Metaphysical Poetry

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and mind)
· The exaltation of wit, which in the 17th century meant a nimbleness of thought; a sense of fancy (imagination of a fantastic or whimsical nature); and originality in figures of speech
· Abstruse terminology often drawn from science or law
· Often poems are presented in the form of an argument
· In love poetry, the metaphysical poets often draw on ideas from Renaissance Neo-Platonism to show the relationship between the soul and body and the union of lovers’ souls
· They also try to show a psychological realism when describing the tensions of love.
Neo-Platonism: This comes from the doctrines of Plato who argues that since the physical world is merely an imperfect imitation of the divine archetype, the poet representing the world is imitating an imitation, and thus creating something that stood at least two removes from the truth.
This argument is answered in at least two ways:
By Aristotle: Because the poet imitates general rather than particular ideas, his work is more philosophical than history.
By the Neo-Platonists: This group suggests that the poet is attempting to imitate not the world, but the live archetype itself.
During the Renaissance, Plato got mingled with Christian and Eastern thought. Through this mingling we get
Platonic love (which is a lot more than you probably think it means). For Plato, beauty proceeds in a series of steps from the love of one beautiful body to that of two, to the love of physical beauty in general, and ultimately to the love of that beauty “not in the likeness of a face or hands or in the forms of speech or knowledge or animal or particular thing in time or place, but beauty absolute, separate, simple, everlasting—the source and cause of all that perishing beauty of all other things.”
A thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility... the ordinary man... falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do ...