THE METAPHYSICAL POETS By Helen C. White
The Metaphysical Poets (Macmillan, iss.) is a study of the religious beliefs and experiences which inform the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw; Vaughan and Traheme. The strength of the book is its analysis of their minds ; its weakness, the ingenuousness of
its poetical criticism. Miss White shows how little these men were inter- ested in the question of Church organisation over which raged the religious battles of the seventeenth century. Their problems were personal. Donne feared the wrath and power of a God of Justice ; Herbert followed a religious life decorously ordered by ceremonial and inspired by wonder at a God of Love ; Crashaw aspired to an ecstatic communion, and Vaughan and Traheme found God revealed in Nature. But her principal achievement is a penetrating study of the motives which led Donne from tavern and boudoir to St. Paul's Cathedral. The strongest of these was the fascination of Theology for a mind delighting in speculation and dialectic. Miss White expounds his " wit " ably, but in the others too often approves dullness for its sincerity. She can never quite forgive Donne, the least mystical of the metaphysicals, for being by far the greatest poet. -
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