In her 2021 poetry collection, To Shatter Glass, Sr. Sharon Hunter explored childhood and memory, an interior pilgrimage toward understanding and forgiveness. Her new collection, Light Before the Sun, continues that pilgrimage, but it goes beyond, toward something that is more like acceptance and resolution.
“Life is a stained-glass window,” she writes, using the metaphor to suggest light, color, and brokenness. She will be looking back before she looks forward, and she will the brokenness and dysfunction of the relationships that shaped a childhood, but she will also see the beauty and the purpose within it.
Like many literary terms, “metaphysical poetry” was not something that the designated poets themselves invented. Instead, in the decades after they flourished, it was John Dryden (1631-1700) and Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) who popularized the description. They did not mean it as a compliment. Instead, they saw this group of 16th century poets as writers who abandoned the rules of poetry and created something unnatural. It wasn’t until the 20th century, led by figures like T.S. Eliot, that the metaphysical poets were seen as something important and creative in and of themselves.
The five poets usually labeled as “metaphysical” were John Donne (1572-1631), Henry Vaughn (1621-1695), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), and Richard Crashaw (1613-1649). Sometimes a sixth is added, that of John Milton (1608-1674), but Milton doesn’t quite fit what the other five were about. One of Donne’s short poems has entered the collective consciousness, with its famous lines of “No man is an island” and “For whom the bell tolls.”
Using conversational, everyday language, the metaphysical poets wrestled with big ideas. They often abandoned meter to delve deeper into what they were writing about. Three of them – Vaughn, Marvell, and Crashaw – lived and wrote through the tumultuous decades of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Crashaw was an exile who died in poverty.
Poet, writer, and editor D.S. Martin finds the metaphysical poets to be inspirational and creative. And he’s published a poetry collection, The Role of the Moon, to pay tribute.
In the summer of 1776, Abigail Adams faced a hard tough decision for herself and her children. Years earlier, she’d watched her husband John make the same decision, and she had struggled with worry. Now it her turn, and the turn of her children. Her husband was in Philadelphia at the meeting that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. She finally made the decision for herself and the family – and got inoculated for smallpox.
Some 37 letters written by the poet John Keats to his great love Fanny Brawne were owned by John Hay Whitney, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain. They were stolen in the 1980s. They had been in the possession of Brawne’s children after her death in 1865, and then they’d been sold at auction in 1885. At some point Whitney had purchased them. After the theft, they had disappeared for 40 years, until an unnamed individual tried to sell some rare books inherited from his grandfather. Included with the books were the Keats letters. And now they’re back with the family they were stolen from.
My wife and I have a significant difference over reading William Faulkner. She had to read “The Bear” and “Barn Burning” in required English classes in college (I took English literature, so I missed Faulkner’s stories). She was not a fan. I came to Faulkner years later, via the authors of the Latin American Boom, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. They’d been heavily influenced by Faulkner, so I decided to read The Sound and the Fury. I was hooked, even with Faulkner’s tendency to often forget about punctuation. But One thing I never considered – some people find reading the author to be therapeutic.
