Metaphysical Poetry

• name:

• Dryden was the first to apply the term

• metaphysical means dealing with the relationship between spirit to matter or the ultimate nature of reality;

• "meta-physics" by Aristotle: sphere of learning "after-physics"; dealing with the world as a whole (spirit and matter);

• features:

• extravagant conceits (or witty comparisons) and his tendency towards hyperbolic abstractions

• Samuel Johnson: 'a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'; causing a shock to the reader by the strangeness of the objects compared

• 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'

• wit and fancy

• puns, paradoxes, anaphors; hyperboles (excessive utterances); anithesis; oxymorons

• terminology (diction) often drawn from science, law, alchemy

• rhetoric important again: a system teaching the art of composition and self-expression; poets to delight, teach and to persuade;

- topics:

• love themes challenging Petrarchan conventions or neo-Platonic ideas (spirit bit less important than the body)

• love as a game

• love as a religion; religion as love

• rediscovery of the body and soul

• Metaphysical poets

• John Donne

themes:

• new way of saying conventional things

• love and salvation

• desire for love

• sinfulness

• fighting against mortality

• erotic love (love of the body; goal is sexual intercourse)

• love as a game

• body and soul

• rejection of the neo-Platonic ideas for Ovidian amor

• women as inconstant, adulterous;

• mutual love transcends transitory matters

• spiritual union in love (private and cosmic)

• roles of the `speaking I': lover, rake / libertine, cynic

• inconstancies because of the conflict of contraries

• discoveries (New World discovered and explored)

• intense and intimate relationship with God (sexual lg?)

• Songs and Sonets 1590; Divine Poems; Holy sonnets, Anniversaries

• individual poems: "Song. Go and catch a falling star";"Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"; "The Flea"

• George Herbert

• a devotional poet

themes:

• conflicts of devotion and rebellion

• spiritual lover's joys and sorrows

• the material world vs spiritual dimension

• using Earthly images for spiritual metaphors

• worldly life and Christian values

• the price of belief and rebellion

• Christian devotion and subordination

• "The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations";

• individual poems: "The Pearl"; "The Collar"

• Andrew Marvell:

• only thematically belonging to the Cavaliers

themes:

• gardens and country life

• relation of body and soul

• love expressed by means of cosmology and mathematics (fulfillment of love only in eternity)

• sexual pleasure; seduction

• carpe diem and fear of extinction

• transitoriness of pleasure

• reflections on the brevity of happiness

• individual poems: "Horatian ode"; "The Definition of love"; "To His Coy Mistress":

• Cavaliers

• celebrating the life and value of Charles I;

• celebrating life;

• minor pleasures and grievances in life

• the court as inspiration

• Andrew Marvell (questionable as explained); Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, John Suckling, Richard Lovelas, Thomas Traherne; Richard Crashaw (Cavalier in chronological belonging; in poetry closer to Donne); Henry Vaughan (same)

Various outlooks on love (recommended reading):

Donne

• The Good-Morrow: New love celebrated.

• The Sunne Rising: Love fulfilled and celebrated.

• The Anniversarie: Love in relation to time.

• The Canonization: Love as a new religion.

• A Valediction: The consolation of love on parting.

• A Nocturnall: A meditation on the lover's desolation.

Herbert

• Jordan: Religious devotion versus secular love.

• The Pearl: God's love for man.

• The Collar: The inevitability of God's love.

• The Flower: The severity and grace of a loving God.

• Love: The love of Christ the Host.

Marvell

• The Coronet: Religious devotion versus secular love.

• Bermudas: The mercy and bounty of God's love.

• To His Coy Mistress: Sexual love and the brevity of life.

• The Definition of Love: A display of the love of wit.

• The Garden: Reasonable contemplation as a retreat from passion.

Recommended reading:

Corns, Thomas N. (ed.) 1998. The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sikorska, Liliana. 2007. A short history of English Literature. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.

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