HELEN GARDNER, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga HELEN GARDNER y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! From Helen Gardner’s classical “Introduction” to her edition of The Metaphysical Poets (1957, revised edition 1972). The term ‘metaphysical poets’ came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the consciousness that it was a piece of literary slang, that he was giving a kind of nickname. … What we call metaphysical poetry was referred to by contemporaries as ‘strong lines’, a term which calls attention to other elements in metaphysical poetry than its fondness for indulging in ‘nice speculations of philosophy’ in unusual contexts. ... Like the later term ‘metaphysical’, the term ‘strong-line’ in a term of disapprobation. It too is a kind of slang, a phrase which would seem to have been coined by those who disliked this way of writing. … What came to be called by its denigrators the ‘strong-lined’ style had its origins in this general desire at the close of Elizabeth’s reign for concise expression, achieved by an elliptical syntax, and accompanied by a staccato rhythm in prose and a certain deliberate roughness in versification in poetry. Along with this went admiration for difficulty in the thought. … It [the ‘strong-lined’ verse, the metaphysical poetry] makes demands upon the reader and challenges him to make it out. It does not attempt to attract the lazy and its lovers have always a certain sense of being a privileged class, able to enjoy what is beyond the reach of vulgar wits. The great majority of the poets included in this book did not write to be read by all and sundry. Few of them published their poems. … The first characteristic that I shall isolate in trying to discuss the admittedly vague and, it is often thought, unsatisfactory term ‘metaphysical poetry’ is its concentration. The reader is held to an idea or a line of argument. He is not invited to pause upon a passage, ‘wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect upon it …’ …; but metaphysical poetry demands that we pay attention and read on. For this reason I have resisted the temptation to print excerpts from longer poems. … A metaphysical poem tends to be brief, and is always closely woven. … Concentration and a sinewy strength of style is the mark of Ben Jonson as well as of Donne, and such adjectives as ‘strenuous’ and ‘masculine’ applied to him by his admirers point to a sense in which he too was in some degree a ‘strong-lined’ man, and explain why so many younger writers were able to regard both him and Donne as equally their masters. … Almost all the poets in this collection exercised their skill in the writing of epigrams. Their efforts make on the whole very dreary reading; but the vogue of the epigram helped to form the taste for witty poetry. The desire for concentration and concision marks also the verse forms characteristic of the seventeenth-century lyric. It appears in the fondness for a line of eight syllables rather than a line of ten, and in the use of stanzas employing lines of varying length into which the sense seems packed, or of stanzas built on very short lines. … The metaphysical poets favoured either very simple verse forms, octosyllabic couplets or quatrains, or else stanzas created for the particular poem, in which length of line and rhyme scheme artfully enforced the sense. … The second characteristic of metaphysical poetry … is its fondness for conceits, and here, of course, Jonson and Donne part company. A conceit (remember that in class a conceit was defined as an extended comparison or metaphor) is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking. All comparisons discover likeness in things unlike: a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness. A brief comparison can be a conceit if two things patently unlike, or which we should never think of together, are shown to be alike in a single point in such a way, or in such a context, that we feel their incongruity. Here a conceit is like a spark made by striking two stones together. … Elizabethan poetry, dramatic and lyric, abounds in conceits. … What differentiates the conceits of the metaphysicals is not the fact that they very frequently employ curious learning in their comparisons. … It is the use which they make of the conceit and the rigorous nature of their conceits, springing from the use to which they are put, which is more important that their frequently learned content. A metaphysical conceit … is used … to persuade, or … to define, or to prove a point. … In a metaphysical poem the conceits are instruments of definition in an argument or instruments to persuade. The poem has something to say which the conceit explicates or something to urge which the conceit helps to forward. It can only do this if it is used with an appearance of logical rigour, … . I have said that the first impression a conceit makes is of ingenuity rather than of justice: the metaphysical conceit aims at making us concede justness while admiring ingenuity. Thus, in one of the most famous of all metaphysical conceits, the comparison of the union in absence of two lovers with the relation between the two legs of a compass, Donne sustains the comparison through the whole process of drawing a circle, because he is attempting to give a ‘proof by analogy’ of their union, by which he can finally persuade his mistress not to mourn. Argument and persuasion, and the use of the conceit as their instrument, are the elements or body of a metaphysical poem. Its quintessence or soul is the vivid imagining of a moment of experience or of a situation out of which the need to argue, or persuade, or define arises. Metaphysical poetry is famous for its abrupt, personal openings in which a man speaks to his mistress, or addresses his God, or sets a scene, or calls us to mark this or see that. A great many of the poems in this collection are inspired by actual occasions either of personal, or, less often, public interest. The great majority postulates an occasion. … The strong sense of actual and often very ordinary situations which the metaphysical poets convey makes me agree with Grierson in thinking that words such as ‘conceited’ or ‘fantastic’ do not sum up their quality at all. A reader may at times exclaim ‘Who would ever think such a thought in such a situation?’ He will not exclaim ‘Who can imagine himself in such a situation?’ Dryden praised Donne for expressing deep thoughts in common language. He is equally remarkable for having extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations. The situations which recur in seventeenth-century lyric are the reverse of fantastic, and often the reverse of ideal or romantic situations. Thus, a very favourite topic is the pleasure of hearing a beautiful woman sing or play. … The most serious and impassioned love poetry of the century argues, or assumes as a base for argument, that love is a relation between two persons loving – ‘It cannot be love till I love her that loves me’. The poems which Donne wrote on the experience of loving where love is returned, poems in which ‘Thou’ and ‘I’ are merged into ‘We’, are his most original and profound contributions to the poetry of human love. It is not possible to find models for such poems as ‘The Good-Morrow’, ‘The Anniversarie’, ‘The Canonization’, and, less perfect but still wonderful, ‘The Extasie’. These poems have the right to the title metaphysical in its true sense, since they raise, even when they do not explicitly discuss, the great metaphysical question of the relation of the spirit and the senses. They raise it not as an abstract problem, but in the effort to make the experience of the union of human powers in love, and the union of two human beings in love, apprehensively. … There are plenty of high and chivalrous fancies, and the Platonic ideal of love as the union of souls casts its spell; … The strength of the religious poetry of the metaphysical poets is that they bring to their praise and prayer and meditation so much experience that is not in itself religious. Here too the poems create for us particular situations out of which prayer or