Who were the Metaphysical Poets?

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Who were the Metaphysical Poets?
John Donne (1572 - 1631)
Andrew Marvell (1621 - 1678)
Richard Crashaw (1613 - 1649) Henry Vaughan
(1622 - 1695) Bishop King Lord Herbert Aurelian
Townsend
George Herbert (1593 - 1633)
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Characteristics

• 17th century
• simple, artificial, difficult or fantastic
• the language was usually simple and pure
• elaborate metaphysical conceits (Valediction
  Forbidding Mourning)
• rapid association of thought challenging the
  reader to keep up with it (Valediction of
  Weeping)
• telescoping of images (The Relic) -- the
  contrast and multiple possible associations (like
  with Shakespeare)
• an incredible focus on technique
• Johnson said, Their attempts were always
  analytic

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The Metaphysical Poets and the New Criticism

• 300 years later, New Criticism re-focused on
  these poets
• T. S. Eliot called them intellectual poets
  (rather than reflective)
• an ordinary man would smell a rose and then go
  read his newspaper, never connecting the two
• a reflective poet would immediately gush (write
  a poem) about the odor of the rose and never get
  to his newspaper
• an intellectual poet,however, would somehow
  connect these two very disparate events and form
  them into a new whole
• metaphysical united the intellectual with the
  emotional while the romantics merely ruminated
• some say their poetry is too technical. Eliot
  said poets must do more than look into their
  hearts to write . . . That is not looking deep
  enough . . . Donne looked into a good deal more
  than the heart. One must look into the cerebral
  cortex, the nervous system and the digestive
  tracts.

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Characteristics, cont.
Easter Wings by George Herbert A
portion of The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot
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Dr. Ray Fleming http//www.fsu.edu/modlang/divisi
ons/italian/rfleming.html
Professor Ray Fleming received his undergraduate
degree in modern languages, philosophy, and
English from the University of Notre Dame. He
studied philosophy and Renaissance literature as
a Fulbright scholar at the University of
Florence. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at
Harvard where he received his doctorate in
comparative literature. Professor Fleming taught
at the University of Notre Dame, the University
of California, Miami University (Ohio), Le Centre
Universitaire in Luxembourg, and at Penn State
University before coming to Florida State in 1995
as a professor of modern languages and
humanities. His primary areas of publication
include Italian, German, and English literatures,
and African American Studies.