metaphysical poetry

About metaphysical poetry

Highly intellectualized poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression.

The word 'meta' means 'after,' so the literal translation of 'metaphysical' is 'after the physical.' Basically, metaphysics deals with questions that can't be explained by science. It questions the nature of reality in a philosophical way.

METAPHYSICAL poetry now, as in the past, is amply discussed and only vaguely defined. From Drummond to Dryden, and from Johnson to T. S. Eliot, it has been variously mentioned but never distinguished clearly from the rest of our poetical literature. Two metaphysical anthologies have been published in recent years, with introductions roughly indicating the compiler's conception of metaphysical poetry and poems which do not seem to belong even to the editor's own notions of the genre. Greisens reaches the conclusion that 'all great poetry is metaphysical. Con- might expect, an anthology of the World's Best Poetry or a Treasure House of English Verse to be a compare - sequentially, one pensive metaphysical anthology. Obviously, a more restrictive definition must be found. It will not do to call great poetry and metaphysical poetry synonymous. Are Shelley's lyrics-Love's Philosophy and 'Music, when soft voices die-metaphysical? They fulfill Greisens’ requirement in that they are 'born of men's passionate thinking about life, love, and death.' They are written in the very metaphysical realm of metaphor, and they subscribe to ideas that are noticeably present in the work of Donne, the exemplar of the metaphysical muse fulfillment of physical love and thoughts of death. They are, however, far from the terrain of metaphysical poetry. They are romantic, of course, and the approach is not primarily from the intellect. The poem on death has none of the metaphysical with dissolution, nor the psychological analysis of emotion-but I trespass upon my definition. Let me say merely that metaphysical poetry probes the depths; it does not consciously and primarily seeks the wings of Daedal us. If the poet is scorched, it is Concern Fist question:-

1).Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry with an explanation of a few metaphysical poetry written by John Donne as well as any other Metaphysical Poet

Ans). How are poets like John Don and Andrew Marvel able to write about a clear subject, which is what the spiritual writer really intends to do with his poetry in my mind's thoughts during a test of poetry? I try to answer these questions and many more.

                         The Flea  

           BY JOHN DONNE

(born sometime between Jan. 24 and June 19, 1572, London, 

Eng.—died March 31, 1631, London)

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

    Yet this enjoys before it woo,

    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

    Though use make you apt to kill me,

    Let not to that, self-murder added be,

    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

About poem :-

The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.”

As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea’s own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no, more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.”

“Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him (“yield to me”), she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.

Analyses:-

This funny little poem again demonstrates Donne's spiritual love-poetry mode, with the least potential for its ability to turn images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. The poem uses the image of a flea who has bitten the speaker and his beloved in order to create entertaining conflicts with both sexes in mind. The speaker wants, the beloved does not do so, and so the speaker, too clever but also a catcher on the straw, uses fleas, whose body bleeds with his loved ones, to show how innocent such a blend can be - in fleas. Very innocent, the sexual mix would be equally innocent, because it really is the only thing. In other words, the speaker fleet is trying to save lives, holding it as "our wedding bed and wedding temple." Here the poet introduces the poet in a wonderful way using a simple flea for his love.

But when the speaker kills the flea despite protests from the speaker, he turns the argument over to his head, claiming that he is still demanding, despite high-minded and pious ideals. By killing the flea, he could not really lose the honor of his beloved - and despite high-minded and pious ideals, he refused to sleep with her, doing so would not honor her.

Poem Form

The poem varies metrically alternating between the lines of the iambic tetrameter and the lines in the iambic pentameter, 4-5 stress patterns, ending with two pentose lines at the end of each column. Thus, the strain method is 454545455 in each of the nine-line stanzas. The rhyme scheme is the same routine in each class, in couples, with the last line rhythm along the last line: AABBCCDDD.

Metaphysical poetry by. T.S. Elliott

17th-century poets are the successors of 16th-century dramatists. They are simple, artificial, difficult, weird who their predecessors were. In the 17th century, a diversity of sensibilities was established and intensified by the influence of two of the most powerful poets of the century - Milton and Dryden. These poets performed some poetic works so beautifully that the magnitude of the effect hid the absence of others. Language improved. When language becomes purer, emotion becomes cruel. Shelly's Triumph Life In one or two paragraphs of Live, the other in Keats' Hyperion. There are signs of conflict towards the integration of sensitivity.

