Why Is Marvell Called A Metaphysical Poet?

Born in 1621, Andrew Marvell was an enigmatic figure in English history.


He had the uncanny ability to ally himself, if you will, with whomever was in power--royalist and anti-royalist alike. That is, you couldn't quite put your finger on him and say that his fidelities were entirely this or that.


One thing about him that intrigues me is how literary critics describe much of his poetry as metaphysical. What do they mean by that? I know that several of Marvell's poems speak of reality, carpe diem, and the fleeting nature of life. Is that what critics are referring to?

Though his poetry can be challenging, I must say that once you do get through it, you feel as if you have achieved something. (Please don't laugh at me, though I know that sounds cheesy) There's so much to be unpacked. For example, "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Garden" seem to touch on how life is everything and nothing all at once.

What are your thoughts? And what are some of your favorite Marvellian poems?

The "metaphysical poetry" label was created by Samuel Johnson and it stuck despite the fact that the poets grouped under the name really share very little in common with each other. Their main similarity is that they wrote lyric poetry in a way that Johnson didn't like, with extended metaphors and treatment of abstracts. He used metaphysical to emphasize that the poets were too concerned with being clever when they should have been writing good poetry instead.

http://www.online-literature.com/sam...-poets-vol1/1/

Read Johnson's Life of Cowley if you want a detailed account of the first use of "metaphysical poet."

OrphanPip,

Do you enjoy reading Marvell's poetry? That is, how do his poems speak to you?

I would not have thought To His Coy Mistress was very metaphysical. Like you said, it was a carpe diem poem. It says to his girlfriend, 'You are young and beautiful now, but soon we will both be dead so let's have sex now.' It does not sound very metaphysical to me.

I've always found the term "interesting". I have seen the same poets labeled as "Mannerists." They certainly share certain characteristics with the artists of the movement known as Mannerism.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

I've always found the term "interesting". I have seen the same poets labeled as "Mannerists." They certainly share certain characteristics with the artists of the movement known as Mannerism.

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Well Marino from what I remember while reading Italian verse, was as "conceited" as any of the so called English poets of the time. The Eliotic argument seems to hold that the grounds of language were so common in Renaissance England that they could express any sentiment specifically and basically in a shared language.They note that by Donne's coming to fruition the language was exhausted and it was necessary to reinvent a sort of way to express popular emotions. That argument has been sort of generally accepted, even though criticized, by the academy for almost a century. I see no reason why it cannot be applied to Italian or French works of the time too.

Lets say Petrarch created the language of the renaissance, through mixing new style with Ovid. What happens when those two poets become boring? where do we turn then? I guess that is what mannerism is. In a sense in the art world Michelangelo was just too big. Nobody could get around him, or any of the other renaissance greats. The forms they invented were exhausted, and new ideas became almost necessary to revitalize - despite the fact that they just didn't come.

We see such an exhausting of form in numerous other cultures and fields. The problem is, do we regard the metaphysical poets as basically redundant literary masturbation, or as inventors and creative genius.

I will admit I do not personally like them. It's like reading Byron in comparison to Wordsworth almost. One seems a hyperbole of the former.

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Originally Posted by JBI

I will admit I do not personally like them. It's like reading Byron in comparison to Wordsworth almost. One seems a hyperbole of the former.

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Hello, you seem a clever fellow from what I have seen so far of you on the forum, but here I must disagree. Wordsworth and Byron share the similarity of a great fondness for nature, they almost deify it in contrast to humanity. But that is their only true similarity. In terms of style Wordsworth is a romantic in the strains of Goethe and Chateaubriand, his world is unified by a perception of harmony. Byron is a satirist, his world is unified by the ridiculous. Don Juan and The Prelude are works which follow two utterly different linegages, Byron works as a conscious descendant of Catullus and Petronious and Juvenal and Marshal and the roman satiric tradition, also influenced by the 17th and 18th century english satirists and rakes - Wordsworth lacks the same historical sense as Byron, in many ways Wordsworth is the beginning of a new patriarcal tree of poetry which would burst and bloom through the victorian era. Byron on the other hand is the last of the satirists of the old school, he is an anachronistic poet who knows that he is the end of the lineage.

