yoked by violence together' 'they were not successful in representing or moving the affections.' (In other words, they had too much head, not enough heart.) The term metaphysical stuck, though the judgment did not: when modernist critics and poets such as T.S. When the influential critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) coined the term metaphysical poets, he meant it as an insult: 'Metaphysical poets' such as Cowley and Donne, he wrote, used their conceits to present 'heterogenous ideas. By the time Cowley died, though, conceits had gone out of fashion. Later poets such as Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) built whole careers by imitating those conceits. (If you think of a book of poems as like a compact disc, then a commonplace book is like a mix tape, or an iPod Donne's poems were like popular, unreleased MP3s.)Дonne liked to make long, odd comparisons, called conceits: he compared two lovers to the parts of a compass, for example, and likened a teardrop to a navigator's globe. Until after his death, most of Donne's poems circulated only in manuscript: his friends copied them by hand, then showed them to their friends, who copied them into their commonplace books. Donne later found his calling as an Anglican cleric, giving dramatic sermons at London's most famous church. The next year, Donne's employer found out and fired him. One such poem is 'The Sun Rising.'ДЄ former law student whose London relatives were persecuted for remaining Catholic after England had turned Protestant, Donne ruined what could have been a fine career at court when in 1601 he secretly married his employer's niece, Anne More. His poems picked up a reputation for head-scratchingly bizarre intellectualism-one reason they're now called metaphysical-but some of them are the most deeply felt poems of romantic love in the language. Though some of his poems defended libertinism and casual sex, he destroyed his first career by falling in love, and stayed with the woman he married until her death. John Donne (1572-1631) wrote a prose work called Paradoxes and Problems, and his life presents plenty of both: he was born a Catholic, gained notoriety for sacrilegious verse, and later in life became an Anglican priest.

Image of the sun rising