The first professor of English at Aberdeen University and later successor to Saintsbury at Edinburgh, Sir Herbert Grierson (1866–1960) did much to stimulate interest in the metaphysical poets with his two-volume edition of Donne and other works.
Extract from the Introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1921), pp. xxix–xxxi, xxxvii–xxxviii, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
It was among the younger generation of Courtiers that Donne found the warmest admirers of his paradoxical and sensual audacities as a love-poet, as it was the divines who looked to Laud and the Court for Anglican doctrine and discipline who revered his memory, enshrined by the pious Izaak Walton, as of a divine poet and preacher. The ‘metaphysicals’ were all on the King's side. Even Andrew Marvell was neither Puritan nor Republican. ‘Men ought to have trusted God,’ was his final judgement on the Rebellion, ‘they ought to have trusted the King with the whole matter’ [RT I, p. 135]. They were on the side of the King, for they were on the side of the humanities; and the Puritan rebellion, whatever the indirect constitutional results, was in itself and at the moment a fanatical upheaval, successful because it also threw up the John Zizka of his age; its triumph was the triumph of Crom-well's sword.
[Quotes the ‘Horatian Ode,’ ll. 115–20.]
To call these poets the ‘school of Donne’ or ‘metaphysical’ poets may easily mislead if one takes either phrase in too full a sense. It is not only that they show little of Donne's subtlety of mind or ‘hydroptic, immoderate thirst of human learning,’ but they want, what gives its interest to this subtle and fantastic misapplication of learning,—the complexity of mood, the range of personal feeling which lends such fullness of life to Donne's strange and troubled poetry. His followers, amorous and courtly, or pious and ecclesiastical, move in a more rarefied atmosphere; their poetry is much more truly ‘abstract’ than Donne's, the witty and fantastic elaboration of one or two common moods, of compliment, passion, devotion, penitence. It is very rarely that one can detect a deep personal note in the delightful love-songs with which the whole period abounds from Carew to Dryden. The collected work of none of them would give such an impression of a real history behind it, a history of many experiences and moods, as Donne's Songs and Sonnets and the Elegies, and, as one must still believe, the sonnets of Shakespeare record. Like the Elizabethan sonneteers they all dress and redress the same theme in much the same manner, though the manner is not quite the Elizabethan, nor the theme. Song has superseded the sonnet, and the passion of which they sing has lost most of the Petrarchian, chivalrous strain, and become in a very definite meaning of the words, ‘simple and sensuous.’ And if the religious poets are rather more individual and personal, the personal note is less intense, troubled and complex than in Donne's Divine Poems; the individual is more merged in the Christian, Catholic or Anglican.
But the strongest personality of all is Andrew Marvell. Apart from Milton he is the most interesting personality between Donne and Dryden, and at his very best a finer poet than either. Most of his descriptive poems lie a little outside my beat, though I have claimed The Garden as metaphysical,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade [ll. 47–8],
and I might have claimed The Nymph and the Faun had space permitted. But his few love poems and his few devotional pieces are perfect exponents of all the ‘metaphysical’ qualities—passionate, paradoxical argument, touched with humour and learned imagery:
As lines, so loves oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet;
[‘Definition of Love,’ ll. 25–8]
and above all the sudden soar of passion in bold and felicitous image, in clangorous lines:
[Quotes ‘To His Coy Mistress,’ ll. 21–32.]
These lines seem to me the very roof and crown of the metaphysical love lyric, at once fantastic and passionate. Donne is weightier, more complex, more suggestive of subtle and profound reaches of feeling, but he has not one single passage of the same length that combines all the distinctive qualities of the kind, in thought, in phrasing, in feeling, in music; and Rochester's most passionate lines are essentially simpler, less metaphysical.
When wearied with a world of woe,
[‘Absent from thee,’ l. 9]
might have been written by Burns with some difference. The best things of Donne and Marvell could only have been composed—except, as an imitative tour de force, like [Sir William] Watson's
Bid me no more to other eyes—1
in the seventeenth century. But in that century there were so many poets who could sing, at least occasionally, in the same strain. Of all those whom Professor Saintsbury's ardent and catholic but discriminating taste has collected there is none who has not written too much indifferent verse, but none who has not written one or two songs showing the same fine blend of passion and paradox and music. The ‘metaphysicals’ of the seventeenth century combined two things, both soon to pass away, the fantastic dialectics of mediaeval love poetry and the ‘simple, sensuous’ strain which they caught from the classics—soul and body lightly yoked and glad to run and soar together in the winged chariot of Pegasus. Modern love poetry has too often sacrificed both to sentiment.
1 Line 1 of ‘The Protest,’ published in the Daily Chronicle, 1 September 1894, reprinted in Odes and Other Poems, 1894.