Write
an essay on the contribution of the Metaphysical Poets to English Literature.
The term
“metaphysical," as applied to English and continental European poets of
the seventeenth century, was used by Augustan poets John Dryden and Samuel Johnson to reprove those poets for their
“unnaturalness.” As Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe wrote, however, “The unnatural, that too is natural," and the
metaphysical poets continue to be studied and revered for their intricacy and
originality.
John Donne, along with similar but distinct poets such asGeorge Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and
Henry Vaughn, developed a poetic style in which philosophical and spiritual
subjects were approached with reason and often concluded in paradox. This group
of writers established meditation—based on the union of thought and feeling
sought after in Jesuit Ignatian meditation—as a poetic mode.
The metaphysical poets
were eclipsed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by romantic and Victorian poets, but twentieth-century readers and scholars,
seeing in the metaphysicals an attempt to understand pressing political and
scientific upheavals, engaged them with renewed interest. In his essay "The Metaphysical Poets," T. S. Eliot, in
particular, saw in this group of poets a capacity for “devouring all kinds of
experience.”
Donne (1572 – 1631) was the most influential
metaphysical poet. His personal relationship with spirituality is at the center
of most of his work, and the psychological analysis and sexual realism of his
work marked a dramatic departure from traditional, genteel verse. His early
work, collected in Satires and in Songs and Sonnets, was released
in an era of religious oppression.