Johnson


Introduction

The term “Metaphysical Poets” as ascribed to a certain group of 17th century poets – such as Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Cleveland, Crashaw, Traherne, Vaughan and Cowley – has a derogatory etymology. The initial signification of the term was actually the opposite of its modern connotation as related to ‘spirits’ and spiritual matters. Those who first imposed the term on such poets – whose poetic interests are nevertheless quite discordant in their scope of subject matters and interests – were critics of the Augustan Age who accused them of being harsh, unnatural, bizarre, and in a word, against the poetic norms of the era. Metaphysical poets had to wait frustrated in their graves for thirty scores till the 20th century revival of interest in them; their poetry then was called not only precious, but the only true poems, rich with association of sensibility.
In the profile of “Metaphysical Poetry” there are two figures that stand out as giving revolutionary depth and signification to the term: Samuel Johnson, and T.S. Eliot. This paper, therefore, tends to make a survey on the application of the term from its first coinage by the Augustans to the 20th century critics who gave new meaning to them. The main focus will obviously be on two main articles: Johnson’s “Life of Cowley”, and Eliot’s “Metaphysical Poets”. Finally it will have a glance at what happened to the somehow put-out fire of enthusiasm in Metaphysical poetry after Eliot and later, the wave of Deconstructionism.

Antagonist Augustans

The term metaphysical meaning ‘after physics’, ‘beyond physics’, or more clearly ‘after (Aristotle’s work on) physics’ is first mentioned in John Dryden’s Discourse of Satire (1693) that John Donne ‘affects the Metaphysics … in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign’, meaning that Donne employs the terminology and abstruse arguments of the medieval Scholastic philosophers and in fact spoils poetry by harsh philosophic expressions. Dryden disapproved of Donne’s stylistic excesses, particularly his extravagant conceits (or witty comparisons) and his tendency towards hyperbolic abstractions. There could be found, of course, traces of the usage of the term even before Dryden. One of the first to use the term was William Drummond of Hawthornden in a letter written to Arthur Johnston in 1630; this shows how much Dryden’s view of the poet was into the literary circles of the period.
Though metaphysical poets have always had admirers in different periods and eras – and that is why they surpassed history’s oblivion, the critics of the Augustan Age who were fond of Neoclassic ideals of decorum, clarity, restraint and admired shapeliness of the poets of Augustan Rome were therefore antagonistic towards poets of the mid-17th century who went beyond those restraints to the forbidden realms of far-fetched conceits and juxtaposition of the most dissimilar.
Samuel Johnson, one of the most outstanding critics and as the most pragmatic as well as practical critic of the era, established the term more or less permanently as a label for metaphysical poets in his Lives of the English Poets (of Cowley). Johnson’s view of the poetry is quite in line with Dryden’s; they both condemn Donne for his “perplex[ing] the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love”.

Johnson’s “Life of Cowley”