Now the question is, what would be the fate of 'spiritual' in the present line of poetry descending in a straight line from them? They will, of course, not be classified as spiritual. Like other poets, spiritual poets have different flaws. But they were trying to find a verbal equivalent for the state of mind and spirit. Elliott concludes the essay by saying that Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Covley are among the best of their current English poems.

T.S. Elliott Dr. Johnson's term is used as a term for abuse of 'spiritual poetry' or as creepy and pleasant and well-written. The main concern of this essay is the extent to which the so-called spiritual school formed the school and how far this school or movement is far from the mainstream. It also shows the characteristic flaws of spiritual poets.

Elliott states that it is extremely difficult to define spiritual poetry and to determine in which verse the poets study it. Donne's poem is in the late Elizabethan. His feelings are often very close to Chapman's. The argument presented by Elliott is that metaphorical poets do not have the correct use of metaphors, similes, or other ideas. Moreover, no common style is so important for distinguishing these poets as a group. But Donne and Colley employs a device that is sometimes characteristically considered 'spiritual': the extension of the figure of speech at a distant stage. Compare Colley's world with Chessboard (To Destiny), and Don's comparison of two lovers with a pair of compasses. In these poets, instead of a clear description of the content of the comparison, development occurs through the rapid organization of thought. Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are protected by short words and sudden contradictions.

Dr. Johnson used the term 'spiritual poets' in the context of Donne, Cleveland, and Colley. He remarked that among them, "extreme racial views are often linked with violence." Elliott says that ideas are often interconnected but not united, and if we judge the style of the poems through their abuse, there are enough examples in Cleveland to justify Johnson. Condemnation. He quotes Lord Herbert's Dee, saying that there is nothing in the poem that fits Johnson's general observation on spiritual poets.

According to Eliot, the language of these poets is, as a rule, simple and pure. Herbert's verse has simplicity. Unlike teenager nineteenth-century poems, seventeenth-century poems (spiritual poems) such as Marvel's Coy Mistress and Crash's St. Teresa characters are different. In earlier times, there was a short syllable to produce the effect of great motion, and in later times, the long text was used to affect scientific glory.

In Eliot's opinion, Johnson seems to have failed the spiritual definition by his faults. One has to consider whether spiritual poetry has the virtue of lasting value. In fact, he doesn't have it. Johnson's observation is that the efforts of these poets have always been analytical. Eliot says that in the dramatic verse of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobian poets, sensitivity develops. In Johnson, Chapman, and Donne, the realization of ideas are entertaining. That is, there is 'integration of sensation'. Eliot distinguishes between the Victorian poet (reflective poet) and spiritual poet (intellectual poet). Poets like Tennyson and Browning think, but do not immediately feel the smell of roses. The idea for Donne was an experience. It improved her sensitivity. Different experiences are seamless and they form new curiosities.

2) Write critical analysis of metaphysical poems of poets other than John Donne.

Ans).

Spiritual Poets By Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

From the life of the poets

Only, like other poets who have written with narrow opinions, and paid for temporary prejudices to their court, rather than intellectual pleasure in the minds of men was much appreciated at that time, and much ignored on the general public of other literature.

As with other human choices, there are changes and fashions, as do other things, that change over time. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there appeared a membership of writers who could be called spiritual poets; It is innate to criticize because of disagreements

Spiritual poets were always trying to figure out why to grow into reality, but unfortunately resolved to show it in poetry, instead of writing poems, they only wrote verses, and often such verses stand better than a finger hearing than an ear; The modulation was so incomplete that they appeared to be versed only by counting utterances.

If the father of criticism properly named the favorable poem [Greek], these writers would, without major lies, lose their authority over the poets' names; For they cannot be said to have imitated anything: they have neither imitated nature nor life; Neither drew types of objects nor represented functions of intelligence.

Those, however, allow those who refuse him to be poets, to be clever. Dryden confessed to himself and his contemporaries that they were down to Donne in wit, But they surpass it in poetry.

If wit can be best described by the Pope, because "he is often thought of, but never expressed so well," he certainly never met or could never be found; Because they tried to be alone in their thoughts, and they were careless in their ingenuity. But Nieu's skeptical account of the pope's wisdom is doubtless wrong; It depresses him below his natural dignity and reduces him to the pleasure of language by the power of thought.

From this account of their compositions, it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow.

  Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general and consist of positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtilty, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments, and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and labored particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon

Yet great labor, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by the readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables.

 In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the image is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried, perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value, and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity, and polished to elegance, may give luster to works which have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment. 



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