The Metaphysical Poets by T.S. Eliot — Read

By collecting these poems[2] from the work of a generation more often / named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor / Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader / will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the / same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or / Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an / anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable / edition of Caroline poets nor that of the "Oxford Book of English / Verse. " Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a / provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so / many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, / as documents in the case of "metaphysical poetry. " The phrase has long / done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant / taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed / a school (in our own time we should say a "movement"), and how far this / so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.

Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but / difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. / The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes / nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling / often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative / from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the / next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally / the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after / by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more / profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns / through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to / find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is / common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an / element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often / Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically / "metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a / figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. / Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a / chess-board through long stanzas ("To Destiny"), and Donne, with more / grace, in "A Valediction," the comparison of two lovers to a pair of / compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the / content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought / which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.