Metaphysical Poets
Introduction
In the early Stuart period the failure of consensus was
dramatically demonstrated within the political collapse of the 1640s and within
the growing sociocultural divergences of the immediately preceding years. While
it had been still possible for the theatres to deal with the state considerably
as one audience, the court—with the Baroque style, derived from the Continent,
that it encouraged in painting, masque, and panegyric—was becoming more remote
from the country at large and was regarded with increasing distrust. In fact, a
growing separation between polite and vulgar literature was to dispel many of
the characteristic strengths of Elizabethan writing. Simultaneously, long-term
intellectual changes were starting to hit the status of poetry and prose.
Sidney’s defense of poetry, which maintained that poetry
depicted what was ideally instead of actually true, was rendered redundant by
the loss of agreement over transcendent absolutes; the scientist, the Puritan
together with his Inner Light , and therefore the skeptic differed equally over the
standards by which truth was to be established. From the circle of Lucius Cary,
Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew in Oxfordshire—which included poets like Edmund
Waller, Carew , and Sidney Godolphin—William Chillingworth argued that it had
been unreasonable for a person to force his opinions onto the other , while
Hobbes reached the other conclusion (in his Leviathan, 1651) that each one must
be because the state pleases. during this context, the old idea of poetry as a
persuader to virtue fell obsolete, and therefore the century as an entire
witnessed a huge transfer of energy into new literary forms, particularly into
the rationally balanced couplet, the autobiography, and therefore the embryonic
novel. At an equivalent time, these influences were neither uniform nor
consistent; Hobbes might repudiate the utilization of metaphor as senseless and
ambiguous, yet his own prose was frequently enlivened by half-submerged
metaphors.
The Metaphysical poets
Writers skilled these conditions in several ways, and in
poetry three main traditions may broadly be distinguished, which are including
the names of Spenser, Jonson, and Donne . Donne heads the tradition that
18th-century critic Johnson labeled for all time because the Metaphysicals;
what unites these poets as a gaggle is a smaller amount the violent yoking of
unlike ideas to which Johnson objected than that they were all poets of private
and individual feeling, responding to their time’s pressures privately or
introspectively. This privateness, of course, wasn't new, but the amount
generally experienced an enormous upsurge of contemplative or devotional verse.
Donne
Donne has been taken to be the apex of the 16th-century
tradition of plain poetry, and positively the love lyrics of his that parade
their cynicism, indifference, and libertinism pointedly invert and parody the
conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though he courts admiration for his poetic
virtuosity no but the Petrarchans. A “great haunter of plays” in his youth,
he's always dramatic; his verse cultivates “strong lines,” dissonance, and
colloquiality. Carew praised him for avoiding poetic myths and excluding from
his verse the “train of gods and goddesses”; what fills it instead may be a
dazzling battery of language and argument drawn from science, law and trade,
court and city.
Donne is that the first London poet: his early satires and elegies are
full of the busy metropolitan milieu, and his songs and sonnets, which include
his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies,
and contingencies, explore the alienation and ennui of urban living. Donne
treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the
personality is multiple, quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His
love poetry is that of the frustrated careerist.
By inverting normal perspectives and making the mistress the
centre of his being—he boasts that she is “all states, and every one princes, I, nothing else is”—he
belittles the general public world, defiantly asserting the superior validity
of his private experience, and regularly he erodes the normal dichotomy of body
and soul, outrageously praising the mistress in language reserved for platonic
or religious contexts. The defiance is complicated, however, by a recurrent
conviction of private unworthiness that culminates within the Anniversaries
(1611–12), two long commemorative poems written on the death of a patron’s
daughter. These expand into the classic statement of Jacobean melancholy, an
intense meditation on the vanity of the planet and therefore the collapse of
traditional certainties. Donne would, reluctantly, find respectability during a
church career, but even his religious poems are torn between an equivalent
tense self-assertion and self-abasement that mark his secular poetry.
Donne’s influence
Donne’s influence was vast; the taste for wit and
conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers like
Aurelian Townshend and William Habington, academics like William Cartwright,
and non secular poets like Francis Quarles and Henry King. the sole true Metaphysical, within
the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical pretensions, was Edward
Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), important as an early proponent of faith
formulated by the sunshine of reason.
