Will Dockery wrote:
> David J. wrote:
>
> > If anyone knows of a URL for T. S. Eliot's essay on the "Metaphysical
> > Poets", or if anyone has a copy he can send me somehow, please either post
> > here or e-mail to me.
> > And don't answer: "Are you too lazy to go to the library?"!
> > --
> > Thanks.
> > David.
> In the meantime, here's T.S. Eliot writing about the Metaphysical Poets, and writing some interesting sentences:
>
> http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/eliot_metaphysical_poets.htm
>
> "By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied..."
>
> "Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw..." -A pretty ood listing of who Eliot considers the main members of the M.P. group.
>
> "...It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically "metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
>
> On a round ball
> A workman that hath copies by, can lay
> An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
> And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
> So doth each teare,
> Which thee doth weare,
> A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,
> Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
> This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
>
> If you can dig that you are quite loyal.
>
> :)
>
> "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone..." -Donne
>
> "Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind..."
>
> This is great, and worth a post all alone:
>
> "The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes...." -T.S. Eliot
>
> That's about it for now.

Very cool, nice read....

Zod wrote:

> Will Dockery wrote:
>> David J. wrote:
>>
>> > If anyone knows of a URL for T. S. Eliot's essay on the "Metaphysical
>> > Poets", or if anyone has a copy he can send me somehow, please either post
>> > here or e-mail to me.
>> > And don't answer: "Are you too lazy to go to the library?"!
>> > --
>> > Thanks.
>> > David.
>> In the meantime, here's T.S. Eliot writing about the Metaphysical Poets, and writing some interesting sentences:
>>
>> http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/eliot_metaphysical_poets.htm
>>
>> "By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied..."
>>
>> "Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw..." -A pretty ood listing of who Eliot considers the main members of the M.P. group.
>>
>> "...It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically "metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
>>
>> On a round ball
>> A workman that hath copies by, can lay
>> An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
>> And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
>> So doth each teare,
>> Which thee doth weare,
>> A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,
>> Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
>> This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
>>
>> If you can dig that you are quite loyal.
>>
>> :)
>>
>> "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone..." -Donne
>>
>> "Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind..."
>>
>> This is great, and worth a post all alone:
>>
>> "The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes...." -T.S. Eliot
>>
>> That's about it for now.

> Very cool, nice read....

Good evening, Zod, agreed.

🙂

Zod wrote:

> Will Dockery wrote:
>> David J. wrote:
>>
>> > If anyone knows of a URL for T. S. Eliot's essay on the "Metaphysical
>> > Poets", or if anyone has a copy he can send me somehow, please either post
>> > here or e-mail to me.
>> > And don't answer: "Are you too lazy to go to the library?"!
>> > --
>> > Thanks.
>> > David.
>> In the meantime, here's T.S. Eliot writing about the Metaphysical Poets, and writing some interesting sentences:
>>
>> http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/eliot_metaphysical_poets.htm
>>
>> "By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied..."
>>
>> "Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw..." -A pretty ood listing of who Eliot considers the main members of the M.P. group.
>>
>> "...It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically "metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
>>
>> On a round ball
>> A workman that hath copies by, can lay
>> An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
>> And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
>> So doth each teare,
>> Which thee doth weare,
>> A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,
>> Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
>> This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
>>
>> If you can dig that you are quite loyal.
>>
>> :)
>>
>> "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone..." -Donne
>>
>> "Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind..."
>>
>> This is great, and worth a post all alone:
>>
>> "The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes...." -T.S. Eliot
>>
>> That's about it for now.

> Very cool, nice read....

Good evening, agreed.