I am not sure exactly what you mean by one seems a hyperbole of the former? When in truth they represent two utterly different worlds.

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Originally Posted by kev67

I would not have thought To His Coy Mistress was very metaphysical. Like you said, it was a carpe diem poem. It says to his girlfriend, 'You are young and beautiful now, but soon we will both be dead so let's have sex now.' It does not sound very metaphysical to me.

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I'd say that the contemplation of mortality as an alternative to the immediacy of the carnal was just about as metaphysical as you can get.

Lets say Petrarch created the language of the renaissance, through mixing new style with Ovid. What happens when those two poets become boring? where do we turn then? I guess that is what mannerism is. In a sense in the art world Michelangelo was just too big. Nobody could get around him, or any of the other renaissance greats. The forms they invented were exhausted, and new ideas became almost necessary to revitalize - despite the fact that they just didn't come.

Mannerism is indeed a reaction against the Renaissance... and especially the perceived "naturalism" of the Renaissance. I personally prefer the "naturalism" of Petrarch, Dante, or Shakespeare... but I quite like Donne, Traherne, and Vaughan (although the latter two are such unique "outsiders" I can't really see terming them as Metaphysical or Mannerist Poets).

As for Mannerism in the visual arts... yes, I will agree that Michelangelo was simply too big... but then again Michelangelo's late works are Mannerist in nature themselves. Mannerism was more of a reaction to the Renaissance... especially the "classicism" and naturalism of the High Renaissance... as a whole. The Renaissance was the single greatest paradigm shift in the history of Western Art and many subsequent artists struggled in coming to terms with all that had happened. In this sense, Mannerism was not unlike the current period of art... as artists struggle to come to terms with Modernism (the greatest shift in the visual arts since the Renaissance) and such giants as Picasso, Matisse, Beckmann, Van Gogh, Monet, and Degas. Mannerism was also an intentional rejection of the values of the Renaissance by artists traumatized by the "Italian Wars" and finally the sack and pillage of Rome by Charles V. Artists employed elements and a style intentionally contrary to the naturalism or "classicism" of the High Renaissance.

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Originally Posted by J.Steerforth

Hello, you seem a clever fellow from what I have seen so far of you on the forum, but here I must disagree. Wordsworth and Byron share the similarity of a great fondness for nature, they almost deify it in contrast to humanity. But that is their only true similarity. In terms of style Wordsworth is a romantic in the strains of Goethe and Chateaubriand, his world is unified by a perception of harmony. Byron is a satirist, his world is unified by the ridiculous. Don Juan and The Prelude are works which follow two utterly different linegages, Byron works as a conscious descendant of Catullus and Petronious and Juvenal and Marshal and the roman satiric tradition, also influenced by the 17th and 18th century english satirists and rakes - Wordsworth lacks the same historical sense as Byron, in many ways Wordsworth is the beginning of a new patriarcal tree of poetry which would burst and bloom through the victorian era. Byron on the other hand is the last of the satirists of the old school, he is an anachronistic poet who knows that he is the end of the lineage.

I am not sure exactly what you mean by one seems a hyperbole of the former? When in truth they represent two utterly different worlds.

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Glad you read the introduction in the Norton English or whatever. You miss my points. If anything Byron is seen as the quintessential Romantic until the 20th century - not Wordsworth. Byron is the father of Byronic poetry, not Wordsworth. The persona of Wordsworth is found in hyperbole in the long poems (with the exception of much of Don Juan) within Byron. The poet open to feeling is how most people at the time would have seen Byron, not the ironic naturalist you pretend him to be. He was seen as a revolutionary in the sense of a Baudelaire, or a Pushkin, not a satirist in the vein of Pope.

Basically the problem is the conflation between Poet Byron and person Byron. The Person seems far bigger than the Poet - adulterous, incestuous, violent, sentimental, over-the-top, etc. As apposed to cultural critic. He was not Matthew Arnold.

He is also not anachronistic, in the sense that he kicked off much of Victorian verse even more-so than Wordsworth. If you recall, Wordsworth pretty much is retired by 1807, Coleridge too - Shelley, Keats, Byron - they write later, but die too quite early. What is Victorian verse then? Well, the first noticeable difference is the centralization of Country. The next is the presence of the idea of poet as emotionally disturbed, violent almost. We also have the new presence of the persona - Wordsworth for all he is worth, only has one persona really in his poems - he has characters, but the poems' tones are virtually all the same as the prelude or Ode.

