The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

nineteenth-century poetry, and T. S. Eliot’s
critical interest was closely related to the
‘modern’ qualities of his own poetry in
that period.
As Grierson pointed out, ‘to call these
poets “the school of Donne” or “metaphysical”
poets may easily mislead if one
takes either phrase in too full a sense’.
Direct imitation of Donne is not the main
feature of most metaphysical poetry, nor
is it ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of being
philosophical. It is essentially the poetry
of ‘wit’, in the seventeenth-century
sense of wit as the capacity to recognize
similarity in disparity, and to combine
playfulness with seriousness. Thus,
the metaphysical CONCEIT, of which the
best-known example is Donne’s comparison
of two lovers to a pair of compasses
(in ‘A valediction forbidding mourning’)
turns upon a surprising and ingenious
analogy between apparently unrelated
areas of experience. It is produced not by
the arbitrariness of free association or the
irrational process of the unconscious
mind, but by the alertness of a mind
accustomed to think in terms of correspondences
and to reason by analogy. In
this respect the ‘metaphysic’ underlying
metaphysical poetry is a traditional but by
then obsolescent conception of an ordered
universe in which correspondences were
held to exist between all planes of being.
The metaphysical conceit, of which
Dr Johnson said that ‘the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence
together’, characteristically forms part of
an ingeniously paradoxical argument in
which immediacy of feeling is apprehended
through conceptual analogies
rather than in sensory images.
Other notable features of metaphysical
poetry include a dramatic sense of
situation, a plain rather than ornate diction,
an elliptical and condensed syntax,
a strong tension between the symmetries
Metre 141
of metrical form and the asymmetrical
rhythms of speech and thought, and a
capacity for abrupt shifts of tone. Not
all metaphysical poetry possesses these
qualities in the same degree; on the other
hand, they are also found in the Jacobean
drama, and in the prose of the period. The
attempt to produce a consistent or exclusive
definition of metaphysical poetry is
therefore less profitable than a flexible
understanding which obscures neither the
distinctions between individual poets nor
the properties of ‘wit’ common to the
period as a whole. See also CONCEIT, WIT.
See T. S. Eliot, ‘The metaphysical
poets’ in Selected Essays
(1961); F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (1962);
G. Williamson, The Donne Tradition
(1961); Richard Willmott, Metaphysical
Poetry (2002); Frances Austin, The
Language of Metaphysical Poets (1992).
DJP
Metre If we are presented with a
sequence of events, we tend to perceive
them rhythmically: they seem to fall into
patterns, whatever their actual temporal
relationships might be. This is true of
linguistic experiences. Hearing English
sentences, we feel that the most prominent
syllables recur at about the same
time-interval, regardless of the number of
intervening light syllables. VERSE is
metered as well as rhythmical: there is a
metrical superstructure over the rhythm.
An additional level of phonetic organization
gathers the rhythmical groups into
metrical units-lines. In prose, the rhythm
continues sequentially as long as the
text lasts, but verse is chopped up into
regularly repeated metrical units. (It is a
vexing question whether there can be
a one-line poem.)
Metre emerges from the numerical
control of rhythm: it entails counting.
Classical French verse counts syllables;