John Dryden and Samuel Johnson on metaphysical poets

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The notions of “metaphysical poetry” and “metaphysical poets” had been adopted keenly by the historians of Polish literature by the middle of the 20th century. It was caused partly by the inadequacy of the term “mannerism,” related primarily to the works of art but also (disputably) to certain texts of poetry and prose hardly fitting the popular paradigms connoted commonly with the ideas of the so-called “Renaissance” or the so-called “Baroque.” What is more, the generation of Polish authors born around 1550, such as Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński or Sebastian Grabowiecki (inspired by Gabriele Fiamma and his sonnets), had been termed "Polish metaphysical poets" because of the religious and philosophical topics of their poems rather than because of their witty conceptism. Nowadays, the modern Polish literary criticism shows a tendency to apply the same notion to any poetical text that goes deep intellectually or spiritually. This occurs despite the fact that the adjective “metaphysical” originally implied, first of all (and not without some irony), the intellectual sophistication of the poetical discourse complicated adequately to the paradoxical images of the reality. By referring to Dryden and Johnson, it seems indispensable, therefore, to clean the term up from its specious, modern and sometimes ahistorical connotations.