'Comparisons are Odious'? Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne

Abstract

This article seeks to locate the metaphysical conceit in its original contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arts of discourse: rhetorical elocutio and inventio, and the language of place logic that supplies material for poetic comparisons. I begin by analysing the cultural and aesthetic assumptions that underpin two foundational responses to the metaphysicals, those of Hazlitt and Johnson. Both discussions depend upon a model of literary topography that classifies the metaphysical conceit as stylistically and affectively remote: it is associated with foreign poetic tastes and recondite analogies too distant from the reader’s horizons of expectation. I then turn to early modern taxonomies, which have no place for the term conceit, but instead deal with exotic similitudes through the figure of catachresis, a stylistic transgression consisting of ‘far-fetched, incongruous speeches’ (Prideaux). Catachresis is evidence of a mind ‘that must wander into the confines’ (Hoskins) and gravitates towards remote corners of the poetic map. The topographical dimensions of early modern comparisons also emerge in Renaissance logic manuals, which cast the process of invention as a journey of exploration to distant topoi or places. I conclude by mapping the discourse of far-fetched comparisons on to Donne’s valediction poems. These lyrics work by imagining the two lovers in different places, and in extreme states of feeling. Catachresis, characterized by Hoskins as ‘somewhat more desperate then a Metaphore’, uniquely captures this register of grief and longing, but also provides a temporary fiction of connectivity, as the lovers’ minds converge in the remote logical places that constitute Donne’s conceits.