Johnson’s description of [metaphysical wit] begins with introducing Metaphysical poets; he accuses them of being a bunch of showing off versifiers rather than true poets whose verses are mere celebration of their extreme knowledge of the world and scientific studies. In fact, Johnson and his contemporaries did not use the term “metaphysical” equal to “spiritual” or in opposition to “physical”; it rather connotes the philosophical and scientific aspect of the poetry rich with strange conceits such as compasses, ether, etc. only at hand for a scholar, not a poet. Johnson condemns these poets of being too much concerned with rhyme. Poetry, he believes, is what engages men’s hearts and opens up their eyes to the “softness of love” as in the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton.
Johnson then attacks the poetry from two different angles: mimetic and pragmatic. The Metaphysicals’ first failure, according to Johnson, could be found out through Aristotle’s criteria for true poetry – as imitative art: Metaphysical poetry is far from truth by copying neither “nature” nor “life”. He then approaches the poetry from another angle and that is its failure to affect the reader the way true poetry does. In other words, Johnson attempts to prove that Metaphysical poetry, though admirable, is not able to please the reader as a harmonious, unified, and beautiful piece of poetry, soothing the minds of the readers. In order to prove so, he questions the central anchor of Metaphysical poetry, namely “wit”:
He first confirms that the true value of their poetry only lies in the merit and extent of their wit. Even Dryden admitted that he and his contemporaries “fall below Donne in wit, but surpass in poetry”. But in order to attack this anchor, he wittily provides two different definitions of ‘wit’. According to Pope, wit is what “has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed”. Based on this definition, Metaphysical poets have failed to such wit, since they “just tried to get singular thought, and were careless of diction”, and language. Here Johnson wittily and boldly questions even Pope’s definition, and provides a new concept of ‘wit’, as being “at once natural and new”. Thus Metaphysical thoughts “are often new, but seldom natural”. In fact the unnaturalness of their poetry is what makes them unpleasing to the mind of the reader.
Having put the two previous definitions of ‘wit’ aside as not working in the case of metaphysical poets, Johnson then takes a step further to define their wit as an example of discordia concors; “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. He decries their roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles, this kind of wit they have “more than enough”.
Johnson may seem to condemn the pragmatic failure of metaphysical poetry as “not successful in representing or moving the affections”, but is actually leaving the ground for the values of their poetry but providing subjective definitions for pragmatic and mimetic values of true poetry:
If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
Johnson here knowingly emphasizes the significance of the reader in producing the final poem, and if by any chance Metaphysical conceits fail to prove “natural”, “just” or “obvious”, they may turn to be so in another time and place, as it really happened in the 20th century and the strange conceits and fragmentation of images seemed so natural to the shattered subjects (readers) of the post-war time. As Goethe remarks, “the unnatural, that too is natural,” and the metaphysical poets continue to be studied and revered for their intricacy and originality because of the very naturalness of images found in their once supposed far-fetched conceits. Such evaluations totally depend on the context, the understanding of the reader, and the time it is being read.
Johnson’s other criteria for wit was being “new” to the reader, but how could a conceit prove new if over-used? In fact, if a conceit or thought become a dead metaphor, it will lose all its magic and wit; and this factor is also dependant on the time and era in which it is read.
His ending, however, is that of a fair judgment and sometimes admiration rather than condemnation: “if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were often worth the carriage”. Apart from finding a kind of ‘truth’ in their poetry, he also confirms a number of valuable features in their poetry such as “acuteness”, “powers of reflection and comparison”, “genuine wit”, “useful knowledge”, and finally “more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment”.
Johnson’s view of Metaphysical poets, though not totally confirming, proved to be fair and influenced by his own era’s literary canon – which valued imitativeness and unity over fragmentation and metaphysical expressions. We should keep in mind that metaphysical poetry was a reaction against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, a courageous act even against the literary canon of their own time. And that is why the metaphysical poets adopted a style that seems so energetic, uneven, and rigorous and much appealing to the fed up 20th century reader.

20th Century Revival of Interest

The Metaphysicals were out of critical favor for the 18th and 19th centuries. Obviously, the Romantic poets who dealt so much with the ideals of ‘nature’, ‘simplicity’, and ‘originality’ and so attempted to achieve the language of ‘man speaking to men’ in their poetry, found little in this heavily intellectualized poetry, that according to Johnson makes “the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonder more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found’. At the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century, interest in this group picked up, and especially important was T.S. Eliot’s famous essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). Eliot himself was quite impressed by Sir Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th Century (1921). It is in fact Grierson who discovers the treasure hidden in their poetry, and having compared them with all other masterpieces of literature, he concludes that metaphysical poetry
lays stress on the right things—the survival, one might say the reaccentuation, of the metaphysical strain, … in contrast to the simpler imagery of classical poetry, of mediaeval Italian poetry; the more intellectual, less verbal, character of their wit compared with the conceits of the Elizabethans; the finer psychology of which their conceits are often the expression; their learned imagery; the argumentative, subtle evolution of their lyrics; above all the peculiar blend of passion and thought[1], feeling and ratiocination which is their greatest achievement…All these qualities are in the poetry of Donne, and Donne is the great master of English poetry in the seventeenth century.
Grierson also uses the term Metaphysical to refer to the Scholastic and philosophic aspects of the terminology. Nevertheless, this feature finds quite positive connotations in his usage, as giving depth and richness to the language and strength of thought. T.S. Eliot, quite under the influence of Grierson, gave value to this kind of poetry as celebrating association of sensibility, that was actually a restatement of that old Johnsonian discordia concors but with a different positive connotation as poetic ideal, and that made all the difference.

