The Metaphysical Poets Quotations
Quotes
(Explanation: Donne’s ideas were not just thoughts; he felt them deeply. His thinking changed his emotions and imagination.)"A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility."
(Explanation: Later poets could not feel their ideas naturally. Their thoughts were slow and lifeless compared to real emotions.)“They do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
(Explanation: Seventeenth-century poets could deeply feel and express all experiences like love, pain, or knowledge with balance and power.)“The poets of the seventeenth century… possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
(Explanation: Modern poets only think intellectually; they cannot feel their thoughts instantly and emotionally like the older poets could.)“They think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
(Explanation: A great poet unites many different experiences—happy or sad—into one deep artistic feeling.)“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.”
(Explanation: After the 17th century, poets lost the power to unite thought and feeling, and that loss never healed.)“In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”
(Explanation: A true poet must be honest to both ideas and emotions—neither should be fake or separate.)“Fidelity to thought and feeling.”
(Explanation: Poetry gains strength through sharp contrasts of ideas that still connect to the same truth.)“The effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle.”
(Explanation: Metaphysical poets joined many images and meanings quickly by creating rich and surprising effects.)“Telescoping of images and multiplied associations.”
(Explanation: Modern poets must be complex because modern life and thought are also complex.)“Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.”
(Explanation: The metaphysical poets joined very different or opposite ideas in one poem.)“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” (by Dr. Samuel Johnson)