Metaphysical poetry has a unique place in English Literature. It is totally different form the poetry of all periods except the Modern age and some Elizabethan poets such as Shakespeare, Middleton, Chapman and Jonson etc. There is a difference between these Elizabethan and the Metaphysical poets in the sense that the Elizabethan poetry lacks scientific images while the Metaphysical poetry is full of these images.

The Metaphysical poetry paves the way for the modernity in the 20th century.

The Modern poets like Eliot, Yeats and many others adopted the Metaphysical style and so, Metaphysical and Modern poetry works in the same manner.

It touches our heart through intellect while Elizabethan, Romantic and Victorian poetry appeals to our heart directly.

Poetry of English literature can be divided into two categories, Musical and Intellectual.




Metaphysical and Modern poetry is intellectual as it appeals to us through reason and Elizabethan, Romantic and Victorian poetry is musical because it directly appeals to our heart without reason.

The Elizabethan age is the age of “music”. This is why F.R. Leavis says, “In an age when music is for all classes an important part of daily life, when poets are along with so large proportion of their fellow-country men, musicians, write their lyrics to be sung, Donne uses in complete dissociation from music a stanza from that proclaims the union of poetry and music.”  This view represents not only the quality of Donne but reflects the entire Metaphysical poetry.

In Metaphysical poetry feeling and thought are unified which makes it less musical. In Elizabethan lyrical poetry music is for music’s sake while in Metaphysical poetry music is for the sake of meaning.

 Metaphysical poetry is remarkably famous for its speaking tone and abrupt, dramatic opening in which the poet addresses his beloved and God unconventionally.

As the Metaphysically are unconventional in their love for God and beloved, their language is simple and colloquial. This quality is completely absent from Milton, Dryden and Johnson etc. this is why Eliot says, “While the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.” The best examples of language’s simplicity and of speaking tone are in Donne’s Cannonization”:

     “For God sake! Hold you tongue/ And let me love,” and in “Good Morrow,”

       “I wonder by my troch what thou and I

         Did till me loved?”


 
The unification of thought and feeling makes Metaphysical poetry logical. This interaction of thought and feeling is only possible when one’s mind works in the logical way. The Metaphysical poets interact their thoughts and feelings. This interaction is absent from the Victorian poets like Tennyson and Browning. So Eliot calls them “reflective poets” and rightly says: “They think but do not feel their thoughts as immediately as the odour of a rose.”  Metaphysical poetry is “felt thought”. The poet transmutes his feeling and experience into logic. This is why Metaphysical poetry is logical or intellectual and not sensuous like that of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge etc.

The logic in Metaphysical poetry is especially the result of the poet’s peculiar use of conceit which is the characteristic feature of this age. Helen Gardner says, “All comparisons discover likeness in things unlike, a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness being strongly conscious of unlikeness. A conceit is like a spark made by stones striking together. After the flash stones are just two stones. Metaphysical poetry abounds in such flashes.”