Poetry in thePoetry Jacobean Age Metaphysical
1603-1625
The Jacobean Age
Accession of James I, belonging to the Stuart family, to the throne of England in 1603 (succeeding Queen Elizabeth I, 1558-1603, the last monarch belonging to the Tudor dynasty). a timeline
The tensions and contradictions that had marked the end of the century now increased.
The stability and self-confidence of the early Elizabethan period were replaced by uncertainty and mistrust >> these also affected poetry, making it more meditative and intellectual.
The Jacobean Age
This sense of uneasiness and anxiety was best conveyed by a group of poets known as Metaphysical Poets. Definition used by Samuel Johnson (18th century) who wrote in an essay on the poet Abraham Cowley: The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables
The Jacobean Age
To Johnson the word metaphysical, far from suggesting philosophical speculation, meant abstruse and incongruous, so it sounded like a reproach to those poets who, in his opinion
were trying to show off wished at any cost to be original and striking filled their poems with “enormous and disgusting hyperboles” privileged ingenuity rather than emotion and feelings were excessively concerned with particulars and details, and unable to catch “great thoughts which are always general”
The Jacobean Age
were too analytic and fragmentary made too much use of a kind of wit which he defined as “discordia concors, a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”.
It is obvious that Johnson, who was a classicist, would be prejudiced against this kind of intellectual poetry, full of metaphors, paradoxes and conceits. His negative judgement was of course shared by his contemporaries in the 18th century, and for more than a century the Metaphysical Poets were ignored.
The Jacobean Age
In the early 19th century the situation slowly began to change.
It was only in the 20th century that these poets were fully appreciated.
Their metrical irregularities and their “rugged” verse were then found to reflect the same moral and material crisis, the same anxiety, the same uneasiness and uncertainty that followed World War I.
The Jacobean Age
The greatest admirer of the metaphysical poets was T.S.Eliot, who, in his review of an anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century published by Herbert J.C.Grierson (1921), exalted the very qualities that Johnson had criticized: 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.
The Jacobean Age
T.S.Eliot, in other words, praised the fusion of thought and emotion, i.e. the blending of the various elements of experience typical of the metaphysical poets.
Some of the writers who are grouped under the name Metaphysical belong chronologically to the reign of Charles I (1625-1649), the second Stuart King of England, but John Donne, who is usually regarded as the foremost metaphysical poet, wrote his finest poetry and prose in the Jacobean period.
Poetry in thePoetry Jacobean Age Metaphysical
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