Byron has a wider range of melancholic or hyperbolic personae. He is the poet of the continent, who can influence Russia as much as Greece.

That is what I mean - what do you do when you have all that in one generation - in the renaissance in rapid succession you have Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, etc. What do you do if you are a young poet at the turning point of the 17th century? What can you write, being faced with such a presence?

Well, I will answer in two ways - one, you do what Donne did - you write a completely self-absorbed kind of poetry. That can be seen in his poem "The bait" as compared to the other two conversation poems. Or, you do what Milton did - you start off imitating, mostly Spenser and Italian works, and then you create a sort of summary of the age in one single work - Paradise Lost - which is very much the end of the renaissance in Europe. It seems to tie everything together, despite also belonging to the new generation, meaning the neo-classical - it creates, as much as it summarizes, in the sense that Mozart is creating on Haydn.

The "problem" with Byron the poet is that he has no singular, identifiable voice the way Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge have. He was certainly a poet open to feeling, with plenty of melancholia and melodrama in his poems, but he was also certainly a satirist. His earliest works, especially English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, is a clear imitation of Pope, and he certainly felt that Wordsworth and Coleridge were a degradation of the classical satire of Pope and Dryden. After that, he seemed to branch off in several directions, including somewhat non-descript lyric poetry, socially caricatured tales, supernatural/apocalyptic pieces, long meditative pieces on country and philosophy (Childe Harold), closet dramas, and actual dramas, before going back to his satiric roots with Beppo and, eventually, Don Juan. If Byron stands out as a satirist to us it's probably because none of the other romantics were at all, and it seems bizarrely out of place in that age. Similarly, Byron, while certainly open to writing about emotion, rarely did it with the kind of personalized rapture of Wordsworth and Keats; there's usually some kind of distance there, if even through the notion of fiction.

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Originally Posted by JBI

Glad you read the introduction in the Norton English or whatever. You miss my
Basically the problem is the conflation between Poet Byron and person Byron. The Person seems far bigger than the Poet - adulterous, incestuous, violent, sentimental, over-the-top, etc. As apposed to cultural critic. He was not Matthew Arnold.

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This is quite similar to what the great Dwight Mcdonald said about Byron in Masscult and Midcult. Macdonald said Byron differed from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope: "His reputation was based on the man-- or what the public conceived to be the man--rather than his work.
His poems were not taken as artistic objects in themselves but as expressions of their creator's personality." The public, Macdonald says, was fascinated not by the real Byron but a "contrived persona." Macdonald wrote his famous essay in 1960, but in the twenty-first century we might consider Byron to be a rock star.

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That is what I mean - what do you do when you have all that in one generation - in the renaissance in rapid succession you have Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, etc. What do you do if you are a young poet at the turning point of the 17th century? What can you write, being faced with such a presence?

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The question has been asked, and perhaps partially answered in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence.

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Well, I will answer in two ways - one, you do what Donne did - you write a completely self-absorbed kind of poetry

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Well, no.
A metaphysical poet, by definition, could not be "self- absorbed."(See "dissociation of sensibility " below.) When reading poetry written in the pre-Romantic era, we have to leave our twenty-first century assumptions on the shelf and remember that the "I" of the poem is seldom the poet himself.

Now, back to our originally scheduled program, which was a question about metaphysical poets and Andrew Marvell:


According to T.S. Eliot, at the end of the 17th century there occurred a "dissociation of sensibility," meaning that between the time of Donne and the beginning of Tennyson and Browning, something irreparable happened to poetry: "It is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet."

In other words, until the age of the Romantic poets, thought and feeling were not separate. This is how The Oxford Companion to English Literature sums it up:

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Eliot suggests that by an increasing refinement of language, accompanied by an increasing crudity of feeling (Gray is cruder than Marvell), thought became separated from feeling. The metaphysical poets[. . .] 'possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. . .a thought to Donne was an experience;it modified his sensibility.'

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Marvell fits squarely in the "pre-dissociation" era chronologically, and his poems themselves also share characteristics of Metaphysical poets. From the Oxford Companion again: "His oblique, ironic, and finally enigmatic way of treating what are quite convention poetic materials (as in "To His Coy Mistress") has especially intrigued the modern mind."

