Metaphysical Poetry PDF

R e si m e k lemek iç in simge y Metaphysic al Poetry and Its Alternatives The literature of the seventeenth-century in Britain, in particular between 1620s and 1690s, is generally con...

R e si m e k lemek iç in simge y Metaphysic al Poetry and Its Alternatives The literature of the seventeenth-century in Britain, in particular between 1620s and 1690s, is generally considered in three main directions: the metaphysical poetry revealing the flourishing of the Baroque in British literature, the literature of the Puritan period, the literature of the Restoration period. The dominant poetic figures of this first half of the century were John Donne – with his intellectually ingenious love and religious verses representing metaphysical poetry – and Ben Jonson, with his drama and poetry modelled after classical tradition. Many of the later seventeenth-century poets were classified, again inappropriately, as disciples of either Donne (the ‘School of Donne’) or Jonson (the ‘Sons of Ben’), that is the followers of either metaphysical innovation or traditional classical models.  Puritanism was a religious and then political movement (culminating in the mid-century Interregnum) rather than a literary one, though it had some – negative rather than positive – repercussions on literary development in Britain and then in America.  The literary expression of the Puritan outlook is better revealed in the works of Andrew Marvell and John Milton, though both being also to a lesser or greater extent under the influence of both the metaphysical innovation and classical tradition. Restoration as a literary period reveals the revival of drama, the receptiveness to contemporary French influences and the consolidation of the dominance of classical principles. It is a period reflecting the beginnings of Neoclassicism in Britain and whose dominant literary figure was John Dryden. Metaphysical Poetry The dictionary definition of ‘metaphysics’ refers to a type of theoretical philosophy of being and knowing, and the term ‘metaphysical’ as based on abstract general reasoning, over-subtle and incorporeal. The poetry termed ‘metaphysical’ stands for exact and careful thinking, the development of the concept as a poetic image that is explored and extended, and which offers to the reader the intellectual pleasure to discover the hidden meaning in the poem. The general characteristics of the poetry termed ‘metaphysical’ in the seventeenth-century English literature are considered in relation to the general cultural attitude of the European Baroque. Moreover, in the present state of terminology, ‘metaphysical’ and ‘Baroque’ are accepted as synonyms to describe a period of intense emotional attitudes, complexity and confusion, in which the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell received the highest level of prominence. The term ‘Baroque’ (that derives from the ancient Portuguese noun barroco meaning an ‘irregular pearl’) was initially applied to the European architectural style of the late sixteenth-century to the early eighteenth- century. It was also applied to the literary style during the period between the decline of Renaissance in Europe in the 1580s and the rise of the Enlightenment in the 1680s. EUROPEAN BAROQUE  In European cultural background, the Baroque poetry was the dominant literary style from the late 1500s to the late 1600s.  Its concern with the relation between reality and appearance, its attempt at exceeding the rational limits of the background, and especially the general extravagance of its poetic themes and techniques were determined by the Reformation and Counter- Reformation, the conflict between religion and Humanism, the new teachings of science which conditioned a doubt in the validity of appearance, a doubt that expresses itself as an obsessive concern for appearance along with a more general religious and spiritual concern. By the contrast with the classical tradition, the literary concerns of the Baroque poets gave rise to a number of their characteristic strategies, such as  the startling conceit,  the dramatic contrast,  the hyperbole,  the concentration of language,  the complex syntax,  the development of paradoxical argument,  and the apparent contradiction in some of amorous poetry in that the sensuous and physical love was treated in most rational terms. Hence the form of irony and ambiguity, and of musical or sculptural effects, and especially the irrational confusion of senses that the poetic style of the Baroque literature may sometimes reveal due to the poets’ attempts at exceeding the limits of the background. ‘Metaphysical’ is the traditional term that came to name a number of English writers of the seventeenth-century, who formed a school of poetry that revolted against the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry, in particular the Petrarchan conceit; The similar methods and thematic concerns allow their consideration within the framework of one literary system, one literary trend, that is the metaphysical trend in British poetry. The first written mentions of the term have been attributed to John Dryden and Dr. Samuel Johnson, both advocates of the neoclassical principles. The former used the term in derogation to accuse John Donne of affecting “the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love” (A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693). The latter, in Lives of the Poets (1781), gave to the term its present use to designate a special poetic manner, the critic claiming that “about the beginning of the