Gun Island

 Gun Island - Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, traces familiar crosscultural patterns evident in his earlier novels. There are journeys by land and water, diaspora and migration, experiences aboard ships, the world of animals and sea-creatures. Ghosh foregrounds environmental issues like climate change and the danger to fish from chemical waste dumped into rivers by factories, concerns that carry over from earlier books like The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement.

Gun Island describes the quest of Deen, a scholar and collector of rare books, who returns from New York, his city of domicile, to the Sunderbans in West Bengal to unravel the mystery and legend of a seventeenth-century merchant, Bonduki Sada-gar, translated “The Gun Merchant,” and his persecution by Manasa Devi, mythical goddess of snakes. In a talk held in New Delhi after the release of the novel, Ghosh stated that the merchant “was a trope for trade.” The merchant and the goddess dramatize “the conflict between profit and the world.” In the novel, the goddess pursues the merchant to make him aware of other realities like the animal world: “Humans—driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest of profit—would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things.”

We learn that the old Arabic name for Venice was al-Bunduqevya, which is also the name for guns. Deen concludes that the name Bonduki Sadagar did not perhaps mean the Gun Merchant but the Merchant who went to Venice. When Deen travels to Venice to research further on the Gun Merchant, he discovers that many Bangladeshis are being employed as illegal migrant labor. Their hazardous journey across the Middle East and Africa and the strong, even militant opposition to their presence in the city by Italian authorities form a major segment of the second part of the novel, contrasting with the Gun Merchant’s past, prosperous journey to Venice (Rita Joshi - World Literature Today). 

Genre: Novel, Cli-fi (Climate Fiction)

• What is Cli-fi (Climate Fiction)?
• Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change and global warming. Not necessarily speculative in nature, works may take place in the world as we know it or in the near future. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society. Climate fiction is distinct from petrofiction which deals directly with the petroleum culture and economy. (To read more, open this Wikipedia link)
• Brief History of Cli-fi : Freelance writer Dan Bloom coined the term cli-fi in 2011 in a press release for Jim Laughter’s Polar City Red, a novel set amid climate refugees in a future Alaska. Today, Bloom publishes The Cli-Fi Report, an online resource serving all things climate fiction. From his home in Taiwan, he told Means & Matters he sees cli-fi as an urgent genre, a route to “wake people up via storytelling.”

• Cli-fi and how it can help response to the climate crisis

Characters and Summary of 'Gun Island

1. Characters and Summary - 1 | Sundarbans | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

2. Characters and Summary - 2 | USA | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

3. Summary - 3 | Venice | Part 2 of Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

Thematic Study of 'Gun Island

1. Etymological Mystery | Title of the Novel | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

2. Part I - Historification of Myth & Mythification of History | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

Part II- Historification of Myth & Mythification of History | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh (Click to watch video)

Part III - Historification of Myth & Mythification of History | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh (Click to watch video)

3. Climate Change | The Great Derangement | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

4. Migration | Human Trafficking | Refugee Crisis | Gun Island | Amitav Ghosh

Check your understanding: Appear in Online Test

Click here to open an online test / Quiz on Gun Island

Worksheets for Flipped Classroom Activities:

• 'Gun Island' Worksheet - 1: Use PDF of novel and ChatGPT (Open AI) for this activity.
• 'Gun Island' Worksheet - 2: Use PDF copy of novel, Open AI Chat GPT and Google Translate for this activity.
• The Objectives of these worksheets: (Click to open pdf)
• Enhancing comprehension
• Encouraging critical thinking
• Improving writing skills
• Enhancing vocabulary
• Supporting independent learning
• Make aware of the potential errors in AI generated responses

Points to Ponder:

1. How does this novel develop your understanding of a rather new genre known as 'cli-fi'?
2. How does Amitav Ghosh use myth of Gun Merchant 'Bonduki Sadagar' and Manasa Devi to initiate discussion on the issue of Climate Change and Migration/Refugee crisis / Human Trafficking?
3. How does Amitav Ghosh make use of 'etymology' of common words to sustain mystery and suspense in the narrative?
4. There are many Italian words in the novel. Click here to view the list of words. Have you tried to translate these words into English or Hindi with the help of Google Translate App? If so, how is Machine Translation helping in proper translation of Italian words into English and Hindi?
5. What are your views on the use of myth and history in the novel Gun Island to draw attention of the reader towards contemporary issues like climate change and migration?
6. Is there any connection between 'The Great Derangement' and 'Gun Island'? 

