Metaphysical Context Flashcards
Katherine Philips
- Also known as “the Matchless Orinda”.
- In younger life wrote verse within a circle of friends appreciating French romances and Cavalier plays.
- Philips broke with Presbyterian traditions to become a member of the Church of England, admiring the King and his policy.
- Philips was known for dramatizing platonic love.
- She expressed her views as a royalist.
- Debated whether she was a lesbian, or just sought to express the value of close friendships.
John Donne
- Born to Catholic parents, but renounced his faith for Protestantism in 1615.
- He married in 1601, and became a priest in 1615, and then a dean at St Paul’s in 1621.
- His tone of poems changed, from witty and sexual early on, to pious, and then sombre. This is due to the death of his wife and friends, and also struggles with illness.
George Herbert
- Priest in the CofE.
- Wrote all poems of religious themes.
Thomas Carew
- Among the Cavalier group of Caroline poets.
- Gave his own witty spin to Petrarchan lyric/Italian sonnet form.
- Greatly admired Donne, calling him the king of “universal monarchy of wit”.
- Such followers as Richard Lovelace and Andrew Marvell.
Anne Bradstreet
- Early English poet but from North America.
- Puritan.
- Mother of 8 children.
- The primary roles of women in Puritan society were to be wives and mothers, and provide. Bradstreet does not appear to resent her husband for leaving her with these duties, often absent, and instead seems to truly miss her husband.
Richard Lovelace
- From a distinguished military and legal family, his father died as a soldier fighting Spain.
- Cavalier and royalist.
- Imprisoned during the English civil war.
Andrew Marvell
- Wrote many poems in praise of Cromwell, contrasting many poet’s royalist attitudes.
- Marvell is said to have adhered to the established stylized forms of his contemporary neoclassical tradition. These include the carpe diem lyric tradition which also forms the basis of his famous lyric “To His Coy Mistress”.
- “To His Coy Mistress”, Marvell’s most celebrated poem, combines an old poetic conceit (the persuasion of the speaker’s lover by means of a carpe diem philosophy) with Marvell’s typically vibrant imagery and easy command of rhyming couplets.
Henry Vaughan
- Royalist, thought to have served in the royalist army.
- Some of his poems are thought to show however how he has contempt for many forms of authority. Many of his poems reflect a feeling of decline, likely as a consequence of post-war monarchy/society.
Metaphysical poetry/conceits
Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem.
The first word “Meta” means beyond. So metaphysical means beyond physical, beyond the normal and ordinary - deals with deep and profound subjects like spirituality, religion, etc.
Cavalier poets
Cavalier poet, any of a group of English gentlemen poets, called Cavaliers because of their loyalty to Charles I (1625–49) during the English Civil Wars, as opposed to Roundheads, who supported Parliament. They were also cavaliers in their style of life and counted the writing of polished and elegant lyrics as only one of their many accomplishments as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits. The term embraces Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew.
Short, fluent, graceful lyrics on love and dalliance, and a carpe diem (“seize the day”) philosophy (“Gather ye rose-buds while ye may”) are typical of the Cavalier style. Besides writing love lyrics addressed to mistresses with fanciful names like Anthea, Althea, Lucasta, or Amarantha, the Cavaliers sometimes wrote of war, honour, and their duty to the king. Sometimes they deftly combined all these themes as in Richard Lovelace’s well-known poem, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,”
Issues of the time which commonly feature in metaphysical poetry
- Exploration of love, religion, faith, and the nature of humanity.
- Science and religion.
- Astronomy: the Copernican system, shifting from a geocentric to a heliocentric understanding of the universe.
- Chemistry/new chemicals
Literary terms
Conceit: It usually sets up an analogy between one entity’s spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem. For example, in the following stanzas from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” John Donne compares two lovers’ souls to a draftsman’s compass.
Extended Metaphor: a literary term that refers to a long metaphorical comparison that can last an entire poem.
Innuendo: an allusive or oblique remark or hint, typically a suggestive or disparaging one.
Intertextuality: a feature of a text that references another text.
Petrarchan sonnet (as appears in some of Carew’s poems)
Also known as the Italian sonnet.
The sonnet is split in two stanzas: the “octave” or “octet” (of 8 lines) and the “sestet” (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines.
These sonnets can feature The Volta, where there is a sudden turn of focus in the sonnet.
Through his sonnets, Petrarch made popular the theme of inaccessible love conceits which compared a woman’s features to objects.
iambic pentameter
“Iambic” refers to an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-bove).
iambs mirror the rhythm of a heart beating — da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
“Pentameter” indicates a line of five “feet”.
Sonnets
- A 14 line structure
- It has a regular rhyme scheme
- It follows a regular rhythm (also called the metre)
