Metaphysicals and Cavaliers

Main influences:
John Donne, Ben Jonson

Departure:

• Both rebeled against "pictorial fluidity, decorative rhetorical patterns, and half-medieval idealism"
• Highly experimental forms as opposed to conventional (sonnet) forms

Contrasts:
 
 

Style of the Metaphysicals:

• Metaphysical Conceit: Relate "symbolic philosophy" where world symbolizes underlying truths. Herbert uses emblems from emblem books. Man as Microcosm very important to Donne. "Sensuous beauty in the face of things was to be apprehended and then turned to sudden symbolic meaning which obliterated its sensuality"
• conceit typically plays off commonplaces: Donne's method is to take the terms of a convention as actual, and then use his wits. Love's Martyrdom--takes amorous martyrdom in light of actual religious martyrdom of 1590's; Kenner calls this "secondhand bits of machinery employed by a decadent poeticizing"; in particular, left over from Italian sonnet tradition (WS as typical user of conventional imagery)
• Donne used classical realism but no allusions. Irony and cynicism.
  - ornament lies in elaborating the figure more formally than in prose discourse, typically individual measuring place in cosmos, and measuring their reality by his experience.
• use of classical witty paradox transforms typical Christian paradox.
• paradox "epigrammatically brief" and thus obscure
• expressive but not beautiful or smooth words/rhythms--often harsh
• reversed feet, harsh alliteration, arbitrary elisions, enjambment
• Marvell and Herbert combines "masculine" or intellectual qualities of Jonson (smooth, succinct language) with Donne (metaphysical insights)
• Metaphysicals are "baroque": finite spaces give way to deeply recessed perspectives.
• variety of subject matter and even personae: two are written in the voice of a woman, one of them arguing wittily for absolute female promiscuity ("Good is not good, unless/ A thousand it possess") and forms of address: advice, satire, celebration, imagines future canonization of self as saint of new Love religion, laments death of loved one, he images his own burial, he makes his will"; explores both scholastic and Neoplatonic metaphysics, yet no sense of the appropriate. Tenderness and justice are rare.

Metaphysical Tradition:
George Herbert
Richard Crashaw
Henry Vaughan
Andrew Marvel

Style of Jonson and Cavalier poets

• celebration of England using personifications, myths, and legends
• Jonson turned from medieval and romantic to adapt CLASSICAL FORMS: he chose forms which would serve to define and celebrate social ideals, praise of blame good or bad people, to criticize and describe.
• forms were epigram, conversation or epistle, ode (moral statement)
• terse, severe, and tender lines
• normal if formal speech
• myth is used for natural or moral allegory, never for ornament
• whole poem turns on it. Prose language more concentrated.
• Jonson thinks personal love poems are embarrassing and amateurish. Devotional poems are bores

Cavalier Poet Tradition:
Robert Herrick
Thomas Carew
Sir John Suckling

Mary Adams
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