T. S. Eliot’s “Metaphysical Poets”

Quite impressed by Grierson’s new interest and insight into Metaphysical poems of 17th century, and especially Donne’s, Eliot picks up the material in a few of his articles, and specifically in “Metaphysical Poets” and examines it from a new angle. He calls the virgin realm of Metaphysical poetry “the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied”. Eliot therefore attempts to make a serious critical, or better say ‘analytical’, survey of the poetry in order to attract attention to its potentialities and the now-lost association of sensibility.
Eliot begins his article with a very good question quite untouched by the kind of abuse which has long shadowed the name and work of the metaphysical poets:
The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own time we should say a ‘movement’), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.
In order to define the school, he first categorizes the poetry of the so-called metaphysical poets into different classes, admitting that such term is too vague and general to cover the varied range of different and sometimes opposing styles and subject matters: the poetry of John Donne, according to Eliot, is “late Elizabethan, its feeling very close to that of Chapman”. The ‘courtly’ poetry of Jonson is Latinate and a different story. And finally there is “the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw” with more intrinsic differentiations.
Eliot’s next step is to find common grounds for such school of vast styles, discovering that what makes them distinguished from other kinds of poetry is “a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader”. He later elaborates more on the term and comes up with a definition of associated sensibility. “The language of these poets”, Eliot remarks, “is as a rule simple and pure“; but the structure of the sentences is “sometimes far from simple” which is due to their “fidelity to thought and feeling”, and not a vice. Comparing Donne with other poets of previous and later ages, Eliot realizes that the difference is not that of ‘degree’, but “between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet”. Eliot writes of Donne quite admiringly that
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. 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.
This amount of concentration and juxtaposition of discordant images is what T. S. Eliot as a man of 20th-century alienations and fragmentations would ideally admire – a consciousness of the fact that the life itself is a great paradox and inherently paradoxical; it is this paradox that manifests itself in the poetry of the Metaphysicals and can finally mingle thought and sense. This realization is of course not appealing to the taste of the Neoclassics – who still enjoyed the illusion of a harmonious world of accords.
Eliot’s article is in fact a response to Johnson’s remarks in “Life of Cowley”. In Eliot’s article, these two voices – of Augustans and of 20th century – make a dialogue with each other, at times approving and sometimes opposing one another. His strategy is a clever and well-planned one. In fact, Eliot claims that he is going to define the Metaphysical poets by their very failures previously shown by Johnson, and manages to transform them to a distinguished concept of paradoxical unity. Somewhere is the article Eliot writes,
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective ‘metaphysical’, consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable,… Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observed that ‘their attempts were always analytic’; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.
As seen in the above witty phrase, Eliot himself does not tend to wholly “reject the criticism of Johnson” – which is considered by Eliot to be “a dangerous person to disagree with”. Having left the Johnsonian canon in peace, Eliot manages to skip the danger of totally rejecting his pragmatic and still-perfect touchstones while cautiously developing his own point of discussion by giving depth and insight to the long ignored value of discordia concors.
Metaphysical Poetry Today
Eliot’s revaluation of Metaphysical poetry and of the association of thought and sense was a great influence on the poetry of twentieth century after him. Eliot himself was quite influenced by Donne’s conceits and far-fetched similes whose trace is easily found in his most outstanding poems, such as “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Interest peaked after Eliot with the New Critics School around mid-century, though it declined afterwards.
One of the main reasons for such revival, apart from the interest and taste of the time’s literary canon, could be traced in the revolutionary ideas of Freud and Darwin as well as what the terrors of the World War left on the minds of the people alienated both from themselves and nature. Meanwhile, Freud’s deconstruction of the unified image of the self as shattered into ego, id, and superego could be considered a main factor in increasing the value of the kind of poetry which is not only conscious of these fragmentations, but actually acts as an agent to gather the broken and shattered pieces of self and universe in a harsh and violent way, in hope for an ultimate resolution.
Years after the decline of the New Critics, with the emergence of a newer voice of Deconstructionism – pioneered by Derrida – interest in Metaphysical Poetry tempered off a bit. The deconstructionists no more believed in the old-fashioned stuff of both Johnson and Eliot; their new literary canon triumphed in questioning the tyranny of language as well as its free play of signs which fails to mean what it struggles to mean. Based on the new waves of critical theory there could be no essential superiority in a text over the other; all texts make but a deferred process of signification which fail to provide an essential truth about the world. Enslaved in numerous discourses and signification systems, the more they try to give us an illusion of unity and harmony the more paradoxical and vulnerable they become.
Thus there might be no essential difference or superiority between the text of Metaphycals and any other text. Nevertheless, Donne and Herbert seem to have survived the critical whirlwind and are still studied from newer perspectives: their texts have proved to be ideal of deconstructive analysis due to the kind of premature consciousness they show towards language and various discourses they apply. Donne’s poetry is quite self-deconstructive and self-consciously tends to celebrate a threshold – a kind of undecidability in the kind and definition of ‘love’ he attempts to reach in his Sonnet Sequences but paradoxically defines it by not finding a determined definition for it. Herbert’s language also provides a perfect and witty fusion of different discourses, among which faith and love are the most outstanding and getting into the critics’ nerves. Another interesting feature of Herbert’s poetry from a Post-structuralist point of view is the amount of discourses he has consciously applied in addressing and describing his God.

