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17th Century MetaphysicalPoetry-ABirdsEyeView
17th Century MetaphysicalPoetry-ABirdsEyeView
Sibaprasad Dutta
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‘About the beginning of the 17th century’, writes Dr. Johnson, ‘ there
appeared a race of poets that may be termed the metaphysical poets’.
Dr. Johnson seems to have borrowed the term ‘metaphysical’ from
Dryden who said that he ‘affects the metaphysics’. Johnson’s phrase
‘may be termed’ indicates that he used the term rather loosely, says
Helen Gardner.
John Donne
The founder of this school of poets was John Donne who broke away
from the traditional easy, fluent style, stock imagery, and pastoral
conventions of the day. He aimed at reality of thought and vividness
of expressions, and his poetry is graceful, vigorous, and despite faults
in rhythm, often strangely harmonious.
In 1601 came out Of the Progres of the Soule, one of the satires
written in the couplet form that later imitated by Dryden and then by
Pope. The satires express Donne’s dissatisfaction with the world
around him and point to his cynical nature and keenly critical mind.
His love poems, the Songs and Sonets, were written in the same
period and are intense and subtle analyses of all the moods of a lover
expressed in vivid and startling language which is colloquial rather
than conventional. The poems of Donne, essentially a psychological
poet whose concern is feeling are all intensely personal and reveal a
powerful and complex being. Besides Songs and Sonets, other
well-known poems of this group are Aire and Angels, A
Nocturnal Upon S. Luce’s Day, A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning and The Extasie.
George Herbert
Richard Crashaw
Henry Vaughan
Thomas Carew
are marked by rich and beautiful fancy and golden felicity of diction
which is rarely equalled.
Abraham Cowley
Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), even more than Pope and Macaulay,
is the great example of the infant prodigy. When he was ten, he wrote
a long epical romance, Pyramus and Thisbe and two years later
composed an even longer poem, Constantia and Philetus. He not
only wrote poems but also plays and histories. The Davideis which
was published in 1656 is his best known poem, written in heroic
couplet. It is a rather dreary epic on King David. His other poetical
works include The Mistress (1647), a collection of love poems and
the Pindarique Odes which combine the classicism of the later
generation with Elizabethan romanticism. In Cowley, the
metaphysical strain is feeble. He was a learned man but his work
suffered from a lack of deep feeling and his use of wit and conceits
was artificial and lacked in artistry. Milton considers that Cowley was
one of the three great English poets, the other two being Shakespeare
and Spenser. But his renown dwindled with the passage of time.
Interestingly Dr. Johnson began his Lives of the English Poets
with Cowley whom considered him as heading the moderns. Cowley’s
other works include Miscellanies occasionally filled with verse. In
this work, we find On the Death of Mr. William Hervey, a Cambridge
friend and On the Death of Mr. Crashaw , which show him at his best
as a man. His Of Wit defines wit in classical manner and Against
Hope seeks to define hope. He also wrote verses on reason in which
he defines piety, and after the Restoration, he addressed an Ode to
the Royal Society which is an eloquent tribute to Bacon. Today, the
pleasant prose of his Essays is more read than his verses.
Andrew Marvell