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The Dynamic Image in Metaphysical Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alice Stayert Brandenburg
Alice Stayert Brandenburg*
Affiliation:
Southern Methodist University
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Extract

So many brilliant critics and scholars have interpreted the metaphysical image that one hesitates to push the analysis farther, but analysis and theory are justified if they throw new light on a subject or show a possible relationship between things that had previously seemed independent. The question is not whether metaphysical poetry can be analyzed more fully, but whether one simple, underlying peculiarity can be found to explain some of the characteristics of this type of verse and to show that these disiecta membra are of a piece. The underlying quality that appears to connect many of the seemingly unrelated features of metaphysical poetry might be called the dynamic image.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 1942 , pp. 1039 - 1045
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

Note 1 in page 1039 Endymion, i, 157 f.

Note 2 in page 1039 Romeo and Juliet, i. v. 47–51.

Note 3 in page 1039 Lines 33 f.

Note 4 in page 1040 Æneid, iv, 68–73.

Note 5 in page 1040 See Paradise Lost, iv, 181 ff.

Note 6 in page 1040 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York, 1935), p. 50.

Note 7 in page 1040 Ibid., p. 55.

Note 8 in page 1040 Hamlet, i. v. 68–70.

Note 9 in page 1040 Romeo and Juliet, ii. ii. 3 f.

Note 10 in page 1040 Lines 1667–73.

Note 11 in page 1040 Spurgeon, op. cit., p. 98.

Note 12 in page 1040 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, i. ii. 57 ff.

Note 13 in page 1041 T. S. Eliot emphasizes this point; see the passage from his Clark lectures quoted by Mario Praz in “Donne's Relation to the Poetry of His Time,” A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spencer (Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 58. See likewise George Williamson's remarks in The Donne Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1930), pp. 89 f. and 48; and W. Bradford Smith, “What Is Metaphysical Poetry?” Sewanee Review, xlii, 263.

Note 14 in page 1041 Milton Allan Rugoff, Donne's Imagery: A Study in Creative Sources (New York, 1939), pp. 220–232.

Note 15 in page 1042 George Williamson, “Donne and the Poetry of Today,” A Garland for John Donne, p. 156.

Note 16 in page 1042 Rugoff, op. cit., pp. 225–228. See also Kathleen M. Lea, “Conceits,” Modern Language Review, xx, 399.

Note 17 in page 1042 Williamson, “Donne and the Poetry of Today,” p. 166.

Note 18 in page 1042 Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Donne in Our Time,” A Garland for John Donne, p. 16.

Note 19 in page 1042 Rugoff, op. cit., p. 241.

Note 20 in page 1043 Henry W. Wells remarks that in a Radical image (which is practically identical with a metaphysical image) “the minor term … is significant metaphorically only at a single narrow point of contact. Elsewhere it is incongruous.” See Poetic Imagery Illustrated from Elizabethan Literature (Columbia University Press, 1924), p. 125.

Note 21 in page 1043 The neutral quality of the minor term is pointed out by Wells (op. cit., p. 121) and by Williamson (The Donne Tradition, pp. 31 and 86 f.).

Note 22 in page 1043 “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” ll. 1–6.

Note 23 in page 1044 Donne, “The Extasie,” ll. 7 f.

Note 24 in page 1044 Lines 409–412.

Note 25 in page 1044 Op. cit., pp. 135 f.

Note 26 in page 1044 Williamson (The Donne Tradition, pp. 86 f.) attributes the failure of many of the conceits of Donne's followers to their neglecting to neutralize the minor term.

Note 27 in page 1045 Line 5.

Note 28 in page 1045 Lines 25–28.

Note 29 in page 1045 See the quotations from Virgil and Shakespeare in the first part of this article.