Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self - Tapa dura

This single volume has a new introduction and updated notes but remains constant in foregrounding the importance of the individual authorial voice. (Years Work in English Studies.)

This study is impressive in its employment of a critical method at once old and new - one with freshness and a logical solidity that exponents of merely fashionable critical approaches will find difficult to refute. (Seventeenth Century News)

Well-organized ... It is an erudite and inclusive treatment of seven poets to illustrate the theme of the study ... ably and succinctly compares and contrasts the seven writers. (Seventeenth Century News)

Ellrodt is certainly learned, and his learning is on display through his study ... its rewards emerge from its history of ideas approach to its subject and various insights into the personalities of each of the writers presented. (Renaissance Quarterly)

This book offers a significant reconsideration of subjectivity in seventeenth-century poetry ... This is a rich, though undoubtedly contentious book that has finally made Ellrodt's extensive examination of the Metaphysical Poets accessible to a wider audience. (Matthew Woodcock, Times Literary Supplement)

This book presents a forceful argument for a reasonable thesis in clear, vigorous prose. There is a wealth of information and insight about the Metaphysical poets and their literary and philosophical background along with numerous interpretive insights on specific poems. It is a book that may be recommended to undergraduate as well as graduate students as a model of literary scholarship and criticism. Finally, it is a telling commentary on contemporary academic publication that Seven Metaphysical Poets is written more lucidly and fluently than many recent scholarly works by native speakers of English. (Journal of English and Germanic Philology)

Seven Metaphysical Poets stands out among the crowd of new books on the seventeenth century for its affirmation of the humane, personal qualities of literature ... this book is a masterly work by a learned and insightful scholar, who provides an engaging account of the poetry while expounding his own particular theory. (Journal of English and Germanic Philology)

Ellrodt builds on his extensive earlier scholarly studies while continuing to add insights into this group of major poets ... an essential statement of a major point of view. (Choice)

Robert Ellrodt's study of seven poets - springing from his wide-ranging three-volume work, Les Poètes métaphysiques anglais - challenges the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. Distinct modes of self-awareness, different emphases in the perception of time and space, and various ways of grasping the sensible and the spiritual, the human and the divine, jointly or separately characterize the minds of Donne and George Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan, Lord Herbert, Marvell, and Traherne. Fundamental mental structures affect their attitudes to love, death, and God, and dictate their privileged modes of composition and expression.

Without neglecting the relations between these individual traits and the general evolution of thought from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, or the immediate cultural environment in which each poet wrote, this critical study maintains the primacy of individual choice, of the 'unchanging self'. The book is not based on a theory, but on a close scrutiny of the characteristic interplay of personal modes of thought and sensibility.