Metaphysical Poetry

Context
1. Poets
  1. John Donne
    1. Born into a Roman Catholic family.
    2. After his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison, Donne succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church.
    3. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children.
    4. In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral (an Anglica Church). In his later years, Donne’s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death.
  2. Henry Vaughan
    1. Educated at Oxford and studied law in London. Similar to John Donne.
    2. Vaughan himself said that the "spiritual quickening and the gift of gracious feeling" that he experienced derived from poet George Herbert.
    3. Vaughan suffered a prolonged sickness that inflicted much pain. Vaughan interprets this experience to be an encounter with death that alerted him to a "misspent youth".
  3. George Herbert
    1. He was noted for unfailing care for his parishioners, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill, and providing food and clothing for those in need.
    2. Henry Vaughan said of him "a most glorious saint and seer".
    3. Herbert himself, in a letter to Nicholas Ferrar, said of his writings, "they are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master".
    4. Worked in Parliament for 2 years, before becoming a priest.
  4. Thomas Carew
    1. He greatly admired the poems of John Donne, whom he called king of “the universal monarchy of wit” in his elegy on Donne
    2. A Cavalier poet, so he was loyal to the King during the Civil War.
  5. Anne Bradstreet
    1. Tte daughter of Thomas Dudley, the Puritan Earl of Lincoln.
    2. She wrote her poems while rearing eight children, functioning as a hostess, and performing other domestic duties.
  6. Richard Lovelace
    1. Royalist whose lyrics and career made him the prototype of the perfect Cavalier.
  7. Anderw Marvell
    1. He criticised and lampooned both the court and Parliament in a lot of his poetry, some published in his lifetime.
  8. Katherine Philips
    1. She founded The Society of Friendship (1651-1661) which was a semi-literary correspondence circle composed primarily of women, though men were also involved.
    2. Fully half of Philips's poetry is dedicated to Anne Owen, (aka Lucasia); the two seem to have been lovers in an emotional, if not in a physical, sense for about ten years.
Themes
1. Religion
  1. Damnation and Salvation
    1. The World
    2. Death be Not Proud
    3. The Collar
  2. Forgiveness
    1. Love (III)
    2. At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners
  3. (Un)Worthiness
    1. Love (III)
    2. Unprofitablness
    3. A Hymn to God the Father
    4. Redemption
    5. The Pulley
2. Attitudes towards Women
  1. Lustfulness of Men (Objectification of Women)
    1. The Flea
    2. Elegy to His Mistress Going to Bed
    3. The Sun Rising
    4. The Apparition
    5. To a Lady that Desired I would Love Her
    6. Song: To Lucasta Going to the Wars
    7. To His Coy Mistress
  2. Unfaithfulness
    1. Song (Go Catch a Falling Star)
    2. Elegy to His Mistress Sitting by a Riverside: An Eddy
    3. Woman's Constancy
  3. Neoplatonic Love
    1. The Good Morrow
    2. A Valediction of Weeping
    3. Song (Ask me no More)
3. Love
  1. Neoplatonic Love
    1. Elegy to His Mistress Going to Bed
    2. To my Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship
    3. Orinda to Lucasia
    4. A Dialogue of Friendship Multiplied
  2. The absence of Love
    1. The Definition of Love
    2. A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day
  3. Lustfulness
  4. Friendship
Influences
1. Philosophical Ideas
  1. Plato's Cave Allegory
  2. Theory of Forms
    1. The real world is outside the one we live in. This real world is unchanging and eternal. It is the world of ideas not of sense, where there are perfect forms of the things we know on earth. Plato's world of forms contains fixed truths which are absolutely true for all time, people and place.
2. Science/Astronomy
  1. Ptolemaic model of the Universe
    1. The idea that the Earth is the centre of the Universe and that everything resolves around it.
  2. Heliocentric model of the Universe
    1. The Sun is in the centre of the Universe and everything revolves around it.
3. Discovery and exploration
  1. The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th century until the end of the 18th century) is a term for the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and was the beginning of globalization.
4. Elizabethan England
  1. Restoration Period
    1. Restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660. It marked the return of Charles II as king (1660–85) following the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The bishops were restored to Parliament, which established a strict Anglican orthodoxy.
    2. The Catholics were the persecuted minority.
  2. The Great Debasement
    1. The amount of precious metal in gold and silver coins reduced and in some cases replaced entirely with cheaper base metals such as copper. So, the value of the coin came from the embossing of the monarch's face onto the coin.
  3. The Civil War
    1. A series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists over, principally, the manner of England's government.

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