seventeenth- century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets” because the images or imagery that they used were relevant to different spheres of experience, such as philosophy, geography, or astronomy. Concerning the concept of love, the metaphysical poets extended the poetic treatment of the experience of love, where Donne, among others, “displays a range of mood more varied and a concept of passion more complex and profound than any of his predecessors”. Moreover, continues Margaret Willy in reaction against “the Petrarchan tradition favoured by Elizabethan sonneteers – the faithful lover for ever pining, prostrate and spurned, at the feet of a disdainful mistress – Donne’s love poems often strike a defiantly disenchanted note. Conventional sentiment and diction are displaced by a testy aggressiveness (…). Prosaic adjectives and verbs (…) are paralleled by the audacious conceit (…). Human love is enlarged, intensified, and dignified by its cosmic context, as it echoes and is echoed by the activity of sun and moon, sea and floods, tempest and earthquake, the very air itself”. Conceit The critical tradition from Dryden to present focuses on ‘imagery’, and the characteristic image of the Elizabethan and later Baroque (including metaphysical) poetry is the ‘conceit’, which is an extended metaphor or a metaphor that surprises by the apparent dissimilarity of the things compared. Etymologically, conceit is a poetic device that derives from a concept rather than observation, and this use of ingenious intellect, or ‘wit’, to create imagery links actually all the Baroque styles. There are often distinguished two main types of the conceit, the ‘Petrarchan conceit’ and the ‘metaphysical conceit’. The latter is also referred to as the ‘Baroque conceit’ by some critics, whereas others consider them as two distinct figures of speech, yet always differentiated from the Petrarchan one. Highly popular among the sixteenth-century sonneteers, among whom Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser, the Petrarchan conceit was an ingenious but exaggerated comparison applied to the beautiful but cold and cruel mistresses, and to the suffering of their worshipful lovers. In his Sonnet 130, Shakespeare parodied some of Petrarchan conceits – “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lip’s red … ” In the seventeenth-century, Donne and other representatives of the metaphysical school, exploiting the knowledge from philosophical, theological and natural sciences, shifted the comparison in the Petrarchan conceit between the subject and a rose, a garden, a ship, or another object, to the more complex, startling, paradoxical and highly intellectual analogies. With the metaphysical poets, the conceit had truly become a ‘concept’, or ‘conception’, not a poetic device in itself but an instrument of persuasion, not a simple poetic metaphor but a means of definition in an argument. The metaphysical conceit The metaphysical conceit is conceived less by emotional states than in the mind of the poet. The metaphysical conceit receives its validity and importance as concept, as the combination of the intellectual with the sensuous, whereas the Baroque conceit emphasises the sensuous level. Compared to the Elizabethan use of the conceit, the metaphysical poets attempted at creating a more intellectual, less verbal representation of their wit in the text, as in ‘more matter and less words’ desiderate. It reveals the attempt at achieving conciseness of expression though it may lead to a certain irregularity and even roughness in versification. The Elizabethan style of the second half of the sixteenth-century, which was highly artificial and rhetorical. In this respect, a major difference in matters of the use of original conceits is that in metaphysical poetry the conceit is used for persuasion, whereas in Elizabethan poetry it is used for decoration. The metaphysical poems, both religious and erotic, are characterized by concentration and logical coherence; they represent a type of poetry dense with meaning, which focuses on idea or argument, and forces the addressee in the poem and the reader to follow and accept that idea or argument. English metaphysical poets created a learned, argumentative imagery, and achieved in their lyrics a peculiar blend of passion and reason, feeling and thought. This peculiar blend of passion and thought, or “feeling thought”, as T. S. Eliot termed it, is considered to be essential to the reading of metaphysical poetry, as it is one of the essential ingredients of the metaphysical conceit. WIT The concept of ‘wit’ together with the use of conceit is central to the metaphysical poetic discourse in which a thought represented an experience and modified the poet’s sensibility. In order to express accurately the experience, metaphysical poets appeal to human mind and analytical thinking rather than to senses, and reveal in their work a great number of characteristic features regarding, on one hand, the themes and the subject matter of poetry, and, on the other hand, the style and the structural organization of the text. Themes: Concerning the thematic level of a metaphysical text, the poets perceive a harmonious pattern of the universe, in relation to which stands the significance of the human experience in its double hypostases: religion and love. The chief subjects are God, love, death, and human frailty, which are expressed and made explicit by the use of carpe diem (‘seize the day’) and tempus edax (‘devouring time’) motifs. STYLE Concerning the style, the main features of the metaphysical poetry are concision and concentration in the poetic expression, which mean a conscious tendency of economy in language. The poet is too busy arguing an issue in terms of reason and leaves outside whatever seems irrelevant. The techniques of textual organization  There is always in a metaphysical poem an argument upon which the entire text is based.  