ABSTRACT
Most early seventeenth-century poets wrote with an excess of manner over matter. When the eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson wrote of a ‘race’ of Metaphysical poets in his ‘Life of Cowley’, he drew his illustrations of their style from Abraham Cowley and John Donne and once from John Cleveland. In a general way, of course, it is obviously true that Metaphysical poets express religious or love melancholy. One interesting form of self-absorption or self-recollection makes an appearance with the Metaphysicals for the first time: the poet’s childhood appears as a visionary figure of the unsocialized self. ‘Metaphysical’ characterized the wit of the earlier seventeenth century as insubstantial and out of touch with human nature. Metaphysical’ is a particularly fuzzy term. After all, if the poets picked up by it depend so much on point of view as the change from Johnson’s selection to the twentieth-century one suggests, questions will arise about definition.