Conclusion

In a conclusion, I should remark that there is necessarily no question of wrongs and rights, or failures or success – as being debated by Johnson and Eliot and over ages – about Metaphysical poetry. Having lost all its distinctions of ‘physics’ or ‘metaphysics’, the word metaphysical has lost its magic and strangeness to the postmodern reader and has actually become an overused and therefore absurd signifier. Thanks to the deconstructive theories of Derrida, I find no more distinction between these binary oppositions and the text itself has rightly proved to be an amalgam of everything in the universe from spirit to matter and from nature to culture.
As explained before, the critical canon of the day can find any kind of text worth studying and therefore the Metaphysicals do not gain any superiority even over the meanest nursery rime. Though still fascinating and surprising, the contemporary reader is not much shocked – if not bored – with the metaphysical conceits. This reveals how much Eliot’s and Johnson’s time is over and how much out-fashioned – though still admiring and truthful – their literary canons have become.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets, of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some account.
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.
If the father of criticism [Aristotle] has rightly denominated poetry . . . an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.
Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.
If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.
If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledge to be just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he missed, to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.
But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Joseph Addison‘s criticism of Paradise Lost from The Spectator No. 267 is an attempt to characterize the work as a heroic poem. Addison considers the rules of heroic poetry as set down by Pére René Le Bossu. The rules state that an epic poem should have but one action, action meaning the plot, motivations and general motion of the poem. The action should be an entire action, with a beginning, middle and end; and it should be a great action, in that it should be of great significance. Addison uses comparisons of Paradise Lost with Iliad and Aenid both widely accepted as the two great heroic epic poems. By making comparisons to them, Addison makes a strong case for Paradise Lost to be included as a heroic poem.
* * *
Samuel Johnson takes minor issue with several of the weaknesses of Paradise Lost. The main flaw, in his opinion, is that the reader will not be given any information about Hell, Heaven or the basic plot line of the poem, as Johnson says, " . . . what we knew before, we cannot learn; what is not unexpected, cannot surprise." Johnson makes an assumption that the reader of Paradise Lost will be a devout Christian, but certainly, the poem can be appreciated by non-Christians, and by those who have devolved their faith. To the modern reader, Paradise Lost refreshes the biblical stories and makes them new. Paradise Lost does not suffer greatly from this flaw, as there are a minority of devout Christians in the world today.
Johnsonís other flaw is that the characters are un-worldly and cannot be related to by the reader. He feels that readers will not be able to identify with Adam, Eve and the preter-natural setting of the poem. This can only be seen as a minor flaw, if a flaw at all, since many stories take place in remote and fanciful settings. The great mythologies of Greece and China are so removed from the "real" world as to be more unbelievable than Paradise Lost, due to their displaced time and place. Moreover, a Christian reader will find Paradise Lost to be based on truth and not fiction, and thus, understandable.
The 20th century reader has become accustomed to science fiction mythologies like Star Trek and Star Warsówhich are more distant and unfathomable, perhaps, than Paradise Lost. Both of these fantasies have characters that are God-like and so alien to our way of thinking that they cannot be explained, merely accepted. The stories are about how human characters deal with their situations, and they are accessible because the morality is always based on human models. The reader of Paradise Lost can relate to its main characters because they are "related" to us in human terms. One may take exception to the character of God, but he is no more unfathomable than many of the characters of modern or ancient mythology. The reader can simply accept the rules of the story and suspend disbelief. Furthermore, Paradise Lost is an epic that is not so much about God as it is about Satan, Eve and Adam, so if there is any problem with the character of God, then it is a minor flaw at worst.
Response and criticism

