paper_1 assignment

Name :- Aditi Vala

MA Sem :- 1

Batch :- 2020-2022

Paper no.:- 101 [ Literature of the Elizabethan and Restoration period ]

Topic :- Biography of Metaphysical Poets

Roll no. :- 01

Enrollment no. :-3069206420200018

Email id :- valaaditi203@gmail.com

Submitted to :- Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MKBU

Biography of Metaphysical Poets :

Introduction :- 

                      The term “metaphysical poets” was first used by Samuel Johnson.17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse.Their poetry is the metaphysical conceit, a reliance on intellectual wit, learned and sensuous imagery, and subtle argument. Metaphysical poetry investigates the relation between rational, logical argument on the one hand and intuition or “mysticism” on the other, often depicted with sensuous detail. Reacting against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and rigorous. Metaphysical poetry uses of ordinary speech mixed with metaphors, puns and paradoxes.   Abstruse terminologies often drawn from science or law are used in abundance. Often poems are presented in the form of an argument. In love poetry, the metaphysical poets often draw on ideas from Renaissance Neo-Platonism – for instance, to show the relationship between the soul and body and the union of lovers' souls.  The poems often aim at a degree of psychological realism when referring to emotions. 

                Metaphysical poets created a new trend in history of English literature.17th-century poets, usually John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Andrew Marvell and a few others.

 

Metaphysical poets :

                      :  John Donne :

John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England.Born into a Roman Catholic family.John Donne was the most influential metaphysical poet. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. His personal relationship with The spirituality is at the center of most of his work, and the psychological analysis and sexual realism of his work marked a dramatic departure from traditional, genteel verse.The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. His early work, collected in Satires and in Songs and Sonnets, was released in an era of religious oppression. Holy Sonnets contains many of Donne’s most enduring poems.

       

                 Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew's day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority.Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets.

                     In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting in Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne's father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife died in 1617 at thirty-three years old shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life.

                    In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral. In his later years, Donne's writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox.

                     :  George Herbert :

George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593, the fifth son of an eminent Welsh family. Herbert left for Westminster School at age ten, and went on to become one of three to win scholarships to Trinity College, Cambridge.Herbert received two degrees :a BA in 1613 and an MA in 1616.He recognized as "a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist.” Throughout his life, he wrote religious poems characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits. In 1633 all of Herbert's poems were published in The Temple: Sacred poems and private ejaculations.In 1624 and 1625 Herbert was elected as a representative to Parliament. He resigned as orator in 1627, married Jane Danvers in 1629, and took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630. Herbert spent the rest of his life as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury. 

                     Herbert's practical manual to country parsons, A Priest to the Temple (1652), exhibits the intelligent devotion he showed to his parishoners. On his deathbed, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to his close friend, Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems only if he thought they might do good to "any dejected poor soul." He died of consumption in 1633 at the age of forty and the book was published in the same year. The Temple met with enormous popular acclaim—; it was reprinted twenty times by 1680.

Herbert's poems have been characterized by a deep religious devotion, linguistic precision, metrical agility, and ingenious use of conceit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Herbert's diction that "Nothing can be more pure, manly, or unaffected," and he is ranked with Donne as one of the great metaphysical poets.

                                    Herbert's poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets.3 They include almost every known form of song and poem, but they also reflect Herbert's concern with speech--conversational, persuasive, proverbial. Carefully arranged in related sequences, the poems explore and celebrate the ways of God's love as Herbert discovered them within the fluctuations of his own experience.2 Because Herbert is as much an ecclesiastical as a religious poet, one would not expect him to make much appeal to an age as secular as our own; but it has not proved so. All sorts of readers have responded to his quiet intensity; and the opinion has even been voiced that he has, for readers of the late twentieth century, displaced Donne as the supreme Metaphysical poet.

                      : Andrew Marvell :

 

Andrew Marvell 's born in 31 March 1621 . Marvell was educated at Hull grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a B.A. in 1639. After working as a tutor and traveling extensively, Marvell served with John Milton in government posts and may have been instrumental in helping Milton avoid severe punishment, even a death sentence, after the Restoration. Marvell was, for a time, a supporter of King Charles I, but he then changed his allegiance to Oliver Cromwell and the commonwealth government. He was an English Metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678.Andrew Marvell is considered one of the metaphysical poets. Like John Donne, he wrote poems that relied on metaphysical conceits, the witty, elaborate comparisons that characterize metaphysical poetry. Also like Donne, many of his poems debate spiritual issues and the transitory nature of life. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton.His poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, The Mower's Song and the country house poem Upon Appleton House. Marvell's most celebrated lyric, To His Coy Mistress, 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. Other works incorporate topical satire and religious themes.

              Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He only belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's execution, which took place 30 January 1649.He only belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's execution, which took place 30 January 1649.

               He wrote “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650), and from 1653 to 1657 he was a tutor to Cromwell’s ward William Dutton. In 1657 he became assistant to John Milton as Latin secretary in the foreign office. “The First Anniversary” (1655) and “On the Death of O.C.” (1659) showed his continued and growing admiration for Cromwell. In 1659 he was elected member of Parliament for Hull, an office he held until his death, serving skillfully and effectively.After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Marvell turned to political verse satires—the most notable was The Last Instructions to a Painter, against Lord Clarendon, Charles’s lord chancellor—and prose political satire, notably The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73). Marvell is also said to have interceded on behalf of Milton to have him freed from prison in 1660. He wrote a commendatory poem for the second edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. His political writings favoured the toleration of religious dissent and attacked the abuse of monarchical power.The first publication of his poems in 1681 resulted from a manuscript volume she found among his effects.

                       While Marvell’s political reputation has faded and his reputation as a satirist is on a par with others of his time, his small body of lyric poems, first recommended in the 19th century by Charles Lamb, has since appealed to many readers, and in the 20th century he came to be considered one of the most notable poets of his century. Marvell was eclectic: his “To His Coy Mistress” is a classic of Metaphysical poetry; the Cromwell odes are the work of a classicist; his attitudes are sometimes those of the elegant Cavalier poets; and his nature poems resemble those of the Puritan Platonists. In “To His Coy Mistress,” which is one of the most famous poems in the English language.His pastoral poems, including Upon Appleton House achieve originality and a unique tone through his reworking and subversion of the pastoral genre.

                      : Conclusion :

                       

Metaphysical poets created a new trend in history of English literature.These poems have been created in such a way that one must have enough knowledge to get the actual meaning. Metaphysical Poets made use of everyday speech, intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. The creator of metaphysical poetry John Donne along with his followers is successful not only in that Period but also in the modern age. Metaphysical poetry takes an important place in the history of English literature for its unique versatility and it is popular among thousand of peoples till now.

                        : Refrence :

• Bald, Robert Cecil (1970). John Donne, a Life. Oxford University Press.

• Gardner, Helen, The Metaphysical Poets. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957)

• “George Herbert-Biography.” George Herbert-Biography. N.p., 2007. Web. 11 Dec. 2015. <http://www.georgeherbert.org/life/bio.html>.

•  "Marvell, Andrew (MRVL633A)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.

                       _________________