Defining John Donne's Poetry

Labeling Poetry "Metaphysical"

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the mind of the fair sex, with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love."

-- John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire

"The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor; 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 the ear [. . .] they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect. [. . .] But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. [. . .] Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth."

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

"To read Dryden, Pope, &c., you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, and discover the Time of each word by the sense of Passion."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Metaphysical Poetry, in the full sense of the term, is a poetry which, like that of the Divina Commedia, the De Natura Rerum, perhaps like Goethe's Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.  [However . . .] Donne, moreover, is metaphysical not only in virtue of his scholasticism, but by his deep reflective interest in the experiences of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity with which he writes of love and religion. [. . .] Donne is perhaps our first great master of poetic rhetoric, of poetry, used, as Dryden and Pope were to use it, for effects of oratory rather than song."

Sir Herbert Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century

"The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets.  It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet.   Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the ordour of a rose.  A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.  When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience [. . .] In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered."

T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets"

The above quotations set out for us a short history of the term "metaphysical" as applied to the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, and others.  What is suggests is that "metaphysical poetry," while in many ways a useful term, is nonetheless a post-17th century construction.  Dryden and Johnson's observations that metaphysical verse lacked decorum or practiced discordia concors, as the later termed it, reveal a later era's discomfort with the poetics that fueled someone like Donne.  In the same way, Coleridge's stress on time, Grierson's on rhetoric, and Eliot's famous "dissociation of sensibility" point to aspects of the poetry that later periods would come to value.

Characteristics of "Metaphysical" Poetry

• Irregular in style, structure, and logic; a deliberate chaos

• Colloquial word choice, tone, and rhythms

• Deliberately complex, even obscure: "Darke Texts Needs Notes"

• Uses contemporary allusions rather than classical ones

• Strong use of irony, paradox, hyperbole, and puns

• Powerful, internalized emotions often present

• Often rejects the conventions of Petrarch, Spenser, and Neo-Platonism

metaphysical conceit: an unusual analogy, often esoteric or ingenious, that relates distant, even alien, areas of knowledge.  They are frequently developed in detail, challenge surface logic, and border on the bizarre or grotesque.

Three Potential Models for the English Metaphysical Style

• The Baroque : The architectural and artistic style that blended the Renaissance stress on formal and orderly with the Picturesque emphasis on the fantastic and eccentric.  It stresses energy, discord, rapid movement, repetition, and asymmetry.

[Click here to look at two examples of Baraque art: a Baroque ceiling nave and The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.]

• The Emblem Book: Sixteenth and seventeenth century collections of symbolic pictures, often with mottoes and commentary that explained the meaning of pictures.  Some argue that the often highly cerebral symbols, as well as juxstapositioning of picture and motto, are akin to the metaphysical style.

[Click here to look at  Francis Quarles: Emblems, divine and moral, together with Hieroglyphicks of the life of man, the most influencial emblem book in seventeenth-century England.]

• The Concettismo: An Italian style of poetry in which the poet "discovers and expresses the universal analogies binding the universe together." (Joseph Anthony Mazzeo)