Metaphysical Poetry:

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Metaphysical Poetry

• An Introduction to John Donne

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John Donne1572-1631, London, EnglandRepresentati
ve metaphysical poet

• Lovers eyeballs threaded on a string.
• A god who assaults the human heart with a
  battering ram.
• A teardrop that encompasses and drowns the
  world.
• John Donnes poems abound with startling images,
  some of them exalting and others grotesque. With
  his strange and playful intelligence, expressed
  in puns, paradoxes and elaborately sustained
  metaphors know as conceits Donne has enthralled
  (and sometimes enraged) reader from his day to
  our own (Norton).
• Contemporary of Shakespeare, 1564-1616

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The Early Seventeenth Century

• 1603 Death of Elizabeth accession of James I,
  first Stuart king of England. Religious tension
  mounted during King Jamess reign
• 1605 The Gunpowder Plot, a failed effort by
  Catholic extremists to blow up Paliament and the
  King
• 1620 Arrival of the Pilgrims in the New World
  aboard the Mayflower
• 1625 Death of James accession of Charles I
• 1642 Outbreak of Civil War theaters closed

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Sound and Content (Norton)

• The early seventeenth century saw important
  changes in poetic fashion. Several prominent
  Elizabethan genres were no longer in evidence
  (sonnet sequences, pastoral poems), nor were
  stylistic features such as nature imagery and
  florid ornament. The norm was coming to be short,
  very concentrated poems in a colloquial and often
  witty plain style.
• The major poets of these years, Donne, Jonson,
  and George Herbert, led this shift.
• The poetry itself uses rough everyday rhythms of
  language it is not gentle poetry and is often
  used as an argument Donne engages with God,
  himself, his spouse, science, and elements of the
  natural world.

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• John Donne was born in London 1572 into a devout
  Roman Catholic household
• They suffered heavily for their loyalty to the
  Catholic Church
• He was a Catholic growing up in Protestant
  England during decades when anti-Roman feeling
  reached new heights.
• At some point in the 1590s, having returned to
  London with travels abroad, he converted to the
  English church.

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What is metaphysical poetry?

• The term metaphysical was first used
  derogatively by John Dryden to describe John
  Donnes work. Drydens accusation was aimed at
  Donnes references to science and philosophy (a
  great departure from sing-song, lovey-dovey
  poetry), and his unnatural engagement with
  intellectual ideas.
• Ben Johnson too employed the term 'metaphysical
  poets', apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and
  Cowley chiefly in mind. He remarks of them that
  their poems yoked 'the most heterogeneous
  ideasby violence together'.

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Donne continued

• Donne uses witty, often sexually-based metaphors.
  In a poem about undressing his mistress, for
  example, Donne writes, Oh! my America, my
  newfound land! comparing the revelation of her
  body to the discovery of a new continent. He also
  employs the word death (fully intending the
  double entendre) to suggest both death itself and
  sexual activity, hence, the lines, I die and
  rise in thee again carry a physical,
  sexually-charged resonance.

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Religion

• Donnes early work, collected in Satires and
  in Songs and Sonnets, was released in an era of
  religious oppression The intensity with which
  Donne grapples with concepts of divinity and
  mortality is exemplified in Sonnet X Death, be
  not proud, Sonnet XIV Batter my heart, three
  persond God, both of which we will examine in
  detail in the next few days.

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Commentary

• Metaphysical poets are revered for their
  intricacy and their originality, as well as a
  poetic style in which philosophical and
  spiritual subjects are approached with reason
  and often conclude in paradox. This group of
  writers established meditationbased on the union
  of thought and feeling... (Academy of American
  Poets).

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Poetry in the Academy

• As a group, these poets were eclipsed by the
  Romantic and Victorian poets, but T.S Eliot
  brought their work back into the academic sphere
  because he saw in this group of poets a capacity
  for devouring all kinds of experience.

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A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

• One of Donnes friends, Izaac Walton, reported
  that this poem was written to Donnes wife when
  Donne went to the Continent in 1611.
  Valediction a departure speech or discourse a
  bidding of farewell.
• In this poem, Donne, elaboratesa figure of
  speech to the furthest stage to which his
  ingenuity can carry it. That is, Donne compares
  two lovers to the legs of a compass, and this
  unlikely comparison, or conceit, carries the
  poem.