‘Metaphysical poetry’ is a problematic term: it is broad and the phe-nomenon it denotes has blurred borderlines. In the eyes of some of the leading figures within classicist aesthetics, this description seemed pejorative, suggesting poems that were too detached from the rules of rationalised discourse, and often invoked contradictory ideas. T.S. Eliot pointed this out in his essay The Metap…