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The poet Abraham Cowley, in whose biography Samuel Johnson first named and described
Metaphysical poetry

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The term metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a

loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the
inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical
quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly
regarded until 20th century attention established their importance.
Given the lack of coherence as a movement, and the diversity of style between poets, it
has been suggested that calling them Baroque poets after their era might be more useful.
Once the Metaphysical style was established, however, it was occasionally adopted by
other and especially younger poets to fit appropriate circumstances.

Contents

 1Origin of the name

 2Criticism
o 2.1The Augustans
o 2.220th-century recognition
 3Defining the canon
 4A sense of community
o 4.1Elegists
 5Characteristics
o 5.1Free from former artificial styles
o 5.2European Baroque influences, including use of conceits
o 5.3Wordplay and wit
o 5.4Platonic influence
 6Stylistic echoes
 7Notes and references
 8Bibliography
 9External links

Origin of the name[edit]

In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his Lives of the Most Eminent English
Poets (1779–81), Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in
which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets".
This does not necessarily imply that he intended metaphysical to be used in its true
sense, in that he was probably referring to a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John
Donne:
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, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses
of love. In this...Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault. [1]
Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of the new style of poetry
was Drummond of Hawthornden, who in an undated letter from the 1630s made the
charge that "some men of late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her
reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical
quiddities, denuding her of her own habits, and those ornaments with which she hath
amused the world some thousand years".[2]

Criticism[edit]
Part of the series on

17th-century scholasticism
Background

Protestant Reformation
Counter-Reformation
Aristotelianism
Scholasticism
Patristics

17th-century scholastics

Second scholasticism of the Jesuits and the Dominicans

Lutheran scholasticism during Lutheran Orthodoxy
Ramism among the Reformed scholastics
Metaphysical poets in the Church of England

Reactions within Christianity

Labadists against the Jesuits

Pietism against orthodox Lutherans
Nadere Reformatie within Dutch Calvinism
Richard Hooker against the Ramists

Reactions within philosophy

Modernists against Roman Catholics

Neologists against Lutherans
Spinozists against Dutch Calvinists
Deists against Anglicanism
John Locke against Bishop Stillingfleet

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The Augustans[edit]
Johnson's assessment of 'metaphysical poetry' was not at all flattering:
The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and, to show their learning was their
whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry,
they only wrote verses, and, very often, such verses as stood the trial of the finger better
than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be
verses by counting the syllables... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their
learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his
improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. [3]
Johnson was repeating the disapproval of earlier critics who upheld the rival canons
of Augustan poetry, for though Johnson may have given the Metaphysical 'school' the
name by which it is now known, he was far from being the first to condemn 17th century
poetic usage of conceit and word-play. John Dryden had already satirised the Baroque
taste for them in his Mac Flecknoe and Joseph Addison, in quoting him, singled out the
poetry of George Herbert as providing a flagrant example. [4]
20th-century recognition[edit]
During the course of the 1920s, T. S. Eliot did much to establish the importance of the
Metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his
own work. By 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the
day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the
passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry." [5]
A further two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their
importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a "high Anglican
and royalist literary history" on 17th-century English poetry. [6] But Colin Burrow's
dissenting opinion, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, is that the term
'Metaphysical poets' still retains some value. For one thing, Donne's poetry had
considerable influence on subsequent poets, who emulated his style. And there are
several instances in which 17th-century poets used the word 'metaphysical' in their work,
meaning that Samuel Johnson's description has some foundation in the usage of the
previous century.[6] However, the term does isolate the English poets from those who
shared similar stylistic traits in Europe and America. Since the 1960s, therefore, it has
been argued that gathering all of these under the heading of Baroque poets would be
more helpfully inclusive.[7]

Defining the canon[edit]

There is no scholarly consensus regarding which English poets or poems fit within the
Metaphysical genre. In his initial use of the term, Johnson quoted just three
poets: Abraham Cowley, John Donne, and John Cleveland. Colin Burrow later singled
out John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard
Crashaw as 'central figures', while naming many more, all or part of whose work has
been identified as sharing its characteristics.[6]
Two key anthologists in particular were responsible for identifying common stylistic traits
among 17th-century poets. Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the
Seventeenth Century (1921)[8] was important in defining the Metaphysical canon. In
addition, Helen Gardner's Metaphysical Poets (1957) included 'proto-metaphysical'
writers such as William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh and, extending into
the Restoration, brought in Edmund Waller and Rochester. While comprehensive, her
selection, as Burrow remarks, so dilutes the style as to make it "virtually coextensive with
seventeenth-century poetry".[6]
Late additions to the Metaphysical canon have included sacred poets of both England
and America who had been virtually unknown for centuries. [9] John Norris was better
known as a Platonist philosopher. Thomas Traherne's poetry remained unpublished until
the start of the 20th century. The work of Edward Taylor, who is now counted as the
outstanding English-language poet of North America, was only discovered in 1937.

