Johnson on the Metaphysicals

When we feel disposed to dismiss Johnson’s views on the views Metaphysical poets as prejudice, we ought to consider whether we are not opposing one prejudice with another, of another kind, between which sensible compromise is difficult or even impossible. I see no way to refute Johnson’s attack on the school of Donne short of setting up an abstract critical dialectic which would have little bearing upon how poetry is written in any age. I should like to marshal here a set of prejudices, of my own, as cogent as Johnson’s, but that would be a feat beyond my capacity, as it would surely be beyond the reach of any critic less ignorant than myself. As a man of the first half of the 20th Century, I have no doubt as many prejudices as Johnson had, but I cannot be sure that I understand mine as well as he understood his. The first obstacle to our understanding of prejudice is the liberal dogma that it must not be entertained; prejudice has, with us, something of the private, the mantic, and the wilful. In this positive ignorance we would do well to remember with Mr. F. R. Leavis that Johnson lived in a “positive culture” which made it easier than it is today for a critic to undergo a “positive training” for his profession¹. Johnson came to The Lives of the Poets when a great age of English poetry was about ending; he had lived through the age, he had formed his sensibility, and disciplined his mind, in it; and it was a poetry to which the Metaphysical style had contributed little. If we refuse to see him as a part of a positive culture, in which personal prejudice can at times, in certain persons, receive the discipline of objectivity which transcends the disorder of unacknowledged opinion, we shall the more readily see in our disagreements with him a failure of sensibility on his part.

These general remarks will serve to expose the bias of the narrow enquiry that follows. Whether it is a proper field of enquiry cannot be determined in a short essay. I shall not be concerned with Johnson’s criticism as a whole, or with the permanent value of his particular judgments; I shall try to investigate a contrast, very broadly conceived, in the use of figurative language, with Johnson on one side and the Metaphysical style on the other. For this purpose I quote, to begin with, four lines from Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” and a part of Johnson’s commentary: