Metaphysical poets and their conceits

The Metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets spanning the 17^th century, whose poems are marked by extreme and at times strange metaphors and subtle but often deliberately outrageous logic; Their poems are often organized in the form of an urgent or heated argument. (The category included John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and other lesser-known poets. These poets were not formally affiliated; The term “metaphysical poets” was applied to them by Samuel Johnson, and taken up by later critics.)

A conceit is a figure of speech, usually a simile or metaphor, that forms an extremely ingenious or fanciful parallel between particularly dissimilar or incongruous objects or situations.

Samuel Johnson describes the metaphysical conceit as “a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike ... the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”