Since Paradise Lost is based upon scripture, its significance in the Western canon has been thought by some to have lessened due to increasing secularism. This is not the general consensus, and even academics labelled as secular realize the merits of the work. In William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "voice of the devil" argues:
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
This statement summarizes what would become the most common interpretation of the work in the twentieth century. Some critics, including C. S. Lewis, and later Stanley Fish, reject this interpretation. Rather, such critics hold that the theology of Paradise Lost conforms to the passages of Scripture on which it is based.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw critical understanding of Milton's epic shift to a more political and philosophical focus. Rather than the Romantic conception of the Devil as hero, it is generally accepted that Satan is presented in terms that begin classically heroic, then diminish him until he is finally reduced to a dust-eating serpent unable even to control his own body. The political angle enters into consideration in the underlying friction between Satan's conservative, hierarchical view of the universe, and the contrasting "new way" of God and the Son of God as illustrated in Book III. In other words, in contemporary criticism the main thrust of the work becomes not the perfidy or heroism of Satan, but rather the tension between classical conservative "Old Testament" hierarchs (evidenced in Satan's worldview and even in that of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel), and "New Testament" revolutionaries (embodied in the Son of God, Adam, and Eve) who represent a new system of universal organization. This new order is based not in tradition, precedence, and unthinking habit, but on sincere and conscious acceptance of faith and on station chosen by ability and responsibility. Naturally, this interpretation makes much use of Milton's other works and his biography, grounding itself in his personal history as an English revolutionary and social critic.
Samuel Johnson praised the poem lavishly, but conceded that "None ever wished it longer than it is."
In Paul Stevens of University of Toronto's Milton's Satan, he claimed the Satan figure was one of the earliest examples of an anti-hero who does not submit to authority, but the actions are greatly based on his own arrogance and delusion. Stevens also claimed Paradise Lost was a story about Milton himself, who wrote in support of events that eventually led to English Civil War. That analysis was debuted in 2009 season of TVO's Best Lecturer series.

