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Marino and the English Metaphysicals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Frank J. Warnke
Frank J. Warnke*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

In their attempts to define the poetic style of John Donne and his followers, twentieth-century critics have often considered its relationship to analogous movements in the continental literatures. They have seen in the common love of paradox and in the common use of far-fetched metaphors, or conceits, links which unite Donne and the other English metaphysical poets to Marino and his followers in Italy and to Góngora and his followers in Spain. Credit for the original insight connecting Donne and Marino, as is so often the case with original insights, must go to Dr. Johnson, who in the famous passage on the metaphysical poets in his “Life of Cowley” suggested that the metaphysical style was “borrowed from Marino and his followers”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 2 , 1955 , pp. 160 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1955

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References

1 Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Archer-Hind, L. (London, 1925), i, 13.Google Scholar

2 Gosse, Edmund, The Life and Letters of John Donne (New York, 1899), ii, 342.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., II, 344.

4 For the presentation of such a position, see Praz, Mario, La Poesia Metafisica Inglese del Seicento: John Donne (Rome, 1945), pp. 5–17.Google Scholar

5 Marino, G. B., Poesie Varie, ed. Croce, Benedetto (Bari, 1913), p. 55.Google Scholar

6 Donne, John, Complete Poems, ed. Bennett, R. E. (Chicago, 1942), p. 6.Google Scholar

7 Thomas Carew, in his elegy on the death of Donne, comments on that poet's banishment of the classical deities from his poetry: Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1949), p. 73.

8 Marino, , Poesie, p. 14.Google Scholar

9 Donne, p. 32.

10 “A Seventeenth-Century Theory of Metaphysical Poetry”, RR, XLII (1951), 245-255; “A Critique of Some Modern Theories of Metaphysical Poetry”, MP, L (1952), 88-96; “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence”, JHI, xiv (1953), 221-234.

11 Mazzeo, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence,” p. 232.

12 Gosse, ii, 343, is mistaken in his statement that “Until the Adone was published [1623], the peculiar talent of Marini was hardly perceived outside Naples and Spain”. English imitations alone indicate that Marino attained a European popularity with the first publication of the Rime in 1602.

13 Drummond's adverse judgment, one of the few surviving contemporaneous statements about metaphysical poetry, occurs in a letter to Arthur Johnston written some time before 1637, quoted by Wallerstein, Ruth C., Studies in Seventeenth Century Poetic (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1950), p. 26.Google Scholar The document, which contains perhaps the earliest application of the term “metaphysical” to the poetry of Donne's school, suggests that Drummond's distaste was aroused more by the obscurity and intellectuality of the poetry than by the nature of its metaphors: “In vain have some men of late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her [poetry's] reformation, and endeavored to abstract her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits and those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some thousand years… . Neither do I think that a good piece of poesy which Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Ronsard, Boscan, Garcillaso, if they were alive and had that language, could not understand, and reach the sense of the writer.”

14 Drummond, William, Poetical Works, ed. Kastner, L. E. (Manchester, 1913), i, 106.Google Scholar Marino's original (Poesic, p. 70) follows:

Mentre Lidia premea

dentro rustica coppa

a la lanuta la feconda poppa,

i’ stava a rimirar doppio candore,

di natura e d'amore;

ne distinguer sapea

il bianco umor da le sue mani intatte,

ch'altro non discernea che latte in latte.

15 Wallerstein, Ruth C., “The Style of Drummond of Hawthornden in its Relation to his Translations,” PMLA, XLVIII (1933), 1102.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 1096.

17 His earliest extant poems date from 1608.

18 Poems, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1923), p. 4.

19 Poesie, p. 77. Rossi, Mario M., La Vita, le Opere, i Tempi di Edoardo Herbert di Chirbury (Florence, 1947), i, 194–201 Google Scholar, has identified this poem as the common source of both Herbert's “A Description” and Carew's “The Complement”, and has also commented on Herbert's general use of Marino in “A Vision”, “Upon Combing her Hair”, and several other poems.

20 Lord Herbert, like most of the metaphysical poets, had little interest in description for its own sake.

21 Both Dunlap (Carew, p. 262) and Moore Smith (Herbert, p. 140) note the resemblance between “A Description” and “The Complement”, but neither is aware of the common source in Marino's sonnet.

22 Dunlap (Carew, p. lv) comments on the importance of Marino as a source for Carew's poems.

23 Carew, pp. 100-101.

24 Herbert, pp. 24-25. Convinced, apparently, of the obscurity of his allegory, Herbert thoughtfully provides a marginal gloss, which includes, at 1. 11, the succinct commentary: “Wart”, “Lice.”

25 Poesie, p. 78.

26 Herbert, pp. 7-8. The poem does not have any specific source in Marino, but a glance at such poems as “La chioma della sua donna sventolata dall' aura” and “Le chiome sparse sulle onde” will indicate its general sources.

27 See Praz, Mario, Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra (Florence, 1925)Google Scholar, Part ii; Warren, Austin, Richard Crashaw: a Study in Baroque Sensibility (Baton Rouge, La., 1939).Google Scholar

28 Marino, G. B., La Strage degl’ Innocenti (Bologna, 1721), p. 3.Google Scholar

29 Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1904), p. 90.

30 Carew, p. 73.

31 Crashaw, p. 91.

32 Crashaw's conception of poetry could never be adequately described by Marino's famous couplet (quoted in Praz, Secentismo, p. 270):

È del poeta il fin la meraviglia,
Chi non sa far stupir vada alla striglia.

33 Grierson, H. J. C., The First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 143 Google Scholar, remarks that parts of Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory and Triumph are far more Marinistic than “anything in Donne or his school”. The Fletchers, of course, differ from Marino in subject matter, as their poetry is almost exclusively religious.

34 The basic conservatism of the metaphysical poets has been remarked on by Grierson, H. J. C., Metaphysical Poetry from Donne to Butler (Oxford, 1947), p. xxix Google Scholar, and by Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays (New York, 1951), p. 253.Google Scholar