This Week’s “The GRE Is Ridiculously Hard, So You Are Not An Idiot” Review

Today’s Topic: The Metaphysical Poets (with debt to Patricia Beer’s An Introduction to the Metaphysical Poets)

Period of Influence: Ranges from Donne’s birth in 1572 (though he started writing twenty years afterward), to Marvell’s death in 1678.

Major Writers: John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert

Chief Characteristics: As Beer notes, “There was a great variety of tone, ranging from Donne’s impatience—(‘For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love’)—to George Herbert’s grateful surprise—(‘Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart / Could have recovered greenesse?’) (Beer 14). The expressiveness was aided by a new freedom in rhythm and less confined by strict traditional forms. In fact, the irregularity of their rhythms was most often the reason for their censure by those who preferred the smoothness of Elizabethan poetry (Beer 15-16).

In some of their poems, they argued as in Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure” and Donne’s “The Flea” and persuasion is a major signifier of metaphysical poetry (Beer 19). (On a side note, one of the few questions I got right on my GRE Subject Test was an identification question—I was able to pick out Donne by his use of the word flea or tic or something like that). However, in this persuasion, the poets often resort to “the use of deliberately false logic” (Beer 20).

This is seen in “To His Coy Mistress”: the speaker knows of his mental superiority and hides what is on its face, a pretty morose and subtle threat, in beautiful language that would convince a simple-minded maiden. The main argument they put forth, which as Beer notes “is nearly always pointed to first of all as being characteristic of their work,” is comparison, usually through metaphor and simile (22). Their comparisons, unlike the Elizabethans, were “so original as to be startling, and at their best so functional as to be far more than decorative” (22). Famous comparisons? Donne’s soul to his wife’s soul as a pair of compasses and the rhythm of the pulse to that of a drum (which was made by Henry King).

Another major characteristic is the wittiness of the poets, which is hard to define and easier to recognize; Beer offers this definition: “a witty poet can think of more than one thing at a time” (25).

Finally, religion draws a clear line between metaphysical poetry and its precursor, Elizabethan poetry: “The development of religious poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century is one of the most distinguished contributions of the Metaphysical Poets to English verse” (Beer 28). Very few Elizabethan poets wrote religious poetry, but with metaphysical poets, earthly love and divine love were both major subjects of the poetry. Many of the Metaphysics were either progeny of clergy or clergymen themselves.