THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

 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 metaphysical formed a
school (in our own time we should say a 'movement'), and how far this so-called school
or movement is a regression from the primary current.
 Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide
what poets practice 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, it is feeling often very close to that of Chapman.
 The 'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; It
expires ill 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 that 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.
 Johnson, who employed the term 'metaphysical poets', apparently having Donne,
Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly ln mind, remarks of them that 'the most heterogeneous
Ideas are yoked by violence together'. The force of this Impeachment lies in the failure
of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and If we are
to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland
to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled
into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry.
 It is to be observed that the language of these poets IS as a rule simple and pure; in the
verse of George Herbert, this simplicity is carried as far as it can go-a simplicity emulated
without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the
other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a Vice; It is a fidelity to thought
and feeling.
 If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define
metaphysical poetry by Its faults, It is worthwhile to enquire whether we may not have
more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the
seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of
the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective 'metaphysical',
considering whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which
subsequently disappeared) but ought not to have disappeared.
 Johnson has hit perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes
that 'their attempts were always analytic'; he would not agree that, after the
dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.
 It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets
expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found In any of the prose,
good as it often is.
 Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were
notable men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of
feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman
especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought
into feeling, which is exactly what we find ill Donne.
 The difference between modern writing and metaphysical is not a simple difference in
degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England
between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and
Browning; It is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet.
 Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think, but they do not feel their thought as
immediately as the odor of a rose __ A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified
his sensibility.
 When a poet's mind IS perfectly equipped for Its work, It IS constantly amalgamating
disparate experiences; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, Irregular, and
fragmentary. The latter falls In love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have
nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of
cooking; in the mind of the poet, these experiences are always forming new wholes.
 We may express the difference by the following theory:
 The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the
sixteenth century, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any
kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their
predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or
Cino.
 In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we
have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the
influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
 Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the
magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in
some respects improved. But while the language became more refined, the feeling
became more crude.
 The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century and continued. The poets
revolted against the ratiocinative and the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits,
unbalanced; they reflected.
 The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the
more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is
that he turns them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically.
 A philosophical theory that has entered into poetry IS established, for Its truth or falsity
in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in
question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the
task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.
 The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, and more
indirect, in order to force, to dislocate If necessary, language into his meaning.
 Hence we get something that looks very much like the conceit -We get, in fact, a method
curiously similar to that of the 'metaphysical poets', similar also in Its use of obscure
words and of simple phrasing.
 Those who object to the 'artificiality' of Milton" or Dryden sometimes tell us to 'look into
our hearts and write'. But that IS not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into
a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous
system, and the digestive tract.
 In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit
he clearly means something more serious than we usually learn today; in his criticism of
their versification, we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but
also how well trained.