly conceited poetry merging thought and feeling was a widely European development in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century. In Italy, Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) was famous, and widely imitated,
for his reversal of Petrarchan conventions in love poems collected in Le rime (1602; Steps to the Temple,
canto 1 only, 1646) and La Lira (1615). Marino and his father, a Neapolitan lawyer, became part of the
literary circle of Giambattista Della Porta, where Marino encountered the philosophy of Giordano Bruno. The
Metaphysical conceits 4
result was a series of lyrics that produced poetry criticized for seeking novelty, not only in its comparisons but
also in its subject matter and diction. Marino was exploring metaphysical concetti independently of early
English Metaphysicals such as Donne, though he directly influenced a second English generation, particularly
Crashaw, who translated Marino’s verse. By 1627, Marino’s imitators in Italy were called i Marinisti, “the
Marinists,” and the Italian equivalent of Metaphysical poetry was Marinismo or secentismo
(seventeenth-century-ism).
In Spain, the poetry of Luis de Góngora y Argote gave the name of Gongorism to the metaphysical style in
Spanish poetry. Gonogora’s opponents called this style culteranismo, combining the words culto
(“cultivated,” which sounds flattering, but implies an overworking of the material) and luteranismo
(“Lutheranism,” which implies a heresy against poetry).
Strong lines
One quality celebrated (or condemned) in the poetry of both Marino and Gongora was also identified in the
English Metaphysicals by their contemporaries, who did not use the term “metaphysical.” Helen Gardner
opens her influential introduction to her anthology of the Metaphysicals with a discussion of this quality under
the name of “strong lines.” Lines of poetry were considered “strong” if they were concise, packing a great
deal of meaning into few words, which at the same time made them difficult to interpret.
Identifying the Metaphysical poets as purveyors of strong lines presents a paradox, since the metaphysical
conceit is characterized by elaborationtracing down every nuance of a comparisonand the strong, or
“masculine,” style is characterized by epigrammatic, elliptical conciseness. Mario Praz met this criticism by
theorizing that the Metaphysical style began as a sort of offshoot of the vogue for emblems, allegorical
pictures of abstract concepts accompanied by epigrams defining that concept. Praz’s theory depends rather
heavily on not making fine distinctions between several types of seventeenth century verse and is no longer
widely held.
Doctrine in metaphysical verse
With the notion that the Metaphysical poets read their learning into their poetry came the obvious question
(though it was not apparently obvious until the 1970’s): If the thought in the devotional lyrics of the
Metaphysical poets is theological, then what is the relation of doctrine to the poems? Can the reader determine
the denominational drift of the poet’s Christianity from the poems? In the 1950’s, critic Martz discovered a
curious phenomenon: Though largely Anglican, the Metaphysical poets were, Martz was convinced,
influenced by Catholic devotional manuals from the continent.
Then a series of critics, starting with William Halewood in The Poetry of Grace (1970), began to assert the
existence of what by the end of the decade became known by Barbara Lewalski’s term, “Protestant poetics,”
in these poets. Whether a particular poet leaned more toward Calvinism or Anglican orthodoxy (other than the
two Roman Catholic poets in the group, Crashaw and Southwell), this theory maintained, their sensibilities
were decidedly Protestant, not informed by Ignatian guides to meditation as Martz suggested. However, in
The Emotive Image (1983), Anthony Raspa posited a “Jesuit poetics” in English poetry of the seventeenth
century, and in Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth Century Poetry (2000), R. V. Young demonstrated that
most of the supposedly Protestant elements of this poetry were common in Catholic thought and doctrine as
well.
Paradoxicallyand the Metaphysical poets loved paradoxthis critical attention to theological subtleties long
since forgotten or ignored by English-speaking culture at large has helped to keep the Metaphysical poets not
only relevant but also vital to twenty-first century literary discourse. Terms such as “provenient grace,”
Marinismo and Gongorismo 5
which had not been a part of ecumenical dialogue between Catholic and Protestant theologians for centuries,
became vital to arguments for or against the notion of Protestant poetics in the twenty-first century. Nor are
these theological discussions peripheral, for most participants in the controversy assume that whatever
theology informs the poetry is crucial to reading and interpreting it.
The relevance of the Metaphysical poets to modern readers is not limited to their religious verse, however.
The Donne revival that led to a rekindling of interest in all Metaphysical poets in the 1920’s was feared in the
decades immediately following to be a mere vogue. C. S. Lewis opened a 1938 essay on Donne’s love poetry
by citing E. E. Kellett’s Whirligig of Taste (1929) as a convenient emblem for the shifting views toward the
Metaphysicals: Scorned by Victorians, lionized by the Jazz Age, perhaps the revival was merely a phase, to be
replaced by another hibernation. That has not happened, however. The metaphysical poets show no sign of
being dislodged from the curriculum of English poetry in the early twenty-first century.