Academic literature on the topic 'Metaphysical poetry'

Abstract: In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, "On Hope," whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. Following Cowley's lead, this essay explores the principle of hope in metaphysical poetry. It reads his poem against the metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno, to clarify its engagement with the Aristotelian notion of potentiality. And it shows how, even in writing against hope, Cowley's poetry can think, and hope, in ways that metaphysics cannot.

Metaphysical is a literary genre that combines philosophical ideas with emotional depth and deep analyses of nature. One of the famous authors in this genre is John Donne, who is known for his profound themes, distinctive style, and skillful use of conceit in his poetry. This paper aims to explore the influence of John Donne's work on metaphysical poetry and assess the contribution and striking elements of metaphysics in his selected poems by examining Donne's use of conceit. The research aims to examine how John Donne influenced the poetry of metaphysics and explore the assessment of his literary endeavors as well as metaphysical elements. The research has uncovered new perspectives from a metaphysical standpoint on religion, the universe, love, and death.

Purpose of the study: Verbalization of concepts in the artistic dimension is of great significance in the study of the metaphysical view of the world. This study is undertaken to identify and describe the principal ways of transformation and interpretation of verbalized concepts with gender features, in particular the concept of WOMAN, in the poetic discourse of the Metaphysicals.
 Methodology: It is based on the combination of research strategies of an interdisciplinary approach with the methods of interpretive, linguistic-stylistic, hermeneutic, and imagological analysis. Adopting the methods of interpretive analysis of literary writings in the gender dimension allows us to greatly broaden the applicable scope of them.
 Main findings: Gender concepts analysis based on the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry can be of great importance since the functioning and transformation of the sphere of concepts are complicated by metaphorical, symbolic, and linguistic ambivalence – an essential element of artistic practices of the Metaphysicals. Verbalization of the concepts of MAN and WOMAN actualise a particular way of transforming and conveying the basic features of the conceptual system of gender through the lens of dialectical thinking.
 Application of the study: The analysis of gender concepts in poetry appears to be an embranchment of relevant and influential gender studies contributing to such fields of humanities as literary studies, linguistics, and philosophy, cultural and religious studies. This emphasizes an interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach.
 Novelty/Originality: The means of interpretive analysis help achieve objectification of the gender sphere of concepts in the metaphysical dimension that becomes a crucial means of representation of the linguistic worldview. Since the verbalization of gender concepts and gender considerations in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, and especially in John Donne's, is not always explicit, the study of them at the imagery level allows revealing even implicit concepts, in particular gender ones, arising from mental activity, spiritual life, and transpersonal experience. In metaphysical poetry, the word is considered a means of contemplating reality and transcending beyond it.

Abstract Gerard Manley Hopkins once said, “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” This phrase not only encapsulates the central emphasis of Hopkins’s poetry but also suggests a proper relationship between philosophy and art. The aesthetic experience of artworks can provide pivotal experiences for metaphysical interpretations, and I attempt to show that Hopkins’s poetry gives such a foundational and informative experience for philosophical investigations. Hopkins develops his poetic expressions based on what he calls the ability of language to inscape and ingress profound experiences of reality. The metaphysics of Duns Scotus in which the particular embodies or transubstantiates the universal underlies these ideas and inspires Hopkins to write poetry. My point is not to say that a philosopher can offer the true meaning of Hopkins’s poetry and that, once we get the philosophical meaning, we can dismiss the poems. Rather, Hopkins’s poetry presents the kind of experiences that a philosopher can use to make meaningful metaphysical interpretations of the world.

AbstractThis article explores the idea of Metaphysical Time in the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī against more general understandings of time and temporality in Sufi thought and Persian poetry. Various attitudes toward serial time and the subjective experience of past, present, and future are reflected in the poetry of not only Rūmī, but also ʽUmar Khayyām and Ḥāfiẓ. The philosophical approaches toward human temporality discussed here include sentient carpe diem, spiritual carpe diem, and pursuit of the Metaphysical Moment, or Time’s Currency (naqd-i waqt). To understand this, we must examine Rūmī’s understanding of the notion of the Sufi as ‘the son of time’ (Ibn al-waqt), along with the concomitant or related ideas in Rūmī’s poetry of ‘the Father of Time’ (abū ‘l-waqt) and ‘the Brethren of Time’ (ikhwān al-waqt), and the Prophet’s Hadith, ‘I have a time with God….’. The article elaborates on some remarkable homologies between the concepts of time and the ‘Industrious Man’ in the poetry of Mawlānā Rūmī and William Blake, and how the attraction of divine love pulls the lover out of Time into the realm of Eternity, and how love subverts rational categories of time and space, which become illusory and vanish in the mystical experience of unity. Aldous Huxley’s distinction between the Philosophers of Time and the Philosophers of Eternity is also explored in relation to Rūmī’s thinking.

This paper starts by stating what metaphysical poetry is, what its characteristics are, and who the metaphysical poets are. Later the paper focuses on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and confirms the thesis that she can be considered a metaphysical poet. The third thing the paper deals with is to what extent Donne’s and Dickinson’s poetry as well as Donne’s Sermons correspond to the Calvinist theology, which is the common credo of the Churches to which they belong. A further issue the paper debates about is rhetorical devices in the metaphysical service.The last aspect of Donne’s and Dickinson’s writing that the essay explores is their attitude towards truth.

Abstract This essay provides the first full descriptive and analytical account since 1946 of Matthew Prior’s poem Alma: or The Progress of the Mind (1719), which Alexander Pope described as a ‘master-piece’. Connections are developed between Prior’s use of effervescent figures of speech and narrative tricks, and uses of figurative metaphysical language in Isaac Newton’s Opticks, the Principia Mathematica, and the ‘Leibniz–Clarke’ controversy of 1715–1716. It emerges that the poem’s main subject is figurative language and the arguments it serves. Alma is a very unusual critique of aspects of Newtonian thought, employing techniques of ‘metaphysical’ poetry to poke fun at Newtonian metaphysics.

In this essay, Aaron Beaver argues that the poetry of Gavrila Derzhavin routinely and consistently connects metaphysical beliefs with moral ones, and that, at its most sophisticated, this connection amounts to a full “metaphysics of morality” much like that developed by Derzhavin's contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Beaver begins by exploring Derzhavin's belief in the immortality of virtue; he then examines how Derzhavin's famous monument poems assert the poet's immortality because he verbally pays tribute to those who are virtuous; finally he analyzes Derzhavin's 1797 poem “Bessmertie dushi,” in which the poet realizes the connection between the immortality of the soul and morality. The latter part of the article examines Derzhavin's poetic expression of this connection in light of Kant's two postulates of the moral law—the immortality of the soul and the existence of God—and finds that Derzhavin's poetry expresses a similar position with genuine philosophical rigor.