Literary works in sixteenth-century England were rarely if ever created in isolation from other currents in the social and cultural world. The boundaries that divided the texts we now regard as aesthetic from other texts that participated in the spectacles of power or the murderous conflicts of rival religious factions or the rhetorical strategies of erotic and political courtship were porous and constantly shifting. It is perfectly acceptable, of course, for the purposes of reading to redraw these boundaries more decisively, treating Renaissance texts as if they were islands of the autonomous literary imagination. One of the greatest writers of the period, Sir Philip Sidney, defended poetry in just such terms; the poet, Sidney writes in The Defence of Poetry (NAEL 1.933-54), is not constrained by nature or history but freely ranges "only within the zodiac of his own wit." But Sidney knew well, and from painful personal experience, how much this vision of golden autonomy was contracted by the pressures, perils and longings of the brazen world. And only a few pages after he imagines the poet orbiting entirely within the constellations of his own intellect, he advances a very different vision, one in which the poet's words not only imitate reality but also actively change it. Characteristics ofMetaphysical PoetrY brief and concentrated in its meaningcentered around dramatic situations fondness for conceits oconceit: from the Italian concetto=thought oan extended metaphor obasis of comparison is surprising oaware if differences within similarity odraws on specialized areas of experience to describe love 1.law 2.medicine 3.philosophy 4.religionDefinition of Metaphysical Poetry: Verse dealing with metaphysics, the use of philosophy to explain the human drama in the universe. (the term, metaphysical, was first applied to Donne in derogation of his excessive use of Dryden in 1693)NOTED FOR: their tendency toward psychological analysis of th...
