The metaphysical poets

John Donne and the seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a style inspired by or similar to his are called the metaphysical poets. This term was coined by Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century critic, who was following a hint by John Dryden. Dryden had said that in his poems Donne "affects the metaphysics and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy (By "metaphysics," Dryden meant speculations on the basic princi­ples governing the realms of knowledge and being.) Johnson fol­lowed up this idea by observing that the "metaphysical poets" were fond of displaying obscure and specialized learning in their poems. He went on to talk about the verbal wit with which this learning is expressed. In the poetry of Donne and his followers, Dr. Johnson found "a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult re­semblances in things apparently unlike. The most heteroge­neous ideas are yoked by violence together."

Neither Dryden nor Dr. Johnson liked the metaphysical poets. They thought that these writers were too concerned with showing how clever they were. After the eighteenth century, Donne and his fol­lowers went largely unread until the twentieth century. Through the influence of T. S. Eliot and other modern poets, the metaphys­ical poets were rediscovered. Many readers in the twentieth century have seen that the metaphysical poets' tendency to express them­selves in elaborate intellectualized images (often called "conceits") and knotty arguments is a genuine attempt to confront the compli­cations of life. And the "violence" or tension Dr. Johnson rightly perceived in the drawing together of dissimilar ideas can be seen as a source of positive expressive energy. The metaphysical poets make extensive use of paradox—an apparent contradiction which turns out on close inspection to yield a valuable perception. Their poems tend to be written in lines of unequal or varying length, and in rhythms that reflect the irregular and unpredictable movements of an active mind and of an informal speaking voice.

The metaphysical poets wrote both love poems and religious or meditative lyrics. The stylistic features just mentioned are charac­teristic of both categories of metaphysical verse. In fact one of the fascinating and often surprising things to observe in metaphysical poetry is the application of religious images and ideas to human love, and, vice versa, the application of language normally associ­ated with human love to religious experience.

John donne (1572-1631)

John Donne's life is usually thought of as having two very different and opposing phases. The first phase is typified in his witty, rakish, intellectually flashy love poems. In the second phase, he became a famous and eloquent preacher. Born into a wealthy, distinguished Roman Cath­olic family, Donne was brilliant and well educated. In the early 1590's he went to study law at one of the Inns of Court, the great institutions for legal study in London. The sophisticated young Eliza­bethans with whom Donne associated at the Inns of Court were notorious for their wild extracur­ricular activities and Donne's early love lyrics and satires, privately circulated among his fellow stu­dents, and were much admired. Toward the end of the century, Donne began to make his way in the world, establishing a name for himself with his charm and brilliant intellect at the court of Queen Elizabeth. He also proved himself as a soldier and adventurer in expeditions with Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex. In 1598 he was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, one of the highest officials in Elizabeth's government, and his prospects for advancement were bright.

But Donne's fortunes took a turn for the worse: in 1601 he secretly married the sixteen-year-old Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece. The marriage was discovered by Ann's father, who had Donne dis­missed from office and imprisoned. This crisis brought on a period of great turmoil and uncer­tainty for Donne, but it eventually ushered in the second phase of his career, when he became the most famous preacher of his day. As a young man Donne had drifted away from the Roman Church. But during his troubled middle years, though he became increasingly concerned with religion, he did not join the Anglican Church. King James I recognized Donne's potential as a religious thinker and preacher, however, and in 1607 declared that if Donne expected any advancement or employment from him, it would have to be in the Church. Thus, partly because of external pressure and partly be­cause of the changes in his own thinking, Donne decided to enter the ministry in 1615. His success was immediate and lasted until the end of his life. From 1621 until his death he was Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, the London center of the Church of England. A few weeks before he died he delivered his own funeral sermon, the final public perform­ance of the most theatrical and spellbinding preacher of the age. The transformation in Donne's life from clever love poet and courtier to eminent divine is cer­tainly remarkable. But the links and continuities between the two phases are perhaps more signifi­cant than the differences. From the outset Donne's writing shows a mind that was restlessly energetic, highly individualistic, and essentially dramatic. Donne provokes his readers; he seems to challenge our minds to be as agile and as daring as his own. The sense of vivid immediacy in his writing, whether directed toward an uncooperative mistress in the love lyrics or toward a stern and mysterious God in the Divine Meditations (or "Holy-Sonnets''), derives from his unrivaled ability to enact through language the urgency and com­plexity of thought and experience.