Critical Reception
Milton's poetic contemporaries were generally awed by his achievement. John Dryden, the leading poet of Restoration society, remarked that in Paradise Lost Milton had outdone any other poet of his time: “This man has cut us all out, and the ancients too,” he was reported to have said. Some scholars have verified Dryden's assessment, suggesting that the decline of the epic genre was the direct result of Milton's supreme achievement, making any further efforts in the epic impossible and superfluous. Although in many ways Milton was very much out of step with his contemporaries—religiously, politically, and artistically—his accomplishment in Paradise Lost was readily acknowledged, and his stature as a poet only increased through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, perhaps reaching a peak during the Romantic era. Romantic poets, including John Keats, William Blake, and Percy Shelley, celebrated Milton's genius and drew heavily from his influence. By the early twentieth century, however, some literary scholars began to question Milton's talent. Inconsistencies in the poem became a target for the criticism of such luminaries as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot. Milton's artistry and reputation was already established, however. Criticism of the later twentieth century falls generally into three broad schools: political readings of the work, stylistic readings, and thematic interpretations. Scholars take for granted that Paradise Lost reflects Milton's frustration with the failed Revolution. Joan Bennett has argued that Milton's depiction of Satan has strong connections to Charles I, linking his exploration of tyranny in Paradise Lost to his prose writings on the tyranny of the monarchy. More broadly, historian Christopher Hill has suggested that the Fall of Man was for Milton analogous to the collapse of the Commonwealth government, each constituting a failure of humanity to choose the right path. Criticism on the form of Paradise Lost has investigated Milton's innovations with the epic: Mary Ann Radzinowicz has detailed the poet's adaptation of psalm genres to the epic form, and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski has found that Milton appropriated a wide variety of genres to create the multiple voices of his characters, particularly in the difficult task of characterizing God. Among the studies of the major themes in the poem, scholarship on Milton and women has been dominant. Opinions on Milton's misogyny or feminism have varied widely, with some scholars declaring that Milton was obsessed with the inherent wickedness of women, and others finding Milton to be a true champion of women's worth. More nuanced readings of Paradise Lost have acknowledged Milton's insistence on women's subordination while also observing how the poem portrays women as independent humans with free will. Diane Kelsey McColley's study of Eve in Paradise Lost was among the first important studies attempting to strike a balance in the interpretation of Milton's depiction of the first woman. Other critics, such as Maureen Quilligan, have noted that much of the movement of the poem depends upon Eve and her use of free will. And, as Linda Gregerson has argued, Milton's narration of Eve's coming to selfhood makes Eve, and not Adam, the model for human subjectivity.
The first important criticism of Milton's epic was provided by his good friend the poet Andrew Marvell, in a commendatory poem published in 1674 along with the second edition of Paradise Lost. It invites comparison with later prose criticism by Addison (NAEL 8, 1.2485) and Samuel Johnson (NAEL 8, 1.2769).

Johnson’s “Life of Cowley”

Johnson’s description of [metaphysical wit] begins with introducing Metaphysical poets; he accuses them of being a bunch of showing off versifiers rather than true poets whose verses are mere celebration of their extreme knowledge of the world and scientific studies. In fact, Johnson and his contemporaries did not use the term “metaphysical” equal to “spiritual” or in opposition to “physical”; it rather connotes the philosophical and scientific aspect of the poetry rich with strange conceits such as compasses, ether, etc. only at hand for a scholar, not a poet. Johnson condemns these poets of being too much concerned with rhyme. Poetry, he believes, is what engages men’s hearts and opens up their eyes to the “softness of love” as in the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton.
Johnson then attacks the poetry from two different angles: mimetic and pragmatic. The Metaphysicals’ first failure, according to Johnson, could be found out through Aristotle’s criteria for true poetry – as imitative art: Metaphysical poetry is far from truth by copying neither “nature” nor “life”. He then approaches the poetry from another angle and that is its failure to affect the reader the way true poetry does. In other words, Johnson attempts to prove that Metaphysical poetry, though admirable, is not able to please the reader as a harmonious, unified, and beautiful piece of poetry, soothing the minds of the readers. In order to prove so, he questions the central anchor of Metaphysical poetry, namely “wit”:
He first confirms that the true value of their poetry only lies in the merit and extent of their wit. Even Dryden admitted that he and his contemporaries “fall below Donne in wit, but surpass in poetry”. But in order to attack this anchor, he wittily provides two different definitions of ‘wit’. According to Pope, wit is what “has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed”. Based on this definition, Metaphysical poets have failed to such wit, since they “just tried to get singular thought, and were careless of diction”, and language. Here Johnson wittily and boldly questions even Pope’s definition, and provides a new concept of ‘wit’, as being “at once natural and new”. Thus Metaphysical thoughts “are often new, but seldom natural”. In fact the unnaturalness of their poetry is what makes them unpleasing to the mind of the reader.
Having put the two previous definitions of ‘wit’ aside as not working in the case of metaphysical poets, Johnson then takes a step further to define their wit as an example of discordia concors; “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. He decries their roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles, this kind of wit they have “more than enough”.
Johnson may seem to condemn the pragmatic failure of metaphysical poetry as “not successful in representing or moving the affections”, but is actually leaving the ground for the values of their poetry but providing subjective definitions for pragmatic and mimetic values of true poetry:
If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
Johnson here knowingly emphasizes the significance of the reader in producing the final poem, and if by any chance Metaphysical conceits fail to prove “natural”, “just” or “obvious”, they may turn to be so in another time and place, as it really happened in the 20th century and the strange conceits and fragmentation of images seemed so natural to the shattered subjects (readers) of the post-war time. As Goethe remarks, “the unnatural, that too is natural,” and the metaphysical poets continue to be studied and revered for their intricacy and originality because of the very naturalness of images found in their once supposed far-fetched conceits. Such evaluations totally depend on the context, the understanding of the reader, and the time it is being read.
Johnson’s other criteria for wit was being “new” to the reader, but how could a conceit prove new if over-used? In fact, if a conceit or thought become a dead metaphor, it will lose all its magic and wit; and this factor is also dependant on the time and era in which it is read.
His ending, however, is that of a fair judgment and sometimes admiration rather than condemnation: “if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were often worth the carriage”. Apart from finding a kind of ‘truth’ in their poetry, he also confirms a number of valuable features in their poetry such as “acuteness”, “powers of reflection and comparison”, “genuine wit”, “useful knowledge”, and finally “more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment”.
Johnson’s view of Metaphysical poets, though not totally confirming, proved to be fair and influenced by his own era’s literary canon – which valued imitativeness and unity over fragmentation and metaphysical expressions. We should keep in mind that metaphysical poetry was a reaction against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, a courageous act even against the literary canon of their own time. And that is why the metaphysical poets adopted a style that seems so energetic, uneven, and rigorous and much appealing to the fed up 20th century reader.

