The Metaphysical Poets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Metaphysical poets, a diffuse group of 17th century writers including John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert. Mourning the death of a good friend in 1631, the poet Thomas Carew declared: “The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds O’erspread, was purg’d by thee; the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted.”The gardener in question was a poet, John Donne, and from his fresh invention blossomed a group of 17th century writers called the metaphysical poets. Concerned with sex and death, with science and empire, the metaphysical poets challenged the conventions of Elizabethan poetry with drama and with wit. And they showed that English, like Italian and French, was capable of true poetry.Unashamedly modern, they were saluted by another great modernist, T.S. Eliot, who admired their genius for imagery, the freshness of their language and the drama of their poetic character. But what do we mean by metaphysical poetry, how did it reflect an age of drama and discovery and do poets as different as John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert really belong together in the canon of English literature?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Tom Healy 6 episodes
  Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London
• Julie Sanders 5 episodes
  Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham
• Tom Cain No other episodes
  Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Related episodes

• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• Pastoral Literature
  
  6 Jul, 2006 820 English and Old English literatures
• History of Metaphor
  
  25 Nov, 2010 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• John Donne
  
  12 Jan, 2023 820 English and Old English literatures
• Yeats and Mysticism
  
  31 Jan, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures
• Thomas Hardy’s Poetry
  
  13 Jan, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
  
  21 Mar, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Romantics
  
  12 Oct, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Lyrical Ballads
  
  8 Mar, 2012 820 English and Old English literatures
• Piers Plowman
  
  29 Oct, 2020 820 English and Old English literatures
• Literary Modernism
  
  26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Dylan Thomas
  
  16 Jun, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Decadent Movement
  
  18 Nov, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures
• Wilfred Owen
  
  27 Oct, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Milton
  
  7 Mar, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures
• Victorian Pessimism
  
  10 May, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
  
  2 Jun, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Greek and Roman Love Poetry
  
  26 Apr, 2007 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Catullus
  
  9 Jan, 2020 870 Latin and Italic literatures
• Aristotle’s Poetics
  
  27 Jan, 2011 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

---

Programme ID: b00cbqhq

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cbqhq

Auto-category: 821.4 (English poetry–17th century)