Samuel Johnson: Life of Cowley (1174)
Johnson’s “Life of Cowley”
Johnson’s description of
[metaphysical wit] begins with introducing Metaphysical poets; he accuses them
of being a bunch of showing off versifiers rather than true poets whose verses
are mere celebration of their extreme knowledge of the world and scientific
studies. In fact, Johnson and his contemporaries did not use the term “metaphysical” equal
to “spiritual” or in opposition to “physical”; it rather connotes the
philosophical and scientific aspect of the poetry rich with strange conceits
such as compasses, ether, etc. only at hand for a scholar, not a poet. Johnson
condemns these poets of being too much concerned with rhyme. Poetry, he
believes, is what engages men’s hearts and opens up their eyes to the “softness
of love” as in the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton.
Johnson then attacks the poetry
from two different angles: mimetic and pragmatic. The Metaphysicals’ first
failure, according to Johnson, could be found out through Aristotle’s criteria
for true poetry – as imitative art: Metaphysical poetry is far from truth by
copying neither “nature” nor “life”. He then approaches the poetry from another
angle and that is its failure to affect the reader the way true poetry does. In
other words, Johnson attempts to prove that Metaphysical poetry, though admirable,
is not able to please the reader as a harmonious, unified, and beautiful piece
of poetry, soothing the minds of the readers. In order to prove so, he
questions the central anchor of Metaphysical poetry, namely “wit”:
He first confirms that the true
value of their poetry only lies in the merit and extent of their wit. Even
Dryden admitted that he and his contemporaries “fall below Donne in wit, but
surpass in poetry”. But in order to attack this anchor, he wittily
provides two different definitions of ‘wit’. According to Pope, wit is
what “has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed”. Based
on this definition, Metaphysical poets have failed to such wit, since they
“just tried to get singular thought, and were careless of diction”, and
language. Here Johnson wittily and boldly questions even Pope’s definition, and
provides a new concept of ‘wit’, as being “at once natural and new”. Thus
Metaphysical thoughts “are often new, but seldom natural”. In fact
the unnaturalness of their poetry is what makes them unpleasing to the mind of
the reader.
Having put the two previous
definitions of ‘wit’ aside as not working in the case of metaphysical poets,
Johnson then takes a step further to define their wit as an example of discordia
concors; “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike”. He decries their roughness and
violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles, this kind of
wit they have “more than enough”.
Johnson may seem to condemn the
pragmatic failure of metaphysical poetry as “not successful in
representing or moving the affections”, but is actually leaving the ground
for the values of their poetry but providing subjective definitions for pragmatic
and mimetic values of true poetry:
If by a more noble and more
adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and
new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production,
acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders
how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom
risen.
Johnson here knowingly emphasizes
the significance of the reader in producing the final poem, and if by any
chance Metaphysical conceits fail to prove “natural”, “just” or “obvious”,
they may turn to be so in another time and place, as it really happened in the
20th century and the strange conceits and fragmentation of
images seemed so natural to the shattered subjects (readers)
of the post-war time. As Goethe remarks, “the unnatural, that too is
natural,” and the metaphysical poets continue to be studied and revered
for their intricacy and originality because of the very naturalness of images
found in their once supposed far-fetched conceits. Such evaluations totally
depend on the context, the understanding of the reader, and the time it is
being read.
Johnson’s other criteria for wit
was being “new” to the reader, but how could a conceit prove new if
over-used? In fact, if a conceit or thought become a dead metaphor,
it will lose all its magic and wit; and this factor is also dependant on the
time and era in which it is read.
His ending, however, is that of a
fair judgment and sometimes admiration rather than condemnation: “if they
frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes
struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were
often worth the carriage”. Apart from finding a kind of ‘truth’ in their
poetry, he also confirms a number of valuable features in their poetry such
as “acuteness”, “powers of reflection and comparison”, “genuine wit”, “useful
knowledge”, and finally “more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment”.
Johnson’s view of Metaphysical
poets, though not totally confirming, proved to be fair and influenced by his
own era’s literary canon – which valued imitativeness and
unity over fragmentation and metaphysical expressions. We should keep in mind
that metaphysical poetry was a reaction against the deliberately smooth and
sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, a courageous act even against the the literary canon of their own time. And that is why the metaphysical poets
adopted a style that seems so energetic, uneven, and rigorous and much
appealing to the fed up 20th century reader.
