The Well Wrought Urn
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The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title c
First edition
Metaphysical poets
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The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a grea
The Well Wrought Urn
…contradict one another because of their connotations. Brooks thus uses the same criteria to analyze and judge these poems as he did for the modern and metaphysical verse. This was a rejection of the typical method of interpretation for these poets, which is to judge them by the Romantic standards of their day and…
The poet Abraham Cowley, in whose biography Samuel Johnson first named and described Metaphysical poetry
The title page of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, 1650
"Europe supported by Africa and America", William Blake, 1796