Break of Day

John Donne’s literary context reflects more what came after his era, long after, than what came before it. It would cause Donne significant confusion, even consternation to find out he was in fact the most prominent of the British Metaphysical poets, primarily because the term itself was not coined until nearly two centuries after his death. When Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), an essayist and minor poet known to contemporary readers largely for his work producing the first dictionary of the English language, coined the term, not surprising given his penchant (obsession?) for definitions, he was most likely referring to how these Elizabethan poets—among them Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crawshaw—tackled ambitious, grandly metaphysical topics about the nature of love and the concept of death, the place of the soul, the integrity of morality itself, and supremely the role of God (most of the metaphysical poets eventually joined the ministry). These poets were hyper-intellectuals, their poetry often dense and intimidating in their arguments (their most direct descendant in American literature would be the first-generation Puritan poets, most notably the Congregationalist apologist Edward Taylor).

Since Dr. Johnson coined it, the term “metaphysical” has come to suggest the poets’ collective affinity for highly eccentric poetic lines, their willingness to use jarring and often unsettling figures of speech (as for instance here when Donne suggests the dawn has no tongue), their interest in expanding the concept of the speaker of a poem, their deep learning and their allusions to the literatures of Antiquity, their often cutting wit and withering sense of honesty when dealing with humanity’s foibles, and ultimately their fascination with rhythm itself and their experiments with nontraditional beats. Interestingly, Dr. Johnson, a staid and quite conservative literary critic, actually used the term “metaphysical” derisively to suggest the pretentiousness and careless crafting of Donne and his ilk. Only later, more than two more centuries, the self-described Modernists poets, most notably Nobelist T. S. Eliot, used the term “metaphysical” not as a put-down but rather to suggest the ambitious reach of these poets’ intellect and their unapologetically bold experiments in upcycling poetry itself into radical forms that poets would not fully appreciate for nearly 400 years.