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

the end