T. S. Eliot’s “Metaphysical Poets”

Quite impressed by Grierson’s new interest and insight into Metaphysical poems of 17th century, and especially Donne’s, Eliot picks up the material in a few of his articles, and specifically in “Metaphysical Poets” and examines it from a new angle. He calls the virgin realm of Metaphysical poetry “the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied”. Eliot therefore attempts to make a serious critical, or better say ‘analytical’, survey of the poetry in order to attract attention to its potentialities and the now-lost association of sensibility.
Eliot begins his article with a very good question quite untouched by the kind of abuse which has long shadowed the name and work of the metaphysical poets:
The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own time we should say a ‘movement’), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.
In order to define the school, he first categorizes the poetry of the so-called metaphysical poets into different classes, admitting that such term is too vague and general to cover the varied range of different and sometimes opposing styles and subject matters: the poetry of John Donne, according to Eliot, is “late Elizabethan, its feeling very close to that of Chapman”. The ‘courtly’ poetry of Jonson is Latinate and a different story. And finally there is “the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw” with more intrinsic differentiations.
Eliot’s next step is to find common grounds for such school of vast styles, discovering that what makes them distinguished from other kinds of poetry is “a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader”. He later elaborates more on the term and comes up with a definition of associated sensibility. “The language of these poets”, Eliot remarks, “is as a rule simple and pure“; but the structure of the sentences is “sometimes far from simple” which is due to their “fidelity to thought and feeling”, and not a vice. Comparing Donne with other poets of previous and later ages, Eliot realizes that the difference is not that of ‘degree’, but “between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet”. Eliot writes of Donne quite admiringly that
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. 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.
This amount of concentration and juxtaposition of discordant images is what T. S. Eliot as a man of 20th-century alienations and fragmentations would ideally admire – a consciousness of the fact that the life itself is a great paradox and inherently paradoxical; it is this paradox that manifests itself in the poetry of the Metaphysicals and can finally mingle thought and sense. This realization is of course not appealing to the taste of the Neoclassics – who still enjoyed the illusion of a harmonious world of accords.
Eliot’s article is in fact a response to Johnson’s remarks in “Life of Cowley”. In Eliot’s article, these two voices – of Augustans and of 20th century – make a dialogue with each other, at times approving and sometimes opposing one another. His strategy is a clever and well-planned one. In fact, Eliot claims that he is going to define the Metaphysical poets by their very failures previously shown by Johnson, and manages to transform them to a distinguished concept of paradoxical unity. Somewhere is the article Eliot writes,
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective ‘metaphysical’, consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable,… Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observed that ‘their attempts were always analytic’; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.
As seen in the above witty phrase, Eliot himself does not tend to wholly “reject the criticism of Johnson” – which is considered by Eliot to be “a dangerous person to disagree with”. Having left the Johnsonian canon in peace, Eliot manages to skip the danger of totally rejecting his pragmatic and still-perfect touchstones while cautiously developing his own point of discussion by giving depth and insight to the long ignored value of discordia concors.

