The Reputation of Native versus Foreign "Metaphysical Poets" in England

Abstract

As everyone knows, one peculiarity of the last years of the Renaissance was their overmastering desire for refinement, elegance, and elaborationa desire which made itself felt in all the arts as well as in social intercourse, and which in literature eventually ran into such an unrestrained, rank luxuriance of stylistic devices, vocabulary, conceits, allusions, and so on that many writers since have called it a 'common blight' and a 'plague' infecting the poetry and prose of all the cultured nations of Europe. In England the Euphuists, the Spenserians, and the so-called Metaphysical Poets were the most contaminated by it, but in their own day and for a short time after they nevertheless achieved considerable popularity. Of these three groups the course of the reputation of the Metaphysical Poets is especially interesting, reflecting as it does the changing taste of succeeding periods, as seen in the widespread, though not universal, reaction against these men during the age of Pope, and in the very general revival of liking during the last third of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth1. Inasmuch, however, as these English poets had other properties than their stylistic ones, and inasmuch as their revival was probably due to these (such as lyricism, intensity, intellectual content, rhythmical experimentation, a flavour of the recherche and the antique) rather than to their fashion of exaggerated wit, it may be useful to verify such conclusions by comparing the attitude of the English public toward certain continental poets who were known to them for similar eccentricities of expression, in order to see whether the same revival took place. Critics from the eighteenth century onward to the twentieth have mentioned three foreign writers, from three different nations, as most resembling the English Metaphysicals, sometimes claiming the relation-