Metaphysical poetry is the name given to a group of mostly 17th-century English poets. Donne is considered the most important of the Metaphysicals, who include such poets as George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw. The Metaphysical poets are noted for their clever, intellectual poetry that involves unusual, complex metaphors known as “conceits,” and other witty word play such as paradox and puns. The conceits challenge the reader to follow the argument and see the similarity between two very different things that no one before the Metaphysical poets would have thought of comparing. The speaker in Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” for example, declares that his soul and that of the woman he loves can never be parted, and in an elaborate conceit he compares the souls of lovers to the two feet of a draughtman’s compass; each can move only in coordination with the other.

Donne and many of the other Metaphysical poets were popular in their day but their poetry went out of fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Samuel Johnson, famous literary critic and essayist, declared in The Lives of the Poets (1779) that in the Metaphysical poets,