Additional Reading resources:

1. Towards a post(colonial)human culture: Revisiting Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island as a fall of Eurocentric humanism by Saikat Chakraborty
2. Climate and Culture in Crisis - Gun Island
3. Surreal Novel about Climate Change and Migration - Gun Island
4. The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island 

5. With ‘Gun Island,’ Amitav Ghosh turns global crises into engaging fiction

6. Is Global Warming the 21st Century’s Black Death?
7. Climate Change and Refugee Crisis through Myth, Legend, History and the so-called 'irrational'

Q & A Session:

Thematic Study

Gun Island | Thematic Study from Dilip Barad

Avoid Plagiarism - Research in Digital Era

 Understanding Unintentional Plagiarism | Research in Digital Era

Avoid Plagiarism - Research In Digital Era from Dilip Barad

How do students research in the digital age? (Source: Turnitin)

The Pew report shows that the ease with which information “appears” online allows students to avoid any of the questions that may surface concerning the quality and intent of information they “research.” The Pew survey revealed that only one percent of those surveyed reported as “excellent” the ability of students “to recognize bias in online content.” As for their “ability to assess the quality and accuracy of information they find online,” only three percent reported that they found students to be “excellent.”

This data supports the following insights into student research behavior, specifically:

 

• Students appear to value immediacy over quality in online research 

The ease with which “the answer” may be found online places sites such as Wikipedia, homework help sites, answer sites, and other social and content sharing sites to the top in terms of source matches. 

• Students often use cheat sites and paper mills as sources 

Less a research competency issue than a moral and ethical one, the significant number of sources that match to cheat sites and paper mills suggest that for students there is a bias towards immediate outcomes and results rather than towards concerted effort to meet assignment goals. 

• There is an over reliance on the “wisdom of the crowd” 

Students appear to demonstrate a strong appetite for crowd-sourced content in their research. Though it is not immediately evident why students seek these sources out, the strong reliance on these types of sites indicate difficulty assessing the authority and legitimacy of the content these sources present. 

• Student “research” is synonymous with “search” 

The frequent and uninhibited use of sites with limited educational value (as defined by the quality and authority of content) in student work underscores a preference for “searched,” rather than “researched” content. 

• Existing student source choices warrant a need for better search skills 

In addition to a preference for immediacy, the popularity of crowd-sourced content online indicates that a majority of students are engaging in cursory or shallow searches for content. At play may be an absence of awareness of how search engines work and how to effectively conduct searches to find appropriate content. What also appears to be absent is the use of criteria (whether internally—or externally—defined) to judge that content.

Evaluating Online Sources

The Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER) represents the evolution of the critical approach that Turnitin has adopted and used to categorize websites in our analysis of student sources. The rubric was designed by academic experts and used by secondary and higher education educators who field-tested the rubric by using it to evaluate over 300 of the most popular student sources (which will be shared in a follow-up white paper.). 

The rubric is built on five criteria: 

• Authority: Is the site well regarded, cited, and written by experts in the field? 

• Educational Value: Does the site content help advance educational goals? 

• Intent: Is the site a well-respected source of content intended to inform users? 

• Originality: Is the site a source of original content and viewpoints? 

• Quality: Is the site highly vetted with good coverage of the topical area? 

These criteria are evaluated along a numerical scale anchored by an explicit call out to “credibility,” a move to make the scores more informative for students. 

Instructors and students who use SEER can quickly arrive at an easy-to-interpret score based on the commonly used 4.0 grade point scale. By adding up all criteria values and dividing by five, users will generate a readily-understandable grade for sources. If so desired, the weighting of the criteria can also be adjusted to reflect varying evaluation-directed objectives (see the accompanying SEER Worksheet in the appendix). 

• 3.0 - 4.0: highly credible, quality sources 

• 2.0 – 3.0: credible sources 

• 1.0 – 2.0: questionable sources 

• 0.0 – 1.0: unacceptable or inappropriate sources 

The rubric, in its entirety, appears below. Following the rubric are a few examples of sites and how instructors have scored them. 

Downloads

1. The Plagiarism Spectrum: 10 Types of Unoriginal Work

2. Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER) Worksheet

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - A Novel by Arundhati Roy

General Observations about the Novel - 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a curious beast: baggy, bewilderingly overpopulated with characters, frequently achronological, written in an often careless and haphazard style and yet capable of breathtakingly composed and powerful interludes. The idea that the personal is political and vice versa informs its every sentence, but it also interrogates that assumption, examining its contours and consequences (Alex Clark, The Guardian).