A sense of community[edit]
Johnson's definition of the Metaphysical poets was that of a hostile critic looking back at
the style of the previous century. In 1958 Alvarez proposed an alternative approach in a
series of lectures eventually published as The School of Donne. This was to look at the
practice and self-definition of the circle of friends about Donne, who were the recipients
of many of his verse letters. They were a group of some fifteen young professionals with
an interest in poetry, many of them poets themselves although, like Donne for much of
his life, few of them published their work.[10] Instead, copies were circulated in manuscript
among them. Uncertain ascriptions resulted in some poems from their fraternity being
ascribed to Donne by later editors.

The title page of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, 1650

A younger second generation was a close-knit group of courtiers, some of them with
family or professional ties to Donne's circle, who initially borrowed Donne's manner to
cultivate wit. Among them were Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his brother George, whose
mother Magdalen was another recipient of verse letters by Donne. Eventually George
Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw, all of whom knew each other, took up the
religious life and extended their formerly secular approach into this new area. A later
generation of Metaphysical poets, writing during the Commonwealth, became
increasingly more formulaic and lacking in vitality.[11] These included Cleveland and his
imitators as well as such transitional figures as Cowley and Marvell.
What all had in common, according to Alvarez, was esteem, not for metaphysics but for
intelligence. Johnson's remark that "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to
read and think" only echoed its recognition a century and a half before in the many
tributes paid to Donne on his death. For example, Jasper Mayne's comment that for the
fellow readers of his work, "Wee are thought wits, when 'tis understood". [12] Coupled with it
went a vigorous sense of the speaking voice. It begins with the rough versification of the
satires written by Donne and others in his circle such as Everard Gilpin and John Roe.
Later it modulates into the thoughtful religious poems of the next generation with their
exclamatory or conversational openings and their sense of the mind playing over the
subject and examining it from all sides. Helen Gardner too had noted the dramatic quality
of this poetry as a personal address of argument and persuasion, whether talking to a
physical lover, to God, to Christ's mother Mary, or to a congregation of believers. [13]
Elegists[edit]
A different approach to defining the community of readers is to survey who speaks of
whom, and in what manner, in their poetry. On the death of Donne, it is natural that his
friend Edward Herbert should write him an elegy full of high-flown and exaggerated
Metaphysical logic.[14] In a similar way, Abraham Cowley marks the deaths of
Crashaw[15] and of another member of Donne's literary circle, Henry Wotton.[16] Here,
however, though Cowley acknowledges Crashaw briefly as a writer ("Poet and saint"), his
governing focus is on how Crashaw's goodness transcended his change of religion. The
elegy is as much an exercise in a special application of logic as was Edward Herbert's on
Donne. Henry Wotton, on the other hand, is not remembered as a writer at all, but
instead for his public career. The conjunction of his learning and role as ambassador
becomes the extended metaphor on which the poem's tribute turns.
Twelve “Elegies upon the Author” accompanied the posthumous first collected edition of
Donne's work, Poems by J.D. with elegies of the author’s death (1633),[17] and were
reprinted in subsequent editions over the course of the next two centuries. Though the
poems were often cast in a suitably Metaphysical style, half were written by fellow
clergymen, few of whom are remembered for their poetry. Among those who are
were Henry King and Jasper Mayne, who was soon to quit authorship for clerical orders.
Bishop Richard Corbet's poetry writing was also nearly over by now and he contributed
only a humorous squib. Other churchmen included Henry Valentine (fl 1600-50), Edward
Hyde (1607-59) and Richard Busby. Two poets, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount
Falkland and Thomas Carew, who were joined in the 1635 edition by Sidney Godolphin,
had links with the heterodox Great Tew Circle. They also served as courtiers, as did
another contributor, Endymion Porter. In addition, Carew had been in the service of
Edward Herbert.
Isaac Walton’s link with Donne’s circle was more tangential. He had friends within the
Great Tew Circle but at the time of his elegy was working as a researcher for Henry
Wotton, who intended writing a life of the poet.[18] This project Walton inherited after his
death, publishing it under his own name in 1640; it was followed by a life of Wotton
himself that prefaced the collection of Wotton's works in 1651. A life of George Herbert
followed them in 1670. The links between Donne’s elegists were thus of a different order
from those between Donne and his circle of friends, often no more than professional
acquaintanceship. And once the poetic style had been launched, its tone and approach
remained available as a model for later writers who might not necessarily commit
themselves so wholly to it.

