Various (ed. Helen Gardner)

Seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets, in an anthology edited by Helen Gardner

About Various (ed. Helen Gardner)

Dame Helen Gardner (1908–1986) was an Oxford scholar of seventeenth-century poetry, an editor of John Donne's Divine Poems and Elegies, Songs and Sonnets, and Merton Professor of English Literature. Her anthology collected the major poets of the 'metaphysical' style, chiefly John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Thomas Traherne, with many lesser contemporaries.

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The Metaphysical Poets

Various (ed. Helen Gardner)

c. 1600–1680 (anthology 1957) · Renaissance Early Modern · Poetry

The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.

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