Conceit (literature)
In literature, particularly poetry, a conceit refers to an elaborate and often extended comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things, serving as a literary device to create deeper meaning. Two prominent forms of conceit are the Petrarchan and metaphysical conceits. The Petrarchan conceit, popularized by the Italian poet Petrarch in the 14th century, typically involves exaggerated comparisons to idealize a beloved's attributes, influencing English love poetry significantly during the 16th century. Conversely, the metaphysical conceit, associated with 17th-century poets such as John Donne, features more complex and intellectually imaginative comparisons that often bridge diverse fields like science and philosophy, creating a unique blend of thought and emotion.
While the use of conceit reached its zenith during these periods, it later faced criticism for being overly elaborate and artificial, leading to its decline in popularity by the 18th century. However, some poets, including Emily Dickinson and later French symbolists, revived the concept, demonstrating its enduring influence. T. S. Eliot's 1921 essay on metaphysical poets played a significant role in re-evaluating the use of conceits, highlighting their power in merging thought with feeling. Overall, conceits remain a fascinating aspect of literary analysis, reflecting the evolution of metaphorical language across different historical contexts.
Conceit (literature)
In literature and, more often, poetry, a conceit is an elaborate comparison likening a subject to something else, either inanimate or living. The Petrarchan conceit, so called because the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch used exaggerated comparisons to praise the physical attributes of the beloved or the agony of the lover, became a convention of English love poems of the sixteenth century. The metaphysical conceit, a more complex, intellectually imaginative comparison, is associated with a group of seventeenth-century English poets, including John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughn.
Regardless of type, a literary conceit is a comparison, often an extended one, that may involve a metaphor, a simile, hyperbole, or oxymoron. The two types of conceit are associated with particular periods in English literary history.
The Petrarchan Conceit
From 1327 to 1368, Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, wrote 366 poems about his love for Laura de Noves, a woman he allegedly met in Avignon. The poems were collected in a canzoniere or song-book. Petrarch’s influence on English poetry began with Geoffrey Chaucer and can be traced at least through the nineteenth century, but it was particularly strong during the sixteenth century. Courtier and poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, who read Petrarch during his travels, determined to introduce the beauty of Italian poetry to the English language. He did this through direct translation of some of Petrarch’s sonnets and through original poems that took Petrarch’s Canzoniere (published posthumously in 1470) as a starting point. In both translations and original work, Wyatt included the convention of the conceit. “My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness,” a translation of Canzoniere 189, the lover’s state is compared in detail to a ship laboring in a storm. Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” originates with Petrarch’s Canzoniere 190. Wyatt uses Petrarch’s conceit of the deer, but he departs from the original in significant ways. Petrarch’s deer is white and her jewels include topazes, representing chastity, and diamonds, representing steadfastness. Wyatt’s deer, an earthier creature, is not white, and her jeweled collar contains no topazes. Anything but tame, Wyatt’s doe is “wild for to hold.”
Wyatt and his contemporary Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, set the pattern that other poets would follow for the remainder of the century. The blazon conceit, a series of comparisons that cataloged the body of the beloved, was particularly popular. Such catalogs can be found in Sonnet 9 of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591); Sidney uses a Petrarchan conceit in which Stella’s face is “Queen Virtue’s court” and the parts of her face parts of the divine palace. In Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595), the speaker likens the body of his starry sapphire-eyed, apple-cheeked, cherry-lipped love to a “pallace fayre.” In Sonnet 64 of Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), the speaker’s love’s breath is sweeter than an entire “gardin of sweet flowres,” which he enumerates.
Parodying the Petrarchan Conceit
The metaphorical hyperbole of such conceits served a dual purpose: it praised the beloved in fanciful terms and it displayed the poet’s wit. The practice became so popular that use became abuse, and hackneyed comparisons became common. Such a state left the Petrarchan conceit ripe for parody. Shakespeare—who had unironically used the Petrarchan conceit elsewhere—in Sonnet 130, mocks the overused comparisons of the Petrarchan conceits by having the speaker refute conventional comparisons one by one. This speaker’s earth-bound mistress is no heavenly being. Her eyes are not remotely comparable to the sun, her hair is not golden, her cheeks are not rosy, and her breath is not perfumed. The closing couplet reveals the insincerity of tributes to a lady’s beauty based on the ideal rather than the real, and contrasts the speaker’s love for his lady whom he sees in all her humanness.
The Metaphysical Conceit
Eighteenth-century English writer and critic Samuel Johnson introduced the term “metaphysical poets” to describe a loose group of seventeenth-century poets that included John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughn, and others. Johnson reproved Donne and the other poets for ignoring natural harmony and violently linking together sometimes shockingly dissimilar objects. Metaphysical conceits are drawn from fields ranging from the ordinary to the esoteric, including science, mathematics, theology, and philosophy. Rooted in intellectual play, the comparison may control the entire poem. But the metaphysical conceit is more than the ability to make imaginative, ingenious associations. Metaphysical wit unites thought and feeling, and the metaphysical poem is an argument in which the conceit itself figures prominently.
Perhaps the most famous metaphysical conceit is Donne’s comparison of his soul and that of his beloved to the two legs of a compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” The compass to which Donne refers is a two-legged device used for drawing circles and for measuring distances on a map. Using a detailed comparison, the speaker crowns his argument that he and his love will be united spiritually even as his travel separates them physically with the claim that her soul is like the “fixed foot” of the compass that “leans” in the direction of the moving foot. Just as the parts of the compass remain joined even at the point of furthest separation, so will the lovers’ souls remain united, and just as the two feet of the compass are pulled together when the task is complete, so will the lovers be reunited physically when he returns from his travels.
Impact
After the seventeenth century, the conceit decreased in popularity. Johnson was not the only influential literary figure of the eighteenth century who found the device displeasing, and the romantics rejected it as too elaborate and artificial. It was still found in altered form in the work of particular poets such as Emily Dickinson, whose Poem 712 (“Because I could not stop for Death”) presents Death as a suitor driving a carriage in what is frequently described as a masterpiece of American poetry. The French symbolists, of whom Charles Baudelaire is probably best known, revived the use of conceits late in the nineteenth century.
It was T. S. Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)—a review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century—that restored Donne and company to a position of esteem. Eliot famously praised these poets for their fusion of thought and feeling and for the powerful effect of their unexpected comparisons.
Bibliography
Eliot, T. S. “Andrew Marvell.” Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt,1964. 292–304. Print.
Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, 1964. 281–91. Print.
Gardner, Helen. The Metaphysical Poets. 3d ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Print.
Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. Boston: Houghton, 2014. Print.
Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Ray, Robert H. An Andrew Marvell Companion. 1998. New York: Routledge, 2014. Digital file.
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