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Braiding together the lives of a diverse cast of characters who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope, here Arundhati Roy reinvents what a novel can do and can be (Penguin Random House).

 

Is novel the right word, though? I hesitate. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, hulking, sprawling story that it is, has two main strands. One follows Anjum, a hijra, or transwoman, struggling to make a life for herself in Delhi. The other follows Tilo, a thorny and irresistible architect turned activist (who seems to be modeled on Roy herself), and the three men who fall in love with her (Parul Sehgal, The Atlantic).

Intertextual references to other writers in the novel

The novel is divided into twelve chapters of varying lengths, unevenly distributed into six sections, each introduced by a short epigraph. The six quoted authors were all poets or writers who held strong, dissident political views, who rebelled against persecution, who refused submission and compromise. Tormented by institutional violence, censored, imprisoned, some were forced to flee into exile, and some were killed. Others were discriminated against for their skin colour, and/or their sexual orientation and gender “indeterminacy”. All were resolutely insubordinate.

They can all be counted among the “Unconsoled” to whom the novel is dedicated, and whose “Minister”, Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, symbolises the refusal to submit to any authority other than one’s conscience, one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity.

1. The first epigraph (“I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart”) was taken from Nâzim Hikmet’s poem “On the Matter of Romeo and Juliet”. [ यानी सारा मामला दिल का है... नाज़िम हिकमत ]

2. The second epigraph quotes Pablo Neruda’s last book, Libro de las Preguntas (The Book of Questions), published posthumously in 1974 - “In what language does the rain fall / on tormented cities?”

[ बारिश किस भाषा में गिरती है

यातनाग्रस्त शहरों के ऊपर ? - पाब्लो नेरुदा ]

3. The third epigraph (141) quotes the first line of one of Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmiri poems, “Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains”, a fit frame for the third “section”, narrated by “The Landlord”, a cold and somewhat cynical servant of the State.

[ मौत एक छरहरी नौकरशाह है, मैदानों से उड़कर आती हुई - आग़ा शाहिद अली ]

4. The fourth epigraph is by Jean Genet, whose novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (written while its author was serving a prison sentence in Fresnes, in 1942) is quoted three times - "Then, as she had already died four or five times, the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death." (Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman).

[ क्योंकि वह पहले चार या पाँच बार मर चुकी थी,

अपार्टमेंट उसकी मृत्यु से भी ज़्यादा गंभीर

किसी नाटक के लिए उपलब्ध था। - ज्याँ जेने ]

5. The fifth epigraph is quoted from James Baldwin’s essay entitled “Down at the cross. Letter from a Region in my Mind”, which offers a set of reflexions on race relations in the USA, many of which, alas, would still be relevant nowadays. When read in the light of caste relations in India, many of those reflexions also seem perfectly relevant - "And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true." - from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

[ और वे मेरी बात पर सिर्फ़ इस वजह से यक़ीन नहीं करते थे की

वे जानते थे कि मैंने जो कुछ कहा था वह सच था। - जेम्स बाल्डविन ]

6. The final epigraph used by Roy is a quotation from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s first volume of memoirs, Hope Against Hope, in which Osip Mandelstam’s widow narrates his tragic fate. -

"Then there was the changing of the seasons. ‘This is also a journey,’ M said, ‘and they can’t take it away from us.’ - (translated by Max Hayward) [ फिर मौसमों में परिवर्तन हुआ। 'यह भी एक यात्रा है,' एम ने कहा, 'और इसे वे हमसे छीन नहीं सकते।' - नादेज्दा मान्देल्स्ताम ]

[To read more details on this click here How to Recruit Art and Intertexts in the Battle against “Stupidification” by Catherine Pesso-Miquel]

About the Characters and Summary of the novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

Part 1 | Khwabgah

Part 2 | Jantar Mantar

Part 3 | Kashmir and Dandakaranyak

Part 4 | Udaya Jebeen & Dung Beetle

Thematic Study of 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

Symbols and Motifs in 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

Check your understanding of the novel - Click here to open online test on 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

Additional Reading Resources:

