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British Poetry

Notes None of this had been true of earlier generations, who had tended to view the human and the
natural as opposite poles, with the natural sometimes exercising an evil power to degrade and
dehumanize those who were to drawn to it. The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to
emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature. It came to be felt that to muse by a
stream; to view a thundering waterfall or even confront a rolling desert could be morally improving.
Much of the nature writing of the 19th century has a religious quality to it absent in any other
period. This shift in attitude was to prove extremely powerful and long-lasting, as we see today in
the love of Germans, Britons and Americans for wilderness.
It may seem paradoxical that it was just at the moment when the industrial revolution was destroying
large tracts of woods and fields and creating an unprecedentedly artificial environment in Europe
that this taste arose; but in fact it could probably have arisen in no other time. It is precisely people
in urban environments aware of the stark contrast between their daily lives and the existence of the
inhabitants of the wild who romanticise nature. They are attracted to it precisely because they are
no longer unselfconsciously part of it. Faust, for instance, is powerfully drawn to the moonlit
landscape outside his study at the beginning of Goethe’s play largely because he is so discontented
with the artificial world of learning in which he has so far lived.

2.4 Conceit

In literature, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or
entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a
conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison. Extended
conceits in English are part of the poetic idiom of Mannerism, during the later sixteenth and early
seventeenth century.

What do you mean by the term conceit in literature?

2.4.1 Metaphysical Conceit

In English literature the term is generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets, an
extension of contemporary usage. In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely
conceptual, and thus tenuous, relationship between the things being compared. Helen Gardner
observed that “a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness” and
that “a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly
conscious of unlikeness.” An example of the latter would be George Herbert’s “Praise,” in which
the generosity of God is compared to a bottle which will take in an infinite amount of the speaker’s
tears.
An often-cited example of the metaphysical conceit is the metaphor from John Donne’s “The Flea”,
in which a flea that bites both the speaker and his lover becomes a conceit arguing that his lover has
no reason to deny him sexually, although they are not married:
Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

When Sir Philip Sidney begins a sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression “My true-love
hath my heart and I have his”, but then takes the metaphor literally and teases out a number of
literal possibilities and extravagantly playful conceptions in the exchange of hearts, the result is a
fully formed conceit.

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