Half-Ten Things to Remember When Venturing into the Lands of the Metaphysical Poets

1. Not a literary movement or school of poetry per se; more of a group of minds (Donne, Marrvel, Herbert, Vaughan) thinking alike - dolling out witty, inventive and stylistically clever verse.

2. Conceit - extended metaphor - fanatics. Just think of Donne's man and woman and their love being like the legs of a compass, or their marriage bed like the body of a flea.

3. Interested in the not-so-rational aspects of human life (for instance, the condition of the human soul), but applying a rational (more down to earth) perspective.

4. The once great Ben Jonhson called them a motley crew, their use of imagery: 'a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'.

5. Were men out of tune with the pulse of their times - meaning stood against the commonality of the 16th century verse. It took more than two centuries for the recognition to come, from no other but T. S. Eliot himself, who wrote in his essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' that these men and their witty lyrics went where no one before them had gone before - into the land of passion and reason, the so-called 'the dissociation of sensibility'. Eliot saw in their verse his own poetic antecedent.