The argument is linked to an idea which is usually stated at the beginning, and which is to be developed and explicated step by step in the text.  The argument or the need to argue arises from this point at the beginning of the poem, where an actual position or situation is vividly imagined, and an idea about existence or a moment of experience is created.  The poet deliberately attempts at explaining the idea and at persuading the reader, and in this sense persuasion is also one of the most important elements in the whole organization of a metaphysical poem. Concerning both the thematic and structural level of the metaphysical poetry and what unites these levels in a coherent poetic discourse is the use of the startling imagery, which is often borrowed from different fields of human experience (philosophy, geography, astronomy, technical and natural sciences).  The seventeenth-century on the whole was a period of transition characterised by a philosophical, scientific and geographical spirit of enquiry.  The new philosophers and scientists displaced the accustomed view on world and bewildered the contemporaries, as metaphysical poets did by reflecting in their works the ideas and events that had become matters of public interest and imagination.  John Donne’s The Good-Morrow, for instance, refers to the lovers’ eyes as hemispheres, and the experience of love is expressed through the images of latitude and longitude, maps, and discoveries of new worlds. The images or imagery result from a twofold perspective involving the famous metaphysical ‘wit’ – representing a means of creating imagery, or the ability of the poet to make apt comparison and to associate ideas in a natural but unusual and striking manner so as to produce surprise joined with pleasure – and the not less famous metaphysical ‘conceit’ – representing the textual expression of the wit. In other words, the conceit results from the poet’s use of the wit in the form of an unusual, much elaborated, audacious and far-fetched comparison, metaphor or simile, with an apparent dissimilarity of the things compared for example, the souls of parted lovers and the action of the compass in Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, or, in another of Donne’s poems, the flea that, in uniting the blood of lovers, becomes their “marriage bed, and marriage temple”. Conceit, especially, is that poetic device by which metaphysical poets achieve also the reconciliation between thought and passion, the equilibrium between intellect and feeling in which emotion is curbed by the rational, and the rational is illuminated by emotion. In other words, the metaphysical conceit appears to be the intellectual equivalent of emotion, the instrument of persuasion in an argument.  A metaphysical poem, however, despite its rational and intellectual argumentation, is not a pure piece of analytical and abstract thinking, because its logic of thought goes hand in hand with emotion, and almost every poem starts from a personal experience, there always being a connection between the abstract and the concrete, a unique blend of reason and passionate imagination.  It is this blend that underlies the unity of existence, where, Joan Bennett observes, “the same flame that lights the intellect warms the heart; mathematics and love obey one principle … one law is at work in all experience”. Metaphysical poems The metaphysical texts, as lyric poems, represent brief but intense meditations, characterised by the striking use of wit, irony and wordplay. Beneath the formal organization, containing stanza form, rhyme and meter, is the underlying structure of the argument in the poem, which reveals that metaphysical poetry is concerned with the poet’s personal experience – intelligent, scholarly, serious – as well as with the whole experience of man, or rather with the profound areas of human experience such as art, learning, relation with God, pleasure, romantic and sensual love, and others. The term ‘metaphysical’ was first used derogatorily; The conceit was thought to be far-fetched, the poetic expression regarded as impudent colloquialism, and metaphysical poetry on the whole was regarded in its own and later periods with disapprobation and complaint.  Metaphysical poetry was restored to its dignity and its true literary value was fully asserted at the beginning of the twentieth-century by, among others, Thomas Stearns Eliot in his essays on the seventeenth-century English poetry (in particular, in The Metaphysical Poets, 1921).  Eliot himself, as well as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, as representatives of the twentieth-century Modernism, found in the metaphysical poetry a kind of literature that marked the transition to modern sensibility, and a kind of poetry capable of expressing a large range of experience, feeling, and thought on the basis of its experimental attempts to free the poetic discourse from any restriction imposed by the poetical conventions. The chief developers of the metaphysical trend in British poetry are John Donne (1572- 1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), Richard Crashaw (1612- 1649) and Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).