Metaphysical Poetry

A note before you buy: this is the literary sense of the word. “Metaphysical poetry” is a label critics pinned on a loose set of seventeenth century poets long after the fact, not a name for spiritual or occult verse. If you came here looking for poems about manifestation, this is not that book. If you came looking for John Donne, it very much is.

A key anthology for students of English literature, spanning the Elizabethan age to the Restoration and beyond, from a time of startling progress, scientific discovery, unrivalled exploration and deep religious uncertainty.

The collection takes in tightly argued lyrics, erotic and libertine treatments of love, divine poems and elegies of lament by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan, alongside less famous but equally interesting poets of the age such as Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Thomas Traherne. What they share is the use of startling metaphor and image to hold an uncertain age still long enough to look at it, an approach that would go on to shape T. S. Eliot and the Modernists.

Why We Carry It
It is here on purpose, and the purpose is that these poets were doing something a witch would recognize: taking a compass, a flea or a drop of dew and insisting it contains the whole cosmos. That is correspondence. Donne would not have called it magic and we are not claiming he would.

Who It Is For
Readers who like language, anyone who studied Donne once and has thought about him since, and practitioners who want writing that treats a small object as enormous.

Try It With

• a journal to copy lines into
• a quill pen to copy them out with
• the rest of the shelf