An Analysis Of Selected Characteristics In Metaphysical Poetry

A comprehensive paper on T.S Eliot's essay, "The Metaphysical Poets". This paper analyses Eliot's essay also providing alternate perspectives. Subsequently the essay also traces the origin of the school of "metaphysical poets", the idea of it and the evolution of this literary school in relation to present times.

“Physics, Metaphysics, and Religion in Lyric Poetry” examines the complex relationship between that seventeenth century poetry loosely defined as “Metaphysical” (especially the work of John Donne) and its investment in questions about the nature of physics, ontology, and human religious experience. It considers the way in which the unique characteristics of Metaphysical verse—its compression, startling images, paradoxes, and dialectical format—made it particularly well-suited for working through intellectual, philosophical, and religious questions.

Metaphysical poetry was a literary movement which took place from around 1600 to 1650. Shakespeare was one of the main influence of these artists. It was not a school : they did not define themselves as metaphysical poets. There are common points between them, but they do not claim to be part of one single school. There is also no definitive list of metaphysical poets, but one is always present : John Donne. Metaphysical poetry is therefore a blurry term designating an heterogeneous class of artists, which sometimes only applies to a certain part of an artist's corpus of works.

Academia Letters, 2021

The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, especially evident in mid-century Latin American literature. To understand the way in which this mystical application is suffused with secularities, I turn to poetry, and specifically, a new notion I term "mysticality." And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano's principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that was broader than reason itself, a concept that "slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing oil, a drop of happiness" (Filosofía 15). This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one's intuition. Zambrano's philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred concepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet's inner sanctum); the function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy. Here, I offer Zambrano's definition of poiesis itself: It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation-poetry into its different species, and philosophy (61).[i] The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order explore such limits. As such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning[ii]: the ability to allow for the unsaid, "the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm's orbit lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence" (El sueño 102). The poet neither renounces nor searches, because he has" (Filosofía 17).[iii] The poet is responsible for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility (18). Their creation is an ongoing process of "poetic being" approaching full self-consciousness. There is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen

IIUC Studies, 2009

Abstract: The language, used by Metaphysical poets is highly evocative and infused with multi-dimensional meaning. It demands comprehension and sensitivity on the part of the reader to grasp out the inner aspect of a poem. Love, being a universal feeling gets expression ...

2021

There is common preservation that the term "metaphysical" is utilized to portray a gathering of seventeenth-century English artists, who wrote in a specific way affected by, or in response to, works by John Donne. The chose not many related as such are known as the metaphysical artists, and their works marked as "metaphysical poetry". Precisely what the term metaphysical refers to, or what does it define this aspect requires some explanation. As indicated by the Cambridge Dictionary, metaphysical poetry identifies with the piece of theory that is tied in with getting presence and information"; while theory then again, is "the affective reason in viewing things with the aspect of the present reality and presence. Subsequently, by suggestion, however, till this day there is no fully effective definition of metaphysical poetry, as it requires a variety of characteristics which will be presented in this paper along with the brief history behind the metaphys...

2012

2005

Since Romanticism, the dominant movement of poetry has consisted of a continual thrust to transcend the defining physical limitations of the art, from Wordsworth's jettisoning of "poetic" diction in favor of a language like that of a "man speaking to men," through the transcendence of meter in the free verse revolution and of the line in projective verse. The most recent stages of the process have been the transcendence of voice in collage poetics and of syntax in fractal or disjunctive poetics, which now includes its own space for transcendence within repeated breaks in the language plane itself.

In recent years several scholars have wrestled with the term “poetic thought,” suggesting in various ways there is something distinctive about the nature of meaning as it occurs/unfolds through poetry. In this paper I suggest, in part following the lead of Simon Jarvis, that one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for exploring this idea lies in a consideration of poetic works through the lens of Heidegger’s early phenomenology. Specifically, I argue that one of the keys to understanding poetic thought lies in a flaw within Heidegger’s ontological divisions between substances, equipment and Dasein, as presented in Being and Time (1927). Through an analysis of three poems by Frank O'Hara, I argue poetry that examines and represents the physical world presents a problem for Heidegger when he suggests equipment in the world must necessarily “withdraw” in order for us to engage with it authentically. To address this, the term environment-at-hand is introduced to describe the relationship between artists and the surrounding environments used for their work. Poetic thought is here conceived as the point where poetry and phenomenology collide; where poetry reflects and enacts the fact that humans are inherently engaged meaning-makers. In this way poetry does not only show us new ways of looking at the world, which it surely does, but it can help us understand the nature of being itself.

study on some of the metaphysical poets