1. Arundhati Roy's Fascinating Mess
2. Political Overtones and Allusions in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry
3. The Poetic Realism of Arundhati Roy in The Ministry
4. Outside Language and Power: The Mastery of A. Roy's The Ministry
5. Political and Gender Issues in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry
6. Ecofeminist Study of 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'
7. Environmental Concerns in 'The Ministry'
8. Timely but not deserving of the Booker
9. How to recruit Art and Intertexts in the battle against 'stupidification

Kota Factory

Kota Factory is an Indian Hindi-language web series created by Saurabh Khanna and directed by Raghav Subbu for The Viral Fever. The story is set in Kota, Rajasthan, an educational hub famous for its coaching centres. The show follows the life of 16-year-old Vaibhav (Mayur More) who moves to Kota from Itarsi. It shows the life of students in the city, and Vaibhav's efforts to get into IIT by cracking the JEE Advanced examination. It also stars Jitendra Kumar, Ahsaas Channa, Alam Khan and Ranjan Raj in prominent roles.^[1]

Saurabh Khanna, the creator of the show, said that he aims to change the popular narrative surrounding Kota and IIT preparation in Indian pop culture to a more positive one via the show.^[2] The series premiered simultaneously on TVFPlay and YouTube from 16 April to 14 May 2019. The series received a generally positive response from critics, praising its monochrome setting, realism, and the major technical aspects of the series.^[3]

Revolution2020

 Revolution Twenty20

Introduction:

“Once upon a time, in small-town India, there lived two intelligent boys.

One wanted to use his intelligence to make money.

One wanted to use his intelligence to start a revolution.

The problem was, they both loved the same girl.”

“Revolution 2020 – a story about childhood friends Gopal, Raghav and Aarti who struggle to find success, love and happiness in Varanasi. However, it is not easy to attain these in an unfair society that rewards the corrupt. As Gopal gives in to the system, and Raghav fights it, who will win?” (Blurb on the last cover-page)

Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition is a 2011 novel by Chetan Bhagat. Its story is concerned with a love triangle, corruption and a journey of self-discovery. R2020 has addressed the issue of how private coaching institutions exploit aspiring engineering students and how parents put their lifetime's earnings on stake for these classes so that their children can crack engineering exams and change the fortune of the family. While a handful accomplish their dreams, others sink into disaster.

The author stated that the novel is based on the "rampant corruption" apparent in the Indian educational system (Firstpost)

Characters in the Novel:

1. Gopal Mishra - One who wanted to use his intelligence to make money - who ultimately joins hands with corrupt politician to walk on the path of corruption and starts private engineering college, Ganga Tech College in Varanasi.

2. Raghav - One who wanted to use his intelligence to start a revolution - who ultimately runs his own news paper 'Revolution 2020' to bring in change in society and make nation free from corruption. He has cracked JEE and AIEEE and joins BHU-IT instead of famous IITs or NITs so he can pursue journalism along with engineering. He follows his passion to be a journalist who can bring in 'change' in society rather than opt for an easy job in multination company or public sector company like his father who was IITian and works as engineer in BHEL.

3. Aarti - daughter of IAS office who is District Magistrate of Varanasi and love interest of both, Gopal and Raghav.

Visit this page for long list of all other characters in the novel . . . (Click here)

Thematic Study:

The novel 'R2020' deals with the theme of Love, Corruption, Ambition and Revolution.

Click here to read in detail about these themes.

Narrative Technique:

Chetan Bhagat narrative technique has a sort of method which he follows in most of his novels. His signature style is to stat with Prologue and end with Epilogue. He himself appears in these prologues-epilogues and listens story from one of the characters of the novel - and then allows him to tell the story in fist-person narration.

Can we apply

Gérard Genette

's narratology to this novel? 

(Click here to read more on narrative technique)

Popular Literature

Undoubtedly, Revolution Twenty20 belongs to the genre of 'Genre Fiction'. It is part of popular literature. It represents popular contemporary culture of India.

Read more about the characteristics of Popular Literature.

Check your understanding of the novel

Appear in an online test to check your understanding of the novel R2020

Additional Resources

1. An online talk by Prof. Om P. Juneja on 'Chetan Bhagat'

2. Shashi Tharoor - Review of One Night @ the Call Center

3. Shashi Tharoor - Review of Revolution 2020

4. Social and Academic Scene in Chetan Bhagat

5. Pritish Nandy - Review of Revolution 2020

6. Hindutva Capitalism - Archana Prasad

Parkinson's Law

 What is Parkinson's Law of Productivity?

