Genevieve Taggard

’s Introduction To Circumference (1929) Essay, Research Paper

CIRCUMFERENCE

"My business is circumference."

Emily Dickinson in a letter to Colonel Higginson, July 1862.

For some centuries English critics have been at work to revise or

apply the term metaphysical given John Donne and his school. The word does very

well, I think, if we use it of poetry, to describe a state of mind, not to designate a

system of thought with the exactitude of the philosopher or the scientist.* "Dryden

gave the term metaphysical to the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy," says

Gosse, "and Johnson borrowing the suggestion, defined the school to describe not

Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who

employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions. The

influence of Donne upon the literature of England," Mr. Gosse concludes, "was

singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign."

I have been attempting to collect into a book what may be considered the most malignant

of Donne’s verses, together with others since his time, down to the present, which seem to

bear them a good comparison, not merely from the school commonly supposed to be

metaphysical, but from English and American poets generally. There are more poems of this

genre than poets; with many lyric and dramatic minds, the metaphysical is a mood

assumed for the moment, or one manner of approach, not a constant quality. Unless we agree

to use Donne as the measure of the metaphysical poet, and draw all others to scale, we

must admit to begin with, that in searching for the Metaphysical Poem we are only after an

abstraction. A long search, however, among many approximations, and repeated varieties,

gives a reader a certain knack at imagining the purest possibility of treatment, of which

the poems one encounters are only less acute designs.

I must state at the outset that I find only two genuinely metaphysical poets of the

first order of clarity in the entire span of our poetry. So far as an unscholarly

knowledge can contend, with the use of a definition that comes from a study of forms and

habitual choices of material, I find this kind of mind perfectly exampled only in John

Donne and Emily Dickinson. Dante, Goethe and Lucretius live in other languages.

"Metaphysical poetry," says Grierson, in his excellent introduction to Metaphysical

Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, "in the full sense of the term, is a

poetry which, like that of the Divina Commedia, the De Natura Rerum and

perhaps Goethe’s Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the

universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.

These poems were written because a definite interpretation of the riddle, the atoms of

Epicurus rushing through infinite empty space, the theology of the schoolmen as elaborated

in the catechetical disquisitions of St. Thomas, Spinoza’s vision of life sub specie

aeternitatis, beyond good and evil, laid hold on the mind and the imagination of a

great poet, unified and illumined his comprehension of life, intensified and heightened

his personal consciousness of joy and sorrow, of hope and fear, by broadening their

significance, revealing to him in the history of his own soul, a brief abstract of the

drama of human destiny. ‘Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge–it is as

immortal as the heart of man.’ Its themes are the simplest experiences of the surface of

life, sorrow and joy, love and battle, the peace of the country, the bustle and stir of

towns, but equally the boldest conceptions, the profoundest intuitions, the subtlest and

most complex classifications and ‘discourse of reason,’ if into these, too, the

poet can ‘carry sensation,’ make of them passionate experiences communicable in vivid

and moving imagery, in rich and varies harmonies."

Johnson and Dryden described the seventeenth century poet as a man of learning who drew

on his knowledge for his phrases, symbols and comparisons, and who treated of matters

"beyond physics." The eighteenth century being unable when it made its

definition to know the work of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and Blake, should

be pardoned for covering them all, and leaving, still, room for another kind of poet–in

no way defining a temperament that marks John Donne from John Keats. However, the

eighteenth century does have in mind something it has not defined. Taking Donne as an

example, it wished to describe a scientific sharpness and an angularity; a saltiness of

phrase designated by them as "wit"; and a coldness that made it possible for the

mind to probe itself, as it writes of itself, lavishly and unmercifully. All this was

concealed under the large word, learning. "Beyond physics" involved God,

the

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