METAPHYSICAL POET

any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne, the chief of the Metaphysicals. Others include George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley. Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit (q.v.) or witthat is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices usedespecially obliquity, irony, and paradoxare always reinforced by a dramatic directness of language, whose rhythm is derived from that of living speech. Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and '40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot's influential essay The Metaphysical Poets (1921). In this essay Eliot pointed out that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a dissociation of sensibility, which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet metaphysical was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities. At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting the metaphysics and for perplexing the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love. Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them the metaphysical poets, and the term has continued in use ever since. For an attempt to establish the justice of this term in relation to their work, Sir Herbert Grierson's Metaphysical Poems and Lyrics of the 17th Century (1921) and James Smith's essay On Metaphysical Poetry in Determinations (ed. F.R. Leavis, 1934) are of interest.