The Metaphysical Poets - Lesson Summary

“The Metaphysical Poets” by T. S. Eliot

Eliot's Appreciation for Professor Grierson

By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance.

Metaphysical School: Are they A Digression from the Main Current, Or?

The phrase ‘Metaphysical School’ has long done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own times we should say a “movement”), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.

The Elaboration of A Figure Of Speech To The Farthest Stage Of Ingenuity

Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically “metaphysical”: the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (“To Destiny”), and Donne, with more grace, in “A Valediction,” the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.

Telescoping of Images: Brief words and Sudden Contrasts

Some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts: A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.

The Most Heterogeneous Ideas Are Yoked By Violence Together

Johnson, who employed the term “metaphysical poets,” apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

Indeed, the fact is that, often the ideas are yoked but not united. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry. We may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (“The Vanity of Human Wishes”):

His fate was destined to a barren strand,

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;

where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended.

Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert’s “Ode,” stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school:

This said, in her up-lifted face,

Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,

Were like two starrs, that having faln down,

Look up again to find their place:

While such a moveless silent peace

Did seize on their becalmed sense,

One would have thought some influence

Their ravished spirits did possess.

A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the world “becalmed”; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant.

The Language of the Metaphysical Poets: Simple and Pure, Yet Structure is Complex

It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling.

It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert’s “Ode” the following from Tennyson:

One walked between his wife and child,

With measured footfall firm and mild,

And now and then he gravely smiled.

The prudent partner of his blood

Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,

Wearing the rose of womanhood.

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 odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

The Poet’s Mind vs Ordinary Man’s Experience

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

A Mechanism of Sensibility, Which Could Devour Any Kind of Experience

The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult or fantastic, as their predecessors were.

Dissociation of Sensibility Sets In: the Seventeenth Century

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in “Country Churchyard” (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the “Coy Mistress.”

The Sentimental Age: They Thought and Felt by Fits

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley’s “Triumph of Life,” in the second “Hyperion,” there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility.

The Metaphysical poets, like other poets, have various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.

Poets Should Cultivate a Refined Sensibility: More Allusive, More Indirect

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

Racine and Baudelaire Vs Milton and Dryden: On Regard for the Soul

In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century—Racine—and the great master of the nineteenth—Baudelaire—are more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul.

Conclusion

Eliot concludes by saying that, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are “metaphysical” or “witty,” “quaint” or “obscure,” though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to break up the classification of Johnson and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend.

*****