Metaphysical Poets Essay Example for Free

Metaphysical Poets hearThe term metaphysical poets was coined by the poet and critic Samuel assson to describe a loose group of British spoken language poets of the 17th whizz C, whose work was characterized by the inventive utilise of dressing tables, and by speculation about topics such as love or religion. These poets were not formally affiliated most of them did not even know or read each other (Wikipedia). Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or witthat is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the lector is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poesy. Metaphysical poetry is less(prenominal) concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness.The boldness of the literary devices usedespecially obliquity, irony, and paradoxis often reinforced by a dramatic dire ctness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech. Esteem for Metaphysical poetry neer stood exalteder than in the 1930s and 40s, largely because of T.S. Eliots influential essay The Metaphysical Poets (1921), a followup of Herbert J.C. Griersons anthology Metaphysical Lyrics Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In this essay Eliot argued that the works of these men embody a alinement of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a dissociation of sensibility, which resulted in works that were any intellectual or emotional merely not both at once. In their own time, howalways, the agnomen metaphysical was used pejoratively in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting the metaphysics and for perplexing the minds of the fair sex with n ice speculations of philosophical system when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love. Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, as well as dubbed them the metaphysical poets, and the term has act in use ever since. Eliots adoption of the label as a term of compliment is arguably a better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets themselves his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets debt to lyrical and socially engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character of their writing ( encyclopaedia Britannica). Without doubt Samuel Johnsons survival of the fittest of the word metaphysical to describe the followers of Donne was directly bowd by these earlier usages (the Cleveland passage is quoted in Johnsons vocabulary of 1755 to illustrate the definition of Metaphysicks).The category of poetry that indulged in metaphysics was a li ve one for later seventeenth-century poets, but for them metaphysics was a word used to mark the point at which strongly argued verse bordered on self-parody. There is more value than this, however, in the group name. Even in the earlier seventeenth century members of the core group of metaphysical poets were connected by a number of social, familial, and literary ties. Izaak Walton relates that Donne and George Herbert enjoyed a extensive and dear fightership, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each others Company (Walton, 578). Donne addressed poems to Herberts mother, Magdalen, and preached her funeral sermon, as well as writing a poem to Herberts brother, Edward, Lord Herbert. Herbert of Cherbury in turn read both Donnes poetry and that of his own brother with care, and was a friend of doubting Thomas Carew and Aurelian Townshend. Henry Wotton was the addressee of epistles in both verse and prose from his nearly friend John Donne, and at one point intended to write a life of Donne.Henry world-beater (whose father ordained John Donne) was in daily contact with Donne at St Pauls Cathedral, where the older poet was dean while King was chief residentiary. Donne bequeathed to King a portrait of himself dressed in his winding-sheet. Not surprisingly Kings verse is haunted by that of his friend, from whom he received manuscripts, as well as books and themes for sermons. Later in the century there were other close groupings of poets, who, although not linked by direct personal familiarity with Donne and Herbert, were bound to each other by ties of family, friendship, and literary consanguinity. Thomas Stanley was a cousin of Richard Lovelace and the nephew of William Hammond, and became a friend of John Hall, one of the most underrated of the minor metaphysical poets.Cowley was a friend and eventually elegist of Richard Crashaw. Pockets of metaphysicality withal survived in several institutions it cannot be an acc ident that Henry King, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Randolph, William Cartwright, and John Dryden all attended Westminster School. But by the later seventeenth century the bonds of friendship and relationship that had linked Donne and Herbert were in the main replaced by looser ties of literary indebtedness. Declaratory utterances to imagined or absent addressees who are summoned into universe by the force of the speakers eloquence are common among poems by members of these networks, as are works that research the balance and imbalance between the demands of the body and the spirit. Direct attempts to persuade, either through comparisons or through arguments that self-consciously display their logical elisions, are also among the most evident legacies left by Donne to his poetical heirs.No single one of these elements constitutes a metaphysical behavior, and it would also be wrong to suppose that all of them mustiness be present in a given poem for it to be regarded as belonging to t he tradition. It is also incorrect to believe that a poet who sometimes wrote poems in a metaphysical manner was always and in every poem a metaphysical. The metaphysical style was various. It also changed in response to historical events. Donnes Poems and Herberts The tabernacle were both posthumously printed in 1633. Those publications immediately extended the literary communities of their authors through time and space, and the fact that both volumes were posthumous had a significant effect on the kind of influence they exerted. Donne and Herbert rapidly became models for imitation, but they could also be regarded as ideal representatives of an age that had passed.Imitation of them could therefore become an act not sound of nostalgia, but of politically or theologically motivated nostalgiaas occurs most notably and heavy-handedly in the high Anglican pastiches of Herbert included in The Synagogue by Christopher Harvey, which was regularly bound with The Temple after 1640. In the political and ecclesiastical upheavals of the 1640s the metaphysical style make a motiond on. Imitating Herbert in particular could signal a appetency to resist the depredations suffered by the English church during the civil war. Richard Crashaws Steps to the Temple (1646) explicitly links itself by its title to Herberts volume. The editions of 1646 and 1648 include On Mr. G. Herberts Booke, which declares Divinest love lyes in this booke. Henry Vaughans preface to the second volume of Silex scintillans (1655) ascribes to Herberts influence his conversion from writing secular poems, and he marks the debt by adopting the titles of several poems by Herbert for his own works.By the second part of Silex these allusions to Herbert carried a political charge, intimating Vaughans resistant attitude to the forcible ejection of conservatively given(p) ministers from churches in his native Wales by commissioners acting under the parliamentary ordinance for the propagation of the gospel. The gradual transposition of networks of closely connected individuals by relationships between dead authors and their readers is peradventure a central reason for the subject of metaphysics (in the pejorative sense) in later seventeenth-century verse. The two later poets stigmatized by Johnson as metaphysical, Cleveland and Cowley, knew Donne only as a voice in a book. Efforts to reanimate that voice often show signs of strain. But the move from personal to textual connection between members of the group did not always have undesirable consequences.Andrew Marvell, who ever since John Aubreys Brief life has tended to be regarded as an isolated figure in the literary landscape, has perhaps the most distinctive poetic voice of any member of the group. By describing pastoral figures with wounded or sullied innocence who argue perplexedly about their own fate and the unattainability of their own desires, Marvell transformed the metaphysical style into an stress appropriate for a per iod of political division and national crisis.He was not but disconnected from its other practitioners he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the same time as Abraham Cowley, and he wrote a commemorative poem for Henry, Lord Hastings, in Lacrymae musarum (1649), a volume that included poems by Dryden as well as John Hall. He and Hall were both among those who composed dedicatory poems for Richard Lovelaces Lucasta (1648). Like Cleveland, Marvell owed his reputation in the later part of his career largely to his political and satirical poems, but his posthumously published variant Poems (1681) shows that a reader of earlier metaphysical verse who actively responded to his changing times could transform the idiom of his predecessors (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).Works cited Colin Burrow, Metaphysical poets (act. c.1600c.1690), Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Feb 2009 http//www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/95605, accessed 5 Aug 2 012 Encyclopedia Britannicawww.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/377915/Metaphysical-poet Wikipediahttp//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets