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The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry, 1872-1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Joseph E. Duncan
Joseph E. Duncan*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

A great deal of attention has been given to the surge of critical interest in metaphysical poetry that followed the publication of Herbert Grierson's edition of John Donne's poems in 1912. Theodore Spencer and Mark Van Doren, for instance, have examined the revival of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets from 1912 to 1938. The achievement of these and of other recent critics has tended to obscure the earlier phase of the metaphysical revival. It has been assumed frequently that the revival began with Grierson's edition and that current theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were first presented in some essays by T. S. Eliot that appeared in the early 1920's. In reality, however, Grierson's edition and the reviews that acclaimed it marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival. His edition was no doubt in part the cause of the enthusiasm about Donne that reached a scholarly climax in 1931 with the observance of the tercentenary of the poet's death. It was also the result of the increased interest in Donne's poetry and personality that began during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Eliot's essays were not so much a new note as a sensitive formulation of ideas that had become familiar by 1912.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 658 - 671
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 See their Studies in Metaphysical Poetry (New York, 1939). The work include a bibleography of books and articles about the metaphysical poets for the years 1912-38. Spencer wrote that be believed that the list of 540 titles was “at least twice as long as a similar list would be for the whole nineteenth century” (p. 3). My investigation of the 19th-century criticism of the metaphysicals substantiates Spencer's surmise. More books and articles of a popular nature, however, appeared in the 19th century—when the metaphysicals were often regarded as quaint—than have appeared since 1912.

2 Some reviews of the Grierson edition appeared after 1912.1 shall refer to these when they illuminate the whole earlier stage of the metaphysical revival and seem to belong logically to this earlier movement. It will also be necessary to quote frequently from Eliot's essays in order to show in what ways his ideas were anticipated during the first stage of the revival.

3 The Complete Poems of John Donne, D.D. (London, 1872), i, x.

4 “Intimate Glimpses from Browning's Letter File,” ed. A. J. Armstrong, Baylor Bull., xxxvii (Sept. 1934), 58,61.

5 See his The Rhetoric of John Donne's Verse (Baltimore, 1906), p. 206.

6 See Literary Criticisms by Francis Thompson, ed. Terence L. Connolly (New York, 1948), p. 149; John Chadwick, “Poet and Preacher,” New World, IX (March 1900), 48; Truman J. Backus, Skew's New History of English Literature, rev. ed. (New York, 1884), pp. 143-144.

7 In a letter to the author on 31 Jan. 1951, Professor Grierson wrote that it had occurred to him during the 1890's that Donne's poems needed textual study similar to that be had recently given Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics while studying at Oxford He recalled that criticisms of Donne by Edward Dowden and William Minto had stimulated his interest in the poet and that he had first read Donne with real interest in E. K. Chambers' edition of 1896. He explained that be had been asked to write the article on Donne in The Cambridge History of English Literature because of his treatment of the poet in his The First Half the Seventeenth Century, published in 1906. While occupied on these two studies, he said, he realised that both the canon and text of Doane's poems needed careful re-exam-

8 A History of English Poetry (London, 1911), iii, 167-168.

9 Chambers, “The Poem, of Join Doone,” MLR, IX (1914), 269, “The Poetry of John Donne,” Spectator. CX (1913), 102; Brooke, “John Donne the Elizabethan,” Nation (London), XII (1913), 826, and “The Poems of John Donne,” TLS, 30 Jan. 1913, p. 13.

10 “John Donne,” Nineteenth Century, VII (1880), 848.

11 English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700 (London, 1897), pp. Ivii-lviiii.

12 Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (New York, 1899), II, 330-334 Symons, “John Donne,” Fortnightly Rev., n.s. LXVI (1809), 735-740; Sanders, “Dr. Donne,” Temple Bar, CXXI (1900), 634; Grierson, ed. The Poems of John Donne, (London, 1912), II, xi-xvii, and “John Donne,” CHEL (New York, 1910), IV, 226, 254

13 More, “George Herbert,” Shelburne Essays, 4th Ser. (New York, 1905), pp. 74-75, Melton, pp. 166, 206; Chadwick, p. 33; Moody and Lovett, A History of English Litereture (New York, 1906), p. 144.

14 Palgrave, ed. The Treasury of Sacred Song (Oxford, 1889), p. 333; “John Donne and His Contemporaries,” Quart. Rev., CXCII (1900), 231; Gosse, The Jacobean Poets (London, 1899), pp. 47-48; Symons, Fort. Rev., n.s. LXVI, 735.

15 Stephen, John Donne,“ National Rev., XLV (1899), 595-596; Chadwick, p. 33, and ”Brief, on Nee, Book,“ The Dial, XX (1 May 1896), 280.

16 Minto, p. 848; Sauders, p. 615; Brooke, Nation, XX, 825.

17 Grosart, Poems of John Donne, II, xivii; Dowden, New, Studies im Literature (London, 1895), pp. 92-95; Clarence Child, “A Group of OU Author.,” MLN, XV (1900), 62; Stephen, pp. 595-596; Schelling, ed. A Book of Elisabethan Lyric (Boston, 1895), pp. xxii, lxviii; Brumbaugh, “A Study of the Poetry of John Donne,” unpubl. diss. (Univ. of Penn-sytvania, 1893), p. 98. See also Grierson, CHEL, IV, 244, and The first Half of the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 160, and The Poems of John Donne, ed. James Rossell Lowell and Charle. Eliot Norton (New York: The Grolier Club, 1895), I, xxi.

18 Grosart, ed. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Morvell (London, 1872-75). I, lxvi; Palmer, ed. The English Works of George Herbert (Boston, 1905), I, 161, and “The Cloister Library,” The Independent, LV2 (1903), 1211.

19 Grosart, ed. The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw (London, 1872-73), II, lxx, Poems of john Donne, II, xxxix, and ed. The Complete Works im Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley (Edinburgh, 1881), I, xcv-xcvii. During the 19th century the passage from Donne's “The Second Anniversary” about Elizabeth Drury's speaking soul and almost thinking body was quoted much more than any other lines from Donne, and it apparently came to be regarded at Donne's expression of η psychological and aesthetic theory, In the 19th century the concept of the union of thought and feeling throve in an intellectual climate particularly sympathetic to the 17th century. Thoreau, referring to Donne's words, “one might almost say, her body thought,” affirmed: “I quite say it.” Quoted from F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (London, 1941), p. 98.

20 Symons, Fort. Rev., n.s. LXVI, 741; Eliot, Essays, pp. 249-250; Stephen, p. 601; and Grierson, CHEL, IV, 245.

21 The Writings of James Russell Lowell (Cambridge, Mass., 1890), III, 171; Schelling, p. xxii; Reed, English Lyrical Poetry (New Haven, 1912), p. 241.

22 Everard Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (New York. 1913), p. 298, and Thomp-son, pp. 555, 188.

23 Nation, XII, 825.

24 “John Donne” Poetry and Drama, I (June 1913), 186.

25 Essays, p. 247.

26 Brooke, Poetry and Drama, I, 186-187, and Eliot, Essays, pp. 247, 262, 255, 248.

27 Eliot praised poets who had the “essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” He found in Chapeau and Donne a changing of thought into feeling (Essays, pp. 246-249).

28 Eliot wrote that the structure of metaphysical poetry is “sometimes far from simple— but that is not a rice (it is a fidelity to thought and feeling) ”He referred to Donne's faithful expression of “emotion as he finds it, his recognition of the complexity of feeling and its rapid alterations and antitheses,” Essays, p. 245, and “John Donne,” The nation and the Athenaeum, XXXIII (1923), 332.

29 Grosart, ed. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of George Herbert (London, 1874), II, lxvii, lxix, and Work, of Richard Crashaw, II, lxiv, lxxvii, and Minto, p. 856.

30 Gosse, John Donne, II, 339-340, and Carpenter, p. lx.

31 Saintabury, Introd., The of Jhon Donne, ed. Ε. K. Chambers (London, 1896), I, xxxii; Symons, Fort. Rev., n.s. LXVI, 742-744; Grierson, Poems of John Donne, II, xxxiv-xxxv.

32 Brooke, Nation, XII, 826, and Poetry ami Drame, I, 187; Chadwick, p. 46.

33 Palmer, I, 155, and Wendell, The Temper of Ike Seventeenth Century in English Literature (New York, 1904), pp. 120-125.

34 Quart Rev., CXCII, 239-240, and Eliot, Essays, p. 250.

35 R. L. Mégroz, Francis Thompson: The Poet of Heaven in Earth (London, 1937), p. 113; Bliss, “Francis Thompson and Richard Crashaw,” The Month, CXI (1908), 1-12; Alice Meynell, “Soma Memories of Franca Thompson,” Dublin Rev., CXLII (1908), 172; Symons, Dramatis Personae (Indianapolis, 1923), p. 162.

36 Poetry and Drama, I, 188.

37 Walter De la Mare, “An Elizabethan Poet and Modern Poetry,” Edinburgh Rev CCXVII (1913), 385, and Rupert Brook, and the Intellectual Imagination (London, 1919), P. 27.

38 Gosse, John Donne, II, 339; Quart. Rev., cxcii, 240; Chadwick, p. 36.

39 Gosse, John Donne, II, 339; Grierson, CHEL, IV, 249; Eliot, Essay, pp. 248-249, 255. For Eliot's comparison of the sensibility of Donne and Mallarmé see“Note sur Mallarmé et Poe,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, XXVII (1926), 524-526.

40 Both metaphysical and symbolist poets believed in a ssstem of underlying analogies and in the relationship between man as microcosm and the universe at macrocosm. Both Baudelaire and Thompson, for example, were influenced by Swedenborg. However, metaphysical poetry is more closely related to symbolist theory than to symbolist practice. Even when the symbolists practiced what they preached, their techniques differed in sev-eral ways from those of the metaphysicals. The metaphysicals' approach to analogy was primarily intellectual and logical; that of the symbolists was primarily anti-intellectual and intuitive. The symbolists were chiefly interested in the secret affinities of all things with an individual soul, while the metaphysicals were more concerned with the relations of things to each other and to God. Nevertheless, tome of the symbolists, particularly Cor-bière and Laforgue, employed metaphors, puns, neologisms, and other devices similar to those in metaphysical poetry.

41 English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945), p. 125.