Metaphysical Poetry Today
Eliot’s revaluation of Metaphysical poetry and of the association of thought and sense was a great influence on the poetry of twentieth century after him. Eliot himself was quite influenced by Donne’s conceits and far-fetched similes whose trace is easily found in his most outstanding poems, such as “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Interest peaked after Eliot with the New Critics School around mid-century, though it declined afterwards.
One of the main reasons for such revival, apart from the interest and taste of the time’s literary canon, could be traced in the revolutionary ideas of Freud and Darwin as well as what the terrors of the World War left on the minds of the people alienated both from themselves and nature. Meanwhile, Freud’s deconstruction of the unified image of the self as shattered into ego, id, and superego could be considered a main factor in increasing the value of the kind of poetry which is not only conscious of these fragmentations, but actually acts as an agent to gather the broken and shattered pieces of self and universe in a harsh and violent way, in hope for an ultimate resolution.
Years after the decline of the New Critics, with the emergence of a newer voice of Deconstructionism – pioneered by Derrida – interest in Metaphysical Poetry tempered off a bit. The deconstructionists no more believed in the old-fashioned stuff of both Johnson and Eliot; their new literary canon triumphed in questioning the tyranny of language as well as its free play of signs which fails to mean what it struggles to mean. Based on the new waves of critical theory there could be no essential superiority in a text over the other; all texts make but a deferred process of signification which fail to provide an essential truth about the world. Enslaved in numerous discourses and signification systems, the more they try to give us an illusion of unity and harmony the more paradoxical and vulnerable they become.
Thus there might be no essential difference or superiority between the text of Metaphycals and any other text. Nevertheless, Donne and Herbert seem to have survived the critical whirlwind and are still studied from newer perspectives: their texts have proved to be ideal of deconstructive analysis due to the kind of premature consciousness they show towards language and various discourses they apply. Donne’s poetry is quite self-deconstructive and self-consciously tends to celebrate a threshold – a kind of undecidability in the kind and definition of ‘love’ he attempts to reach in his Sonnet Sequences but paradoxically defines it by not finding a determined definition for it. Herbert’s language also provides a perfect and witty fusion of different discourses, among which faith and love are the most outstanding and getting into the critics’ nerves. Another interesting feature of Herbert’s poetry from a Post-structuralist point of view is the amount of discourses he has consciously applied in addressing and describing his God.

Conclusion

In a conclusion, I should remark that there is necessarily no question of wrongs and rights, or failures or success – as being debated by Johnson and Eliot and over ages – about Metaphysical poetry. Having lost all its distinctions of ‘physics’ or ‘metaphysics’, the word metaphysical has lost its magic and strangeness to the postmodern reader and has actually become an overused and therefore absurd signifier. Thanks to the deconstructive theories of Derrida, I find no more distinction between these binary oppositions and the text itself has rightly proved to be an amalgam of everything in the universe from spirit to matter and from nature to culture.
As explained before, the critical canon of the day can find any kind of text worth studying and therefore the Metaphysicals do not gain any superiority even over the meanest nursery rime. Though still fascinating and surprising, the contemporary reader is not much shocked – if not bored – with the metaphysical conceits. This reveals how much Eliot’s and Johnson’s time is over and how much out-fashioned – though still admiring and truthful – their literary canons have become ■