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Ⅲ. Metaphysical
Poets and Cavalier Poets
1. Metaphysical Poets and John Donne
A term used to group
together certain 17th-century poets, usually Donne, Marvell, Vaughan and
Traherne, though other figures like Abraham Cowley are sometimes included in
the list. Although in no sense a school or movement proper, they share
common characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate
stylistic manoeuvres.
Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their poetry,
which investigates the world by rational discussion of its phenomena rather
than by intuition or mysticism. Dryden was the first to apply the term to
17th-century poetry when, in 1693, he criticized Donne: He affects the
Metaphysics 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. He disapproved of Donne's stylistic
excesses, particularly his extravagant conceits (or witty comparisons) and
his tendency towards hyperbolic abstractions. Johnson consolidated the
argument in The Lives of the Poets, where he noted (with reference to
Cowley) that 'about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race
of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets'. He went on to
describe the far-fetched nature of their comparisons as 'a kind of discordia
concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike'. Examples of the practice Johnson
condemned would include the extended comparison of love with astrology (by
Donne) and of the soul with a drop of dew (by Marvell).
Reacting against the deliberately smooth and sweet
tones of much 16th-century
verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and
rigorous. (Johnson decried its roughness and violation of decorum, the
deliberate mixture of different styles.) It has also been labelled the
'poetry of strong lines'. In his important essay, 'The Metaphysical Poets'
(1921), which helped bring the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries back
into favour, 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'.”
The poets who belong to this group are: John Donne, George
Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley,
John Cleveland.
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