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Metaphysical Poetry

In 1779, the famous literary critic Samuel Johnson coined the term “metaphysical poetry” to describe the verses of a small number of seventeenth-century poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Generally speaking, the word metaphysical refers to a type of philosophical thinking that is characterized by the use of abstract reasoning. When Johnson described certain examples of poetry as metaphysical, he wanted to underscore their tendency toward philosophical abstraction. For him, though, abstraction was a bad thing. He felt that metaphysical poets developed unnecessarily elaborate conceits and unsolvable paradoxes. What resulted was dense and intellectual verse that demonstrated the poet’s wit more than it pleased the reader. Despite Johnson’s personal distaste for it, metaphysical poetry made a significant comeback in the early twentieth century, largely due to an enthusiastic reception from famous poets like T. S. Eliot. Today, many scholars celebrate John Donne as one of the Renaissance’s finest metaphysical poets, and the ambitiously constructed conceits that appear in many of his poems show why. The elaborate metaphor of the lovers’ bedroom as an empire unto itself is one of Donne’s most famous metaphysical conceits.

Ptolemaic Astronomy

One of the primary features of the Renaissance was a fascination with the aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific achievements of classical antiquity. Among the most influential of antiquity’s achievements related to the astronomical models of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek who lived in the second century CE. Ptolemy’s most comprehensive work about astronomy is known today as the Almagast, a work that features a great deal of mathematical modeling alongside detailed star maps. Later in his life, however, Ptolemy authored a more speculative work, known in English as Planetary Hypotheses. In this work, Ptolemy developed his influential cosmological model, according to which the earth stood at the center of the universe. Around the earth there was a series of nested spheres occupied by the nearest lunar and planetary bodies: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, and so on to the grandest sphere of all—the sphere of fixed stars. In “The Sun Rising,” Donne directly references the Ptolemaic model of the universe in the final lines (29–30):

     Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
     This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Here, the speaker insists that his bedroom—as a microcosm of the earth—occupies the very center of the universe. The sun thus revolves around the lovers.

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