Characteristics[edit]
Free from former artificial styles[edit]
Grierson attempted to characterise the main traits of Metaphysical poetry in the
introduction to his anthology. For him it begins with a break with the formerly artificial
style of their antecedents to one free from poetic diction or conventions. [19] Johnson
acknowledged as much in pointing out that their style was not to be achieved “by
descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by
traditional imagery and hereditary similes”.
European Baroque influences, including use of conceits [edit]
Another characteristic singled out by Grierson is the Baroque European dimension of the
poetry, its “fantastic conceits and hyperboles which was the fashion throughout Europe”.
[20]
 Again Johnson had been partly before him in describing the style as “borrowed from
Marino and his followers”. It was from the use of conceits particularly that the writing of
these European counterparts was known, Concettismo in Italian, Conceptismo in
Spanish.[21] In fact Crashaw had made several translations from Marino. Grierson noted in
addition that the slightly older poet, Robert Southwell (who is included in Gardner's
anthology as a precursor), had learned from the antithetical, conceited style of Italian
poetry and knew Spanish as well.
The European dimension of the Catholic poets Crashaw and Southwell has been
commented on by others. In the opinion of one critic of the 1960s, defining the extent of
the Baroque style in 17th-century English poetry “may even be said to have taken the
place of the earlier discussion of the metaphysical”. [22] Southwell counts as a notable
pioneer of the style, in part because his formative years were spent outside England. And
the circumstance that Crashaw's later life was also spent outside England contributed to
making him, in the eyes of Mario Praz, “the greatest exponent of the Baroque style in any
language”.[23]
Crashaw is frequently cited by Harold Segel when typifying the characteristics of The
Baroque Poem,[24] but he goes on to compare the work of several other Metaphysical
poets to their counterparts in both Western and Eastern Europe. The use of conceits was
common not only across the Continent, but also elsewhere in England among
the Cavalier poets, including such elegists of Donne as Carew and Godolphin. As an
example of the rhetorical way in which various forms of repetition accumulate in creating
a tension, only relieved by their resolution at the end of the poem, Segel instances the
English work of Henry King as well as Ernst Christoph Homburg's in German and Jan
Andrzej Morsztyn’s in Polish. In addition, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is given as a
famous example of the use of hyperbole common to many other Metaphysical poets and
typical of the Baroque style too.
Wordplay and wit[edit]

“Europe supported by Africa and America”, William Blake, 1796

The way George Herbert and other English poets “torture one poor word ten thousand
ways”, in Dryden's phrase, finds its counterpart in a poem like “Constantijn
Huygens’ Sondagh (Sunday) with its verbal variations on the word ‘sun’. [25] Wordplay on
this scale was not confined to Metaphysical poets, moreover, but can be found in the
multiple meanings of ‘will’ that occur in Shakespeare's “Sonnet 135”. [26] and of ‘sense’
in John Davies’ “That the Soul is more than a Perfection or Reflection of the Sense”.
[27]
 Such rhetorical devices are common in Baroque writing and frequently used by poets
not generally identified with the Metaphysical style.
Another striking example occurs in Baroque poems celebrating "black beauty", built on
the opposition between the norm of feminine beauty and instances that challenge that
commonplace. There are examples in sonnets by Philip Sidney, where the key contrast is
between ‘black’ and ‘bright’; [28] by Shakespeare, contrasting ‘black’ and various meanings
of ‘fair’;[29] and by Edward Herbert, where black, dark and night contrast with light, bright
and spark.[30] Black hair and eyes are the subject in the English examples, while generally
it is the colour of the skin with which Romance poets deal in much the same paradoxical
style. Examples include Edward Herbert's “La Gialletta Gallante or The sun-burn'd exotic
Beauty” and Marino's “La Bella Schiave” (The Beautiful Slave). [31] Still more
dramatically, Luis de Góngora’s En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento (At the Feast of
the Blessed Sacrament)[32] introduces a creole dialogue between two black women
concerning the nature of their beauty.[33]
Much of this display of wit hinges upon enduring literary conventions and is only
distinguished as belonging to this or that school by the mode of treatment. But English
writing goes further by employing ideas and images derived from contemporary scientific
or geographical discoveries to examine religious and moral questions, often with an
element of casuistry.[34] Bringing greater depth and a more thoughtful quality to their
poetry, such features distinguish the work of the Metaphysical poets from the more
playful and decorative use of the Baroque style among their contemporaries.
Platonic influence[edit]
Ideas of Platonic love had earlier played their part in the love poetry of others, often to be
ridiculed there, although Edward Herbert and Abraham Cowley took the theme of
“Platonic Love” more seriously in their poems with that title. [35]
In the poetry of Henry Vaughan, as in that of another of the late discoveries, Thomas
Traherne, Neo-Platonic concepts played an important part and contributed to some
striking poems dealing with the soul’s remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm
and its spiritual influence.

