John Dryden said in his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693) that John Donne in his poetry "affects the metaphysics," meaning that
Donne employs the terminology.
In 1779 Samuel Johnson extended the term "metaphysical" from Donne to a school of poets, in the acute and balanced critique which he incorporated in his "Life of Cowley."
The name is now applied to a
group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether or not directly influenced
by Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry (Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley) and in religious poetry (Herbert, Vaughan,
Crashaw, and Traherne).
Attempts have been made to demonstrate that these poets had in common a philosophical worldview.
The term "metaphysical," however, fits these very diverse writers only if it is used, as Johnson used it, to indicate a common poetic style, use of figurative language, and way of organizing the meditative process or the poetic argument.
Donne set the metaphysical mode by writing poems which are sharply opposed to the rich and the idealized view of human nature and of sexual love which had constituted a central tradition in Elizabethan poetry, especially in Spenser and the writers of Petrarchan sonnets.
Donne's poems are opposed also to the fluid, regular verification of
Donne's contemporaries, the Cavalier poets.
Instead, Donne wrote in a diction
and meter modeled on the rough give-and-take of actual speech, and often organized his poems in the form of an urgent or heated argument—with a reluctant mistress, or an intruding friend, or God, or death, or with himself.
He employed a subtle and often deliberately outrageous logic; he was realistic, ironic, and sometimes cynical in his treatment of the complexity of human motives, especially in the sexual relation; and whether playful or serious, and whether writing the poetry of love or of intense religious experience, he was above all "witty," making ingenious use oí paradox, pun, and startling parallels in simile and metaphor.
The beginnings of four of Donne's poems will illustrate the shock tactic, the dramatic form of direct address, the rough idiom, and the rhythms of the living voice that are characteristic of his metaphysical style:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root. ..
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
Busy old fool, unruly sun ...
Batter my heart, three-personed God ...
Some, not all, of Donne's poetic procedures have parallels in each of his contemporaries and successors whom literary historians usually group as metaphysical poets.
These poets have had admirers in every age, but beginning with the Neo-
classic Period of the later seventeenth century, they were by most critics and
readers regarded as interesting but perversely ingenious and obscure exponents of false wit, until a drastic revaluation after World War I elevated Donne, and to a lesser extent Herbert and Marvell, high in the hierarchy of English poets.
This reversal owed much to H. J. C. Grierson's Introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1912), was given strong impetus by T. S. Eliot's essays "The Metaphysical Poets" and
"Andrew Marvell" (1921), and was continued by a great number of commentators, including F. R. Leavis in England and especially the American New Critics, who tended to elevate the metaphysical style into the model of their ideal poetry of irony, paradox, and "unified sensibility."
More recently, Donne has lost his exemplary status, but continues
to occupy a firm position as a prominent poet in the English canon.
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