In a 1986 essay on Wallace Stevens, the critic Helen Vendler begins, as an exacting mind will do, with a distinction. Poetry can be divided into first order and second order: the first order is poetry of immediacy, such as in Yeats, often buoyed by an “I,” and the second order the detached reflection of, say, Gaius Petronius. Though admittedly, in her word, “crude,” it is, as so many crudely sketched paradigms are, not wholly incorrect for its simplicity. One has poetry for thinking or poetry for feeling, and they are not written the same.1
T.S. Eliot made essentially the same distinction as Vendler in his 1921 essay in the TLS on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and for him the situation is chronological:
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
That “forming of new wholes” is a way of describing the notoriously impenetrable “conceits” that appear in verse by the so-called metaphysical poets, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell totemic among them. The term was coined and the group was named by the irascible cataloger Samuel Johnson, who wrote that in a conceit “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Another, far less sexy way of putting it would be that a conceit is metaphor constructed from two apparently incompatible elements. For its detractors, that incompatibility is a failure of the poem to meet the mimetic expectations placed on poetry to conjure the thing that is obviously the sweet smell of the rose while at the same time not it at all. For Eliot, the conceit was “a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
Metaphor is an intensifier. When used in verse, there are two basic elements at work, what is executed on the page and what occurs in the reader. A rose is lovely and so is our beloved; when we think of the two together something unlike the two separately is gained. The metaphor itself is neither the subject nor whatever is invoked in addition to it—the beloved and the rose—but rather a third thing created when the two are yoked together as a new, whole experience had within.
For Johnson, poetry was “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.” A well-metered poem that does not lean on metaphor, or perhaps eschews it entirely, if one could imagine such a thing, will be pleasurable in the English language. English verse was designed to be so. But there is something of the look of the unreasonable to the conceit. However, the reputation they gained far precedes; they are simply poetry of the second order, images that must be thought to be felt. The satisfaction of that third element in the combination of the two is achieved not by the confluence of feelings but by the unfolding of reason.
The oft-used example of conceit occurs in Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” on the loss of a spouse, and how there is no break between souls joined in holiness, like precious metal:
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.This is a lovely bit of language. The idea takes not only a moment of thought but a knowledge of natural science, a novel kind of knowledge that would’ve excited contemporary readers. One can hammer metal and though it may get thinner and thinner it will not cleave in two. It’s unexpected, but sensical.
His poem “The Ecstasy” opens with a pretty dizzying palimpsest of conceits in the same theme: the two subjects here are sat together like a pillow and a bed, like a full river resting on the bank, like a violet and its stem; two parts of a whole.
Where, like a pillow on a bed
A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest
The violet’s reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.Do these, when taken together, work? I would argue this is a first-order metaphor that works like a second-order. None of these metaphors is mismatched, but working out exactly what they are takes a bit of parsing that makes the experience of the poem go from bafflement to rigor to, finally, the amazing sense of cohesion. It’s a feeling of unity that William James will call conversion.
Then the next four lines:
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;This will—dare I say, should—cause an initial visceral reaction of disgust at the thought of two sets of eyeballs strung together on a thread like beads. It is certainly not as lovely an image as beds or rivers or flowers. But it’s pure second order—one is not meant to feel this at all but to understand, from their own experience, that when with a true kindred spirit, as with two who are one another’s best, the eyes are fixed outward, looking in the same direction. C.S. Lewis would use the same image to describe friendship in The Four Loves, writing that “we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.”
Metaphor is, also, high artifice, and the conceit its purest form. The mania for genuine feeling, for the first order, of the nineteenth century would damn the metaphysical poets until the renaissance of artifice wrought by modernism, with all its faults. Even still, poetic conceits remain haunted by their reputation of being abstruse and inaccessible, and though perhaps admired in the twentieth century were untouched and unused by any modern admirers. Our loss. These endeavors not only access the interior life but create in verse a third order, neither thought nor felt but the marriage of the two, experience devoured.
“The Hunting of Wallace Stevens,” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 1986. (I ought to mention that I am an editor at that paper.)