The Metaphysical Conceit and the Metaphysical Poets

 

En literatura inglesa no se suele emplear el término "barroco" (baroque). El estilo que aquí llamaríamos barroco o exageradamente complicado y alambicado lo llaman allí "metaphysical": the metaphysical poets, los poetas metafísicos o conceptistas; el "concepto" o juego de ideas conceptista o barroco es el "metaphysical conceit":

 

 Conceit,  an elaborate metaphor comparing two apparently dissimilar objects or emotions, often with an effect of shock or surprise. The *Petrarchan conceit, much imitated by Elizabethan sonneteers and both used and parodied by Shakespeare, usually evoked the qualities of the disdainful mistress and the devoted lover, often in highly exaggerated terms; the *Metaphysical conceit, as used by *Donne and his followers, applied wit and ingenuity to, in the words of  Dr. *Johnson, 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike' e.g. Donne's famous comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.

 

Metaphysical  Poets. Poets generally grouped under the label include *Donne (who is regarded as founder of the 'school'), George *Herbert, *Crashaw, *Henry Vaughan, *Marvell and *Traherne, together with lesser figures like *Benlowes, *Herbert of Cherbury, Henry *King, Abraham *Cowley and *Cleveland. The label was first used (disparagingly) by Dr. *Johnson in his 'Life of Cowley' (written in 1777). *Dryden had complained that Donne 'affects the metaphysics', perplexing the minds of the fair sex with 'nice speculations of philosophy'. Earlier still William *Drummond censored poetic innovators who employed 'Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities'. The label is misleading, since none of these poets is seriously interested in metaphysics (except Herbert of Cherbury, , and even he excludes the interest from his poetry). Further, these poets have in reality little in common: the features their work is generally taken to display are sustained dialectic, paradox, novelty, incongruity, 'muscular' rhythms, giving the effect of a 'speaking voice', and the use of 'conceits', or comparisons in which tenor and vehicle can be related only by ingenious pseudo-logic.

With the new taste for clarity and the impatience with figurative language that prevailed after the *Restoration, their reputation dwindled. Their revival was delayed until after the First World War when the revaluation of metaphysical poetry, and the related downgrading of *Romanticism and *Milton, was the major feature of the rewriting of English history  in the first half of the 20th cent. Key documents in the revival were H. J. C. *Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) and T. S. *Eliot's essay 'Metaphysical Poets', which first appeared as a review of Grierson's collection (TLS, 20 Oct. 1921). According to Eliot these poets had the advantage of writing at a time when thought and feeling were closely fused, before the *'dissociation of sensibility' set in about the time of Milton. Their virtues of difficulty and togh newness were felt to relate them closely to the modernists—*Pound, *Yeats, and Eliot himself.

(From The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature)