Write a short note on Metaphysical Poetry.
The Metaphysical poets of seventeen century particularly admired the methodology of science and in fact the copied it and their phrasing is often technical. Spare and Polysyllable, through they are not repeating actual science but making those metaphorical substitutions.
In a broad sense, the term “Metaphysical Poetry” is used to can not philosophical poetry or poetry dealing with metaphysics exploring the problem of one and many unity and division and the spirit and the flesh.
In general Metaphysical Poetry is characterized by what is called “Masculine expression’. It is bold dramatic and concise. It is intellectual analytical and complex. T.S. Eliot found in it a perfect fusion of intellect and feelings. Herbert called it “emotional apprehension of thought”. The Metaphysical Poets generally ignore traditional stanza forms and use vividly colloquial language, obscure or out landish imagery and extravagant diction.
The Metaphysical Poets not only wrote of love but also of God and of theology. Devoting their intellect and imagination to reflection upon God and their relation to him they produced what is by no means common in English literature, great religious poetry. Their devotional poetry in marked by intensity and spiritual insight to be seen elsewhere only in such isolated poets as Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell. In the poetry of Donne, Herbert and Thomas Traherne, there is a deep expression of communication with God.
Metaphysical poet, any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne, the chief of the Metaphysical. Others include Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley as well as, to a lesser extent, George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech.
The Metaphysical Poets were well admired in their won days but many derogatory remarks were made against their Poetry from the 17th to the early 19th century except Samuel Johns and Coleridge who were appreciative of the Metaphysicals almost all the academic critics and men of letters in the Romantic Snorted at their Poetry. The late 18th century was probably the time at which the reputation of the Metaphysicals was lowest and very few people would know him.
