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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
The late A. J. Smith, formerly Professor of English at the University of Southampton, is well known for his many contributions to the field of seventeenth-century English literature. His present work, following Literary Love (1983) and The Metaphysics of Love (1985), completes a trilogy on "metaphysical sentience in Renaissance poetry" (p. xi). In it, he not only deals with the idea of "metaphysical wit" in early seventeenth-century English Renaissance poetry but also essays a comparison with apparently similar trends which emerged earlier in Continental Europe.
English metaphysical poetry, from John Donne to Andrew Marvell, is noted for its use of wit. Many continental Renaissance writers, from the fifteenth century forward, also evolved a characteristic form of wit. Smith investigates the question of how European Renaissance wit might have influenced the English development and, en passant, postulates a reason for the latter's demise. This enquiry, he argues, is of more than literary interest, since it reveals differences in fundamental cosmologies. Superficial similarities aside, he contends, each reveals a "divergent expectation of the created order" (p. xi).
Smith rightly first defines and characterizes "metaphysical...
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