If you want to read more on time management and Parkinson's Law, click these links. . . 

A Beginners Guide To Parkinson’s Law: How To Do More Stuff By Giving Yourself Less Time

Parkinson’s Law – Why You Waste Time and 5 Ways to Avoid it

One more interesting video on Parkinson's Law

Introduction to Digital Humanities

Prof. Dilip Barad

Presentation

Digital Humanities: An Introduction from Dilip Barad

Video Recording of the session with the students of Amity University, Jaipur

References

Admin, Dhai. “Nirmala Menon on Marrying Technology and the Humanities.” DHARTI (blog), October 9, 2020. https://dhdharti.in/2020/10/09/nirmala-menon/.

“Arts and Humanities Research Computing.” Accessed November 26, 2021. https://digitalhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/.

“Bichitra :: Online Tagore Variorum :: School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.” Accessed November 25, 2021. http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php.

“Course | Electronic Literature | EdX.” Accessed November 26, 2021. https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:DavidsonX+D004x+3T2015/home.

DHARTI. “DHARTI.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://dhdharti.in/.

Medium. “DHARTI India.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://dharti-india.medium.com.

Dr. Kalyani Vallath. Cultural Studies Terms: Digital Humanities NEW AREA IN RESEARCH IN ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VcXXgmY9Rg.

Elijah Meeks. An Introduction to Digital Humanities - Bay Area DH, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvZToQSX244.

“Events – Arts and Humanities Research Computing.” Accessed November 26, 2021. https://digitalhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/events/.

INDIAN MEMORY PROJECT. “HOME - INDIAN MEMORY PROJECT - FAMILY PHOTOS & NARRATIVES.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/home/.

edX. “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-digital-humanities.

Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. “The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature.” Routledge & CRC Press. Accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Experimental-Literature/Bray-Gibbons-McHale/p/book/9781138797383.

Koehler`, Adam. “Composition, Creative Writing Studies, and the Digital Humanities.” Bloomsbury. Accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/composition-creative-writing-studies-and-the-digital-humanities-9781472591968/.

“Mendeley Chrome Extension - Google Search.” Accessed June 9, 2022. https://www.google.com/search?q=mendeley+chrome+extension&oq=mendeley+chrome+extension&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l2j0i22i30l2j0i390l3.6881j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

Moral Machine. “Moral Machine.” Accessed November 29, 2021. http://moralmachine.mit.edu.

Partition Archive, 1947. “Www.1947partitionarchive.Org |.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/.

“Project Madurai.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://www.projectmadurai.org/.

“Projects – Arts and Humanities Research Computing.” Accessed November 26, 2021. https://digitalhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/projects/.

Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Cyberspace Textuality : Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999. http://archive.org/details/cyberspacetextua0000unse.

Serious Science. Digital Humanities - Jeffrey Schnapp, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYRExzsRC9w.

T, Shanmugapriya, and Nirmala Menon. “Infrastructure and Social Interaction: Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities in India.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 014, no. 3 (September 25, 2020).

Wolfreys, Julian. “Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century.” Accessed November 29, 2021. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-introducing-criticism-in-the-21st-century.html.

Metaphysical Poetry

1. Metaphysical Poets:

Metaphysical poet, any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne, the chief of the Metaphysicals. Others include Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley as well as, to a lesser extent, George Herbert and Richard Crashaw.

Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech.

Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and ’40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In this essay Eliot argued that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a “dissociation of sensibility,” which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet “metaphysical” was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to “abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.” At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting “the metaphysics” and for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.” Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them “the metaphysical poets,” and the term has continued in use ever since. Eliot’s adoption of the label as a term of praise is arguably a better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets themselves; his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets’ debt to lyrical and socially engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character of their writing. (J.E. Luebering)

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 greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance. (Click here to read more)

2. Explore Metaphysical Poetry

Samuel Johnson - Metaphysical Poets

• 1 History of Metaphysical Poetry
• 2 Who Were the Metaphysical Poets?
• 3.1 Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
• 3.2 Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
• 4 Examples of Metaphysical Poems
• 
  

3. Video Resources

 

About John Donne

  

4. Analysis of Poems

Analysis of 'Death'

Analysis of 'Flea'

Analysis of 'The Sun Rising'

Analysis of 'Ecstasy' - Another analysis

Analysis of 'The Collar'

Analysis of 'To his Coy Mistress'

5. Online Test - Check your understanding