Donne’s most enduring followers were the three major
religious poets George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Herbert, a Cambridge academic who
buried his courtly ambitions within the quiet lifetime of a rustic parsonage,
wrote a number of the foremost resonant and attractive religious verse within
the language. Though not barren of tension, his poems substitute for Donne’s
tortured selfhood a humane, meditative assurance. They evoke a practical piety
and a richly domestic world, but they dignify it with a musicality and a sense
for the sweetness of holiness that bespeak Herbert’s identification with the
nascent Anglican Church of Archbishop William Laud. against this , the poems of
Crashaw (a Roman Catholic) and therefore the Welsh recluse Vaughan move in
alternative traditions: the previous toward the sensuous ecstasies and
effusions of the Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism and
mystical raptures.
However, within the context of the Civil Wars,
Vaughan’s and Crashaw’s introspection began to seem like retreat,
and, when the satires of John Cleveland and therefore the lyrics of Abraham
Cowley took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it had been
diagnostic a loss of control within the face of political and social traumas.
The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a technique for
holding together conflicting allegiances was Donne’s outstanding heir, Marvell.
Marvell’s writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and
precise,
uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with Puritanical economy of
statement. His finest work seems to possess been done at the time of greatest
strain, in about 1650–53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian
general but opponent of King Charles I’s execution, to whose retirement from
politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in “Upon
Appleton House.”
His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive to
all or any the main conflicts of their society—body against soul, action against
retirement, experience against innocence, Cromwell against the king—but Marvell
sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and wit instead of
attempting to make a decision or transcend it. during this situation,
irresolution has become a strength; during a poem like “An Horatian ode upon
Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” which weighs the claims of King Charles and
Cromwell, the poet’s reserve was the sole effective way of confronting the
unprecedented demise of traditional structures of politics and morality.
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Jonson and therefore the Cavalier poets
The Jonsonian tradition was, broadly, that of social verse,
written with a Classical clarity and weight and deeply informed by ideals of
civilized reasonableness, ceremonious respect, and inner self-sufficiency
derived from Seneca; it's a poetry of publicly shared values and norms.
Jonson’s own verse was occasional; it addresses other individuals, distributes
praise and blame, and promulgates sober and judicious ethical attitudes. His
favoured forms were the ode, elegy, satire, epistle, and epigram, and that they
are always beautifully crafted objects, achieving a Classical symmetry and
monumentality. For Jonson, the unornamented style meant not colloquiality but
labour, restraint, and control; an honest poet had first to be an honest man,
and his verses lead his society toward an ethic of gracious but responsible
living.
With the Cavalier poets who succeeded Jonson, the element of
urbanity and conviviality attended loom larger. Herrick was perhaps England’s
first poet to precise impatience with the tediousness of country life. However,
Herrick’s “The Country Life” and “The Hock Cart” rival Jonson’s “To Penshurst”
as panegyrics to the Horatian ideal of the “good life,” calm and retired, but
Herrick’s poems gain retrospective poignancy by their implied contrast with the
disruptions of the Civil Wars.
The courtiers Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Lovelace developed a fashion of ease and naturalness suitable to the planet of
gentlemanly pleasure during which they moved; Suckling’s A Session of the Poets
(1637; published 1646) lists quite 20 wits then in town.
The Cavalier poets were writing England’s first vers de
société, lyrics
of compliments and casual liaisons, often cynical, occasionally obscene; this
was a line to be picked up again after 1660, as were the heroic meter and
attitudinizing drama of Jonson’s successor as Poet Laureate , Sir William
Davenant. a special contribution was the elegance and smoothness that came to
be related to Sir John Denham and Edmund Waller, whom the poet Dryden named
because the first exponents of “good writing.”
Waller’s inoffensive lyrics are the epitome of polite taste, and
Denham’s topographical poem “Cooper’s Hill” (1641), a big add its title , is a
crucial precursor of the balanced Augustan couplet (as is that the otherwise
slight oeuvre of Viscount Falkland). the expansion of Augustan gentility was
further encouraged by work done on translations in mid-century, particularly by
Sir Richard Fanshawe and Thomas Stanley.
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