Who were the Metaphysical Poets?
John Donne
(1572 - 1631)
Andrew Marvell
(1621 - 1678)
Richard Crashaw (1613 - 1649)
George Herbert
(1593 - 1633)
Henry Vaughan (1622 - 1695)
Bishop King
Lord Herbert
Aurelian Townsend
Characteristics
•
17th century
• “simple, artificial, difficult or fantastic”
• the language was usually simple and pure
• elaborate metaphysical conceits (Valediction Forbidding Mourning)
• rapid association of thought challenging the reader to keep up with it
(Valediction of Weeping)
• telescoping of images (The Relic) -- the contrast and multiple possible
associations (like with Shakespeare)
• an incredible focus on technique
• Johnson said, “Their attempts were always analytic”
The Metaphysical Poets and the New
Criticism
• 300 years later, New Criticism re-focused on these poets
• T. S. Eliot called them intellectual poets (rather than reflective):
• an ordinary man would smell a rose and then go read his
newspaper, never connecting the two
• a reflective poet would immediately gush (write a poem) about the
odor of the rose and never get to his newspaper
• an intellectual poet,however, would somehow connect these two
very disparate events and form them into a new whole
• metaphysical united the intellectual with the emotional while the
romantics merely “ruminated”
• some say their poetry is too technical. Eliot said poets must do
more than “look into their hearts to write . . . That is not looking deep
enough; . . . Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One
must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system and the
digestive tracts.”
Characteristics, cont.
“Easter Wings”
by George Herbert
A portion of
“The Wasteland”
by T. S. Eliot
Professor Ray Fleming received his
undergraduate degree in modern
languages, philosophy, and English
from the University of Notre Dame.
He studied philosophy and
Renaissance literature as a Fulbright
scholar at the University of Florence.
He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at
Harvard where he received his
doctorate in comparative literature.
Professor Fleming taught at the
University of Notre Dame, the
University of California, Miami
University (Ohio), Le Centre
Universitaire in Luxembourg, and at
Penn State University before coming
to Florida State in 1995 as a professor
of modern languages and humanities.
His primary areas of publication
include Italian, German, and English
literatures, and African American
Studies.
Dr. Ray Fleming
http://www.fsu.edu/~modlang/divisions/italian/rfle
ming.html