With special reference to "The Good Morrow", "The Extasie", "The Canonization", "Batter My Heart", "A Hymme To God the Father" explain why John...

The phrase "metaphysical poetry" was initially used
disparagingly by John Dryden (1631-1700) and Samuel Johnson (1709-84) who applied it to
a group of seventeenth-century poets, whom they considered influenced by Donne or
sharing his poetic diction. To Johnson, in particular, such poetry aimed to show the
learning of the poets and thus sounded detached from human life ("to show their learning
is their whole endeavor"). The label acquired a positive meaning in the twentieth
century, particularly thanks to T. S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" in his
Selected Essays (1932) which valued Donne's balance of ideas and
emotion, often conveyed through difficult and elaborated metaphors, in his
poetry.

The characteristic features of metaphysical poetry
are:

- wit: that is intellectual learning, often displayed
by Donne through unlikely comparisons and metaphors linking two things apparently very
different. Examples include: Worlds and emispheres for lovers in "The Good Morrow",
bodies as books and thus the physical dimension of love in "The Extasie", lovers as
insignificant insects and then with a leap that is really hard to justify as the
constantly self-regenerating Phoenix in "The
Canonization";

- conceits: these metaphors become rather
extended in several poems, they are not merely decorative but become part of the central
argument. In "The Flea", for example, the central image of the title is developed
throughout the poem, as in "The Good Morrow";

- colloquial
style: the difficulty of the metaphors and the concepts they convey are often hidden
under a colloquial style as in "The Flea", "Batter My Heart", "The Good Morrow". This
style gives Donne's poetry a dramatic quality and, particularly the opening lines of the
poems reproduce the pace of everyday speech