METAPHYSICAL POETRY
from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Preminger, Alex; Brogan, T. V. F. (co-eds); Warnke, Frank J.; Hardison Jr, O. B.; Miner, Earl (assoc. eds).
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. xlvi, 1383 p.

METAPHYSICAL POETRY

A term applied to the poetry written by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and other 17th-c. Eng. poets, distinguished by ingenuity, intellectuality, and sometimes obscurity. Recent scholarship has extended application of the term to Continental poets of the same period (de Mourgues, Warnke), so that m. p. is now often seen as an international phenomenon of the baroque (q.v.) or, as some would have it, of mannerism (q.v.) (Sypher). Use of the term to designate a recurrent constant rather than a specific historical phenomenon has at best only a metaphorical or impressionistic validity, however. M. p. of the 17th c. is characterized by a strong dependence on irony and paradox (qq.v.) and by the use of the conceit (q.v.) as well as such figures as catachresis and oxymoron (qq.v.). Its strategy of address is typically dramatic rather than narrative or descriptive. In its earlier manifestations (e.g. the Songs and Sonets of Donne), m. p. was further distinguished by highly original attitudes toward sexual love. Donne rejected not only Petrarchan rhetoric (see PETRARCHISM)--except in a partially ironic manner--but also the pose of abject worship of the mistress which 16th-c. poets had inherited, via Petrarch, from the troubadours. A new sexual realism, together with introspective psychological analysis, thus became an element in the m. fashion.

Realism, introspection, and irony remained dominant features in Eng. as well as Continental m. p., but many of the greatest of Donne's successors--Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan--generally chose to articulate those qualities in a religious rather than an amorous context. A great deal of m. p. is devotional; some of it is mystical. Although some scholars regard the term "m. p." as a misnomer, pointing out that its practitioners are seldom concerned with questions of metaphysics or ontology (Leishman), others have maintained that the distinctive quality of m. p., the occasion of its technique, is precisely that the subject--love, death, God, human frailty--is presented in the context of some m. problem (J. Smith). Such a justification was not, however, in the mind of Dryden when he suggested the term in a reference to Donne ( Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire , 1692): "He affects the metaphysics not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign, and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy." (In Donne's own lifetime William Drummond of Hawthornden had referred scornfully to poems in which "m." diction is employed.) It remained for Dr. Johnson to supply the first analysis of m. imagery and to establish the term "m." permanently in Eng. criticism. Johnson described the basis of m. imagery as a kind of discordia concors through which "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together," criticizing the school therefore for its lack of naturalness.

Favoring a kind of imagery which requires the mediation of the intellect for full comprehension, m. p. shows relatively little interest in sensuous imagery. There are, however, some poets (e.g. Crashaw in England, Gryphius in Germany) who manifest aspects of both the m. and the "high baroque" manners. The assumption made by many earlier critics (Williamson, White), that Eng. m. p. derives primarily from attempts to imitate Donne, has been refuted by modern scholarship, which has demonstrated not only the notable individuality of poets such as Herbert and Marvell but also the fact that many features of m. style are present in much poetry written either shortly before or during the time when Donne wrote his Songs and Sonets, by such poets as Southwell, Greville, and Alabaster (Martz), not to mention the fact (noted above) that many poets on the Continent, predecessors and contemporaries of Donne, wrote poems in the m. style. Such poets as La Ceppede in France, Huygens and Revius in Holland, and Quevedo in Spain seem certainly to deserve the name "m. poets." If there can be said to be a "School of Donne" in England, it consists of such minor amorous lyrists as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Carew, and Suckling, not of the great devotional poets.

Poets and critics during the heyday of m. p. had almost no awareness of that kind of poetry as a distinct stylistic phenomenon; most theorists of the age continued to describe poetry in the traditional terms of Ren. poetics (see BAROQUE POETICS). However, some It. and Sp. writers--particularly Baltasar Gracian--did offer the doctrine of "universal analogy" as a basis for the conceit, and "strong lines" was a phrase used by Eng. critics to designate the intricate intellectual quality of Donne and many of his contemporaries.

Dominant in England until the Restoration (1660) and the associated triumph of neoclassicism, m. p. went into eclipse throughout the 18th and 19th cs. (Continental m. p. had a similar destiny.) Although such poets as Coleridge and Browning admired Donne, he and his successors were generally regarded as frigid and pretentious purveyors of intentional obscurity. But the turn of the 20th c. ushered in a revaluation, heralded in England by the publication of Sir Herbert Grierson's great ed. of Donne's Poetical Works (1912) and coinciding with the Ger. rediscovery of baroque poetry and the Sp. rehabilitation of the reputations of Gongora and Calderon. The age of modernism (ca. 1920-ca. 1960) privileged m. p. with particular intensity. T. S. Eliot, the most influential modernist poet-critic in the Eng.-speaking world, saw in its practitioners, as in the Jacobean dramatists, a sensibility that had not suffered "dissociation," a capacity for "devouring all kinds of experience" which he contrasted with the singleness of tone of the romantics and Victorians. For the first time since the 17th c., the m. poets became a vital influence on living poets.

Some critics of the 1920s and 1930s went too far in stressing the modernity of the m. group, but balance was subsequently restored by studies that demonstrated the links between m. p. and the phenomena of its own age and its intellectual heritage--such phenomena as scholastic philosophy, Ren. logic and rhetoric, the "new science" of the 17th c., and Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology (Tuve, Nicolson, Martz, Lewalski). Especially rewarding has been the examination of the relationship between m. p. and the practice of formal religious meditation as formulated by Ignatius of Loyola. Some scholars (see Martz) have found in Ignatian meditation a basis for both the union of thought and feeling so often ascribed to m. p. and the markedly dramatic qualities of that poetry. Martz and others have suggested that the term meditation might be extended to cover an entire poetic mode rather than the 17th-c. phenomenon alone, and that meditation is one of the psychological bases of lyric composition (Warnke). Meditation has also been studied in the m. p. of France, Spain, and Holland.

If modernism exaggerated the modernity of the m. poets, however (and it should be noted that in the decades after 1960 scholarly attention tended to shift from Donne and the ms. to Spenser and Milton), the fact remains that the age did feel a special affinity with them. It may be that in our own century, under the disturbing impact of scientific relativity, social fragmentation, and political confusion, many artists and intellectuals were bound to feel a kinship with an age in which, in Donne's phrase, "new philosophy call[ed] all in doubt." The m. style, in its introspective and realistic orientation, its wide-ranging metaphor, and its daring rhetoric, aimed at wresting a precarious unity from the scattered materials of an existence which had become puzzling and unfocused. The poets of modernism may have felt their own task as similar. Similarity, however, is not identity (H. Block, for example, has convincingly refuted the supposed parallel between m. and symbolist poetry), and the m. poets are best approached with a clear sense of their historical uniqueness.