Metaphysical Shadows
The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry
Sean H. McDowell
Metaphysical Shadows
The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry
Sean H. McDowell
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Description
Metaphysical Shadows examines how the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell still speaks to working poets today. In the poems of Seamus Heaney, Alfred Corn, Anne Cluysenaar, Kimberly Johnson, Maureen Boyle, Jericho Brown, and others, these earlier poets continue to cast shadows in powerfully revealing ways.
A scholar, a poet, a teacher, Sean McDowell knows how to read and make his reading speak. Metaphysical Shadows offers a wonderfully multi layered linking of past and present in its engagement with a varied range of 20th and 21st century poets as they think through and write with Donne, Vaughan, Herbert and Marvell. The more one reads this fascinating and evocative study the more one wants to read.
Sean McDowell’s Metaphysical Shadows represents a vital contribution to a century-long conversation, initiated by T.S. Eliot, of revaluing the impact on contemporary poetry of early modern English poets under the sign of Donne. What sets McDowell’s study apart is its attention to inclusiveness: to expanding the boundaries of who might be represented—and part of the strength of this book is its mix of familiar and new faces—and to assessing the multiple ways poets today find sustenance in the past. In this latter capacity especially, Metaphysical Shadows goes a long way toward developing a wider critical vocabulary for understanding the nature of poetic influence. It does so, too, always conscious of teasing out connections from below rather than imposing them from above, sensitive to the merits of the individual poets and their poems, and to the different attractions they felt toward the peculiar magnetic qualities of their precursors. Written with eloquent clarity, Metaphysical Shadows will appeal to anyone wishing a trusty guide through the troubled waters of today’s culture wars.
Beautifully written, Metaphysical Shadows shows how specific poems (and poetry more generally) carry a special wisdom about human experience. In this wide-ranging, expansive, yet tight book, each chapter is rich, bringing in many poets (some I have only discovered here) before focusing on a few specific poems that bear imprints of engagement with specific poems from the past. We see how each poet engages in intimate conversations with an earlier poet, but Sean McDowell is also a voice in the conversation, bringing them together over the centuries, and offering his own eloquent insights. He brings together not just past and present, but also suggests there is a transnational and transhistorical community of poets. I cannot imagine a better explanation than this book of the value of poetry and literature, of Donne and those “metaphysicals” to us now, when the humanities and literary studies have been so sharply attacked.
Sean H. McDowell is associate professor of English at Seattle University.