The Metaphysical Poets

“The Metaphysical Poets” is an essay published by American-English poet T.S. Eliot in 1921 that became an influential piece of literary criticism. The essay helped stir 20th-century interest in and appreciation for the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, which included John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert.

In the essay Eliot argues that the work of these poets embodies a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve. He introduced his famous phrase “dissociation of sensibility” to describe the change that had occurred in English poetry after the heyday of the Metaphysical poets. According to Eliot, the result was poems that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. Eliot held up the Metaphysical poets as a model for the new style of contemporary poets—the Modernist generation.

Background: Book review or manifesto?

Eliot’s essay appeared in the October 20, 1921, edition of the Times Literary Supplement. It was not published as a critical and creative manifesto—although that is what it was—but as a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler.

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The subject of Grierson’s book was especially important to Eliot. For years he had immersed himself in extensive critical reading of such poets as Dante, Donne, and the French Symbolist Jules Laforgue, among many others. By the time Eliot wrote “The Metaphysical Poets,” he had published his first great poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), and his first important collection of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920).

Meanwhile, Eliot’s personal life was in profound disarray. His marriage was deteriorating, his mental and physical health was suffering, and he was employed in a dronelike job in the basement of Lloyds Bank in London. Yet he was also at the height of his literary powers. “The Metaphysical Poets” was as much of a guide to Eliot’s aspirations about his own poetry as it was a defense of 17th-century poets. His masterpiece, The Waste Land, was just around the corner.

Who were the Metaphysical poets, and why did they need defending?

Grierson’s anthology of Metaphysical poets came along as critics were beginning to reconsider the talents of that generation, whose work had long fallen out of favor. Metaphysical poetry is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by “conceit” or “wit”—that is, by the odd and often jarring combination of apparently unconnected ideas and things. A metaphysical conceit usually sets up an analogy between one figure’s spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the poem’s entire structure. The goal is to jolt readers out of their complacency and force them to think through the argument of the poem.

A classic example of a metaphysical conceit is found in Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which he compares two lovers’ souls to a compass:

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If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

In his essay Eliot uses the line “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone” in Donne’s poem “The Relic” as another example of the surprising contrasts between images—“bright hair” and “bone”—found in Metaphysical poetry, and he argues that such pairings produce a “powerful effect” on the reader.

Notably, the Metaphysical poets did not refer to themselves as such. The term metaphysical was applied to them pejoratively by their contemporary John Dryden, who took issue with what he considered to be their intellectual affectation of “the metaphysics.” Specifically, he chided Donne for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex [women] with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts…with the softnesses of love.”

In the 18th century Samuel Johnson coined the term metaphysical poets to criticize Donne, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley. Johnson was never so contemptuous of these men as when he wrote, in his seminal Lives of the Poets, “The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor.” They were too focused on the technical and analytical. According to Johnson, they wrote mere “verses,” not poetry, and these “were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.”

Summary of the essay

Eliot’s “review” of Grierson’s anthology spends little time discussing the book, except to note that Grierson “has rendered a service of some importance” and that his book is both “a piece of criticism and a provocation of criticism,” given the longstanding reputation of the Metaphysical poets. The rest of Eliot’s essay is a vigorous rebuttal to Johnson and Dryden, the latter of whom he accuses, along with John Milton, of having triumphed in their poetry “with a dazzling disregard of the soul.”

Whereas many critics elevated Dryden, Milton, and later generations of English poets, such as the Romantics, Eliot proposes that English poetry has degraded since the 17th century. The culprit is what he calls a “dissociation of sensibility,” or a loss of the union of thought and feeling. For Eliot, it comes down to “the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet.” Regarding the latter kind, he compares the Metaphysical poets with two of the most highly regarded 19th-century poets:

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour 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 experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, 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.

However, Eliot’s essay is not an outright rejection of English poets since the 17th century. He acknowledges “the best verse” of William Collins, Thomas Gray, and others, and he calls Dryden and Milton “two of the greatest masters of diction” in the English language. In some works by Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Eliot sees glimpses of the Metaphysical sensibility. But he credits the onset of the “sentimental age” of the 18th century and a revolt “against the ratiocinative, the descriptive” as introducing more refined language but cruder emotion into English poetry.

Much of Eliot’s argument, however, leads to a declaration of what he believed modern poetry should aspire to be—in a word, “difficult.” He writes,

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

He would do just that with his next major work.

Metaphysics meets Modernism: The Waste Land

In October 1922 Eliot published a poem titled The Waste Land. Long, challenging, and impressive in its diversity of style and cultural references, the poem became one of the most important literary events of the modern age. In the words of fellow poet William Carlos Williams, “It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.”

The Waste Land’s overarching theme was the disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I (1914–18). It presents the breakdown of a marriage and makes many references to facets of modern life, such as automobiles and popular music.

Eliot really makes his readers work for it. Like the Metaphysical poets, he uses startling contrasts to shock readers out of their complacency. Spring, the season of hope, brings no such thing in the opening lines of The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.” The poem’s narrative frequently shifts between different speakers and languages, and Eliot employed a range of styles and techniques, including free verse and stream of consciousness. More than just showing off his skill, Eliot wanted to create a fractured narrative that mirrors the alienation of modern society.

Sound familiar? In a word, the poem is difficult—exactly what Eliot called for in “The Metaphysical Poets.”