Yes, there are a small percentage of insane people and they make the largest percentage of noise. What separation? Thought and feeling? LOL

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

This is quite similar to what the great Dwight Mcdonald said about Byron in Masscult and Midcult. Macdonald said Byron differed from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope: "His reputation was based on the man-- or what the public conceived to be the man--rather than his work. His poems were not taken as artistic objects in themselves but as expressions of their creator's personality." The public, Macdonald says, was fascinated not by the real Byron but a "contrived persona." Macdonald wrote his famous essay in 1960, but in the twenty-first century we might consider Byron to be a rock star.

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I think there's little doubt that Byron's public, mass popularity--his rock-star status--was inextricably connected to his public persona, and the public's assumption (not always entirely incorrect) that Byron's poetry was autobiographical. On the other hand, that doesn't explain the popularity of, eg, his verse tales, which were extremely popular and not autobiographical at all, and it certainly doesn't explain his popularity amongst other poets, much less composers, both inside and outside of England. Would Goethe, Shelley, Swinburne, Scott, et al. have loved Byron solely because of his public persona? I highly doubt it. What about Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi? Clearly Byron captured something that was quite profound to a great number of romantic writers and composers, especially abroad.

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

Well, no.
A metaphysical poet, by definition, could not be "self- absorbed."(See "dissociation of sensibility " below.) When reading poetry written in the pre-Romantic era, we have to leave our twenty-first century assumptions on the shelf and remember that the "I" of the poem is seldom the poet himself.

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Let's do remember, however, that the term "metaphysical" is a post-hoc label, and while it does capture some of what many poets of this time have in common, like a lot of labels it tends to obscure differences as much as it highlights similarities. Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Traherne, etc. are all quite, quite different in spite of what few similarities they have in common. As to being "self-absorbed," I think JBI meant it another way, mainly that Donne was self-absorbed in regards to being clever, and to showing off in the most flamboyant way his cleverness. I don't think he meant "self-absorbed" in the same way that Confessional Poets are "self-absorbed" (ie, autobiographical). Although, even that is only partly true, as Donne undoubtedly did write about events in his life, but it's equally true that these events were assimilated into expressions that had more to do with the complexity of expression and thought, especially metaphorically and syntactically. That's where the dissociation comes from.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Let's do remember, however, that the term "metaphysical" is a post-hoc label, and while it does capture some of what many poets of this time have in common, like a lot of labels it tends to obscure differences as much as it highlights similarities. Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Traherne, etc. are all quite, quite different in spite of what few similarities they have in common.

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I want to address this point rather specifically. Elliott's scholarship first seen in his Cambridge lectures and those given at John Hopkins then finally put out in full in "The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry," which is simply a printing of the transcriptions of those lectures, does a fine job of illuminating this whole topic. It is rather impossible to summarize easily the key points of the work, but it is pertinent to paraphrase Eliot's definition of Metaphysical Poetry which in his first lecture he fully admits is difficult to define. He then goes on to discuss at length some of the problems with connecting not just Donne to Marvel and Cowely, but also this group to the Italian poets surrounding Dante and Marino and the French poets surrounding LaFrouge and Baudelaire. These problems include ones of style and content that spans a wide range, and the necessity of a definition which encompasses them all but not all of poetry. Ultimately, he comes to the idea that the common thread between these poets that there poetry at its most metaphysical converts the idea into the reality, or that the idea is expressed through the experience and thus the image of the poem is taken to the limit of its thought. If I had Eliot's work before me now, I would perhaps be able to give a better account of this idea which is most important to his conception of metaphysical poetry; however, since I do not have his work before me I will point out a phrases he uses to refer to the techniques of metaphysical poetry that rings in my ears, "words made flesh." I would perhaps amend his phrase though and say instead thoughts made flesh. It is this mode of writing which Eliot uses to connect Marvel to the group of Metaphysical poets, and his work on the subject is worth finding to better understand his point.

As for the rest of the conversation, I am not sure what the Romantics have to do with the original question, but then again the Romantics seem to be everywhere these days so I will nod to your side debate with only a quizzical grin.