The Metaphysicals and the Baroque
Wylie Sypher
THE
lodestone of modem cnticiSm of poetry, as well as of the
practice of poetry itself, is the passage in Coleridge's
Biographia
Literaria
suggesting that the poetic imagination balances or reconciles
opposite or discordant qualities. Coleridge's emphasis upon an imagi–
native
discordia concors,
the opposition of impulses within a poem,
has stimulated a criticism that is always seeking out or wondering
at complexities, ambiguities, tensions, and the shifts
in
tone associated
with irony.
If
a sense of these is not evoked from the reader, the poem
is suspected of approaching the oversimplified, the naive, the senti–
mental, the pretty.
The supposition has been, since
T.
S. Eliot became a force in
verse and the evaluation of verse, that this tortuous and even tortured
progress is akin to the "metaphysical" poetry of the seventeenth
century, and of John Donne in particular. Many poets like Ransom,
MacLeish, Tate, Frost, Edith Sitwell, and Eliot himself have been
identified with the "metaphysical." The reputation o£ Donne, in fact,
has for a time overborne that of Milton, who
is
at the moment
recovering a little from the slurs of T. S. Eliot and those who have
complained that Milton writes an artificial language and is forever
in danger of tumbling from his poetic "elevation." Roused by Eliot's
remarks upon Milton's verse, Sir Herbert Grierson, Charles Williams,
E. M. W. Tillyard, and C. S. Lewis have had the daring to protest.
The tacit opposition into which Donne and Milton have been thrown,
and the simultaneous expansion of Donne's and shrinkage of Milton's
reputations, more and more seem to have been a critical aberration.
C. S. Lewis, in particular, has raised issues that bear upon today's
poetry and criticism of poetry. A reaction against Donne seems to
be
under way in criticism, though not (yet?) in verse itself.
What seems not to have been stressed is that Donne and Milton
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