Discussion on Metaphysical poetry and Poets

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Metaphysical poetry

In this article, we are going to be discussing metaphysical poetry. So, metaphysical poetry starts happening around the Renaissance, which you have learned in history.

The term metaphysical poetry was first coined by Samuel Johnson in his work " lives of the most eminent English poets " in the beginning the 17th century.

This is a rebirth of learning. Poets are getting even more creative. Shakespeare is on the scene, so it's the 1600s, late 1500s.

The metaphysical poetry was started by John Donne. It was John Donne who introduced this new school of thought. The school of Donne was known as the school of metaphysical poetry and was followed by the poets like George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan and Cowley.

 John Donne was considered as the master of metaphysical poetry for his magnificent talent and his use of wit in his works. Apart from John Donne , the other most significant metaphysical poet was Andrew Marvell.

The metaphysical poets were not even friends or anything, but this push for creativity during the Renaissance made metaphysical poetry what it was. 

The metaphysical poetry was ignored in the 18th and 19th century but it was Eliot and Grierson who started the revival of this poetry in the 20th century.

The fundamental aspect of metaphysical poetry is that the work is characterized by the usage of conceits, wit and imagery. Metaphysical poets introduced a very witty and ironical way of expression in the genre of English poetry.

Some of you may have had the word "conceit" on your vocabulary flashcards, so you know that a conceit is an exaggerated comparison. The conceits that these poets were using were extremely inventive, and usually the poems had to do with thinking about love or religion, or sometimes death and like I said, this is going on in 17th century England, like Shakespeare, but he was not a metaphysical poet.

The metaphysical poets were using these exaggerated, sometimes grotesque, comparisons as a sort of reaction against the overly elevated language of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan poets.

Rather than comparing a woman to a blossoming flower, the metaphysical poets might have compared her to a more industrial tool, or something equally as (seemingly) random.

 To break down the roots of the word "metaphysical",meta means "above or beyond" and physical means "earthly or concrete," so the metaphysical poets moved concrete symbols beyond their meaning into more philosophical symbols, as we will see in just a minute. So, back to what a conceit is. If you haven't had conceit as one of your vocabulary words, it's kind of like a metaphor.

 It's an exaggerated comparison between two very unlike things. And, in a conceit, the two things are so unalike that the reader doesn't even want to compare them. It's an uncomfortable comparison, but the poet skill fully makes the comparison acceptable to the reader. The way you unpack the meaning of a conceit is you pull out the associations you may have with the two things being compared. One example is this very famous poem, "The Flea" by John Donne, whom we will talk more about in a minute.

It says, "Oh stay! Three lives in one flea spare where we almost, yea more than married are. This flea is you and, and this our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is."

OK take a second and reread that. So, in other words, what John Donne is saying here is, "Oh stay!" or "Don't go! This little flea has my blood, your blood, and its own blood. And so our bodily fluids are already mixed in the flea, so we might as well make love even though we are not married." 

So, John Donne uses this flea as kind of the idea of "We're already mixed together in there, so madame let's go ahead and get in bed."

So, the comparison between the flea and marriage is not one that one would normally make. If someone said to you that fleas are closely related to love making, you might laugh or think they're weird, but the metaphysical poets make it work. Once he is finished the poem, you can understand, like, "Oh, I can see how that would work." Going back to John Donne, it looks like "John Don-nay" or something like that, but it is pronounced "Dunn," like "You are done with that assignment."

His most famous poem is "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning". As I said, John Donne wrote during the late 1500s, early 1600s, so he was alive at the same time as Shakespeare. I'm not sure if they knew each other or not, but that would be neat if they did.

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