ABSTRACT
The lyric manner of Donne certainly is in marked contrast with that of all preceding poets and of most of his early contemporaries, and the note of reaction in it is unmistakable. It was immediately recognized as a novelty, and, in that age of catholic tastes, it was very generally admired. Protests, however, were not wanting. Drummond, in a passage in a letter which seems to be directed against the new movement which starts from Donne, writes: ‘[Poesy] subsisteth by herself, and after one demeanour and continuance her beauty appeareth to all ages. In vain have some men of late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits and those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some thousand years.’ Donne’s poetry, it cannot be denied, is denuded of most of the habits and ornaments which up till then had been considered de rigueur for polite verse. Whether the occasional ingenuity and remoteness of his imaginative turns deserve the appellation of ‘metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities’ might to-day be made a matter of question. Dr Johnson, indeed, using what appears to have been the traditional epithet-it is used also by Dryden in the same connection-calls the manner ‘metaphysical’; and, by a heroical exercise of the time-fallacy (for the lyrical work of Donne and of Cowley was separated by a full quarter-century) , ranks the poetry of Cowley under the same head. As a matter of fact Cowley’s verse is, loosely speaking, ‘metaphysical’; that is to say, it is far-fetched, abstract, and intellectualized. Cowley represents both the culmination and the incipient degeneracy of the school of wit and ingenuity in poetry. He is the reputed father of the bastard Pindarique ode, a species which represents the galvanic extravagance of individualism, already potential in Donne, and also the dissolution of organic poetic form, just as the conceits and the abstract manner of
advance over the purely conventional and Italianate conceits of the early lyric school, or over the more elaborate and conscious prettiness of Marinists like Drummond. What marks the new poetic style is an intensification of conceit, weighting it with symbolism. Applied to more serious conceptions the tendency results in the religious symbolism of Crashaw and Herbert. Donne is a thoroughly original spirit and a great innovator; he is thoughtful, indirect, and strange; he nurses his fancies, lives with them, and broods over them so much that they are still modern in all their distinction and ardour, in spite of the strangeness of their apparel-a strangeness no greater perhaps than that of some modern poets, like Browning, as the apparel of their verse will appear two hundred years hence. Ingenuity, allusiveness, the evocation of remote images and of analogies that startle the mind into a more than half acquiescence, phantoms of deep thoughts, and emotions half-sophisticated and wholly intense: these things mark the poetry of original and taking, but it lacks simple thoughts; it does not sing. It is ascetic and sometimes austere; the sense of sin, the staple of contemporary tragedy, enters the lyric with Donne. He is all for terseness and meaning; and his versification accords with his thought and is equally elliptical.