Stylistic echoes[edit]
Long before it was so-named, the Metaphysical poetic approach was an available model
for others outside the interlinking networks of 17th century writers, especially young men
who had yet to settle for a particular voice. The poems written by John Milton while still at
university are a case in point and include some that were among his earliest published
work, well before their inclusion in his Poems of 1645. His On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity (1629) and "On Shakespear" (1630) appear in Grierson's anthology; the latter
poem and “On the University Carrier” (1631) appear in Gardner's too. It may be
remembered also that at the time Milton composed these, the slightly younger John
Cleveland was a fellow student at Christ's College, Cambridge, on whom the influence of
the Metaphysical style was more lasting.
In Milton's case, there is an understandable difference in the way he matched his style to
his subjects. For the ‘Nativity Ode’ and commendatory poem on Shakespeare he
deployed Baroque conceits, while his two poems on the carrier Thomas Hobson were a
succession of high-spirited paradoxes. What was then titled “An Epitaph on the
Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” was included anonymously among the
poems prefacing the second folio publication of Shakespeare's plays in 1632. [36] The
poems on Thomas Hobson were anthologised in collections titled A Banquet of
Jests (1640, reprinted 1657) and Wit Restor’d (1685), bracketing both the 1645 and 1673
poetry collections published during Milton's lifetime. [37]
The start of John Dryden’s writing career coincided with the period when Cleveland,
Cowley and Marvell were first breaking into publication. He had yet to enter university
when he contributed a poem on the death of Henry Lord Hastings to the many other
tributes published in Lachrymae Musarum (1649). It is typified by astronomical imagery,
paradox, Baroque hyperbole, play with learned vocabulary (“an universal
metampsychosis”), and irregular versification which includes frequent enjambment. [38] The
poem has been cited as manifesting “the extremes of the metaphysical style”, [39] but in
this it sits well with others there that are like it: John Denham’s “Elegy on the death of
Henry Lord Hastings”, for example, [40] or Marvell's rather smoother “Upon the death of the
Lord Hastings”.[41] The several correspondences among the poems there are sometimes
explained as the result of the book's making a covert Royalist statement.[42] In the political
circumstances following the recent beheading of the king, it was wise to dissemble grief
for him while mourning another under the obscure and closely wrought arguments typical
of the Metaphysical style.
The choice of style by the young Milton and the young Dryden can therefore be explained
in part as contextual. Both went on to develop radically different ways of writing; neither
could be counted as potentially Metaphysical poets. Nor could Alexander Pope, yet his
early poetry evidences an interest in his Metaphysical forebears. Among
his juvenilia appear imitations of Cowley.[43] As a young man he began work on adapting
Donne's second satire, to which he had added the fourth satire too by 1735. [44] Pope also
wrote his “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717) while still young,
introducing into it a string of Metaphysical conceits in the lines beginning “Most souls, ‘tis
true, but peep out once an age” which in part echo a passage from Donne's “Second
Anniversary”.[45] By the time Pope wrote this, the vogue for the Metaphysical style was
over and a new orthodoxy had taken its place, of which the rewriting of Donne's satires
was one expression. Nevertheless, Johnson's dismissal of the ‘school’ was still in the
future and at the start of the 18th century allusions to their work struck an answering
chord in readers.