Metaphysical Poets - Origin of The Name

Origin of The Name

In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". This does not necessarily imply that he intended metaphysical to be used in its true sense, in that he was probably referring to a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne: "He affects 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 softnesses of love. In this . . . Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault." Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of a certain metaphysical school or group of metaphysical poets is Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), who in one of his letters speaks of "metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities."

Nor was Johnson's assessment of 'metaphysical poetry' particularly flattering, since he wrote:

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and, to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and, very often, such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

There is no scholarly consensus regarding which seventeenth-century English poets or poems may be regarded as in the 'metaphysical' genre. Colin Burrow, writing for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, describes John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw as the 'central figures' of metaphysical poetry.

In 1921, Herbert Grierson published Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, which collected poems by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell, and Carew. Helen Gardner's Metaphysical Poets anthology, published in 1957, contained work by many more writers, including 'proto-metaphysical' poets such as William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Ralegh, and even poems by the Restoration libertine the Earl of Rochester. As Burrow remarks, in Gardner's anthology 'The all-thinking, all-feeling metaphysical poets were becoming virtually coextensive with seventeenth-century poetry'. Furthermore, Burrow argues that the 'metaphysical poets' conceit was an attempt by twentieth-century writers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on seventeenth-century English poetry. Such an imposition has been resisted by scholars.