Art as a device of affecting the modern conceptions of truth:

The malleability of truth in the writings of the ‘Metaphysical Poets’

Septelici Gheorghe (s3461912)

Arts, Culture and Media
The Early Modern European Continuum
Lecturer: prof. M. Stöhr
Date: 02-07-2019
Contents:

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………... 1

I. Classical conceptions of truth (Alétheia)………………………………………………... 3

II. Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Alétheia and Plato’s allegory of the cave………... 4

III. Nietzsche on truth as metaphors……………………………………………………….... 5

IV. Shklovsky’s ‘Art, as Device’ and its relation to truth…………………………………… 7

V. Metaphysical poets: stylistic properties and the misunderstanding of the term

‘metaphysical’…………………………………………………………………………... 8

VI. Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’ and John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ ………………... 9

Conlcusion………………………………………………………………………….................... 11

Works cited……………………………………………………………………………………... 13

i. Primary sources……………………………………………………………………... 13

ii. Secondary sources…………………………………………………………………... 13

Introduction
Alétheia - the Greek word that is closest to our modern definition of 'truth' - is a concept
that has been of interest to humans for millennia. Throughout history it took on different
meanings and different degrees of signification for us. As a philosophical object of study it can
be traced back to the Pre-Socratics, as in, for example, the group of Pre-Socratics named the
Sophists, whose conception of truth was determined through the lens of the subjective human
perception. The Sophist Protagoras is known for famously stating that man is the measure of all
things. Perhaps it was with them that the idea of truth being a subjective matter began.
Philosophers that came after them, such as Plato and Aristotle, dismissed this idea believing that
the theory of the Sophists came from materialistic aspirations. In Plato's view, claiming that
things are true or false according to one's subjective perception meant that that claim in itself
could be easily refuted on the basis that it is false. This idea was problematic for Plato, because
he did believe that there are things that are true and things that are not true and a human's task is
to reveal to himself/herself the essence of truth in its purest form. Plato expressed this idea in his
famous allegory of the cave, where one, realizing that he or she is looking at the Shadows, or, as
Plato also called them, at the of the Forms, understands that they are mere representations or
imitations of an Idea, and that the essence of these Ideas resides beyond the imitations. In the
20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger revisited Plato's famous analogy.
Heidegger's contributions to this theory came from an ontological perspective trying to connect
the notion of Truth with the notion of Being (as in the state). Through this he attempted to
demonstrate that in Plato a transformation of the notion of truth happened, and a new tradition of
thinking about this concept began. Friedrich Nietzsche, another German philosopher, refuted the
existence of any notion of truth whatsoever. In his seminal work from 1873, called ‘On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, Nietzsche compares truth to metaphors. He claims that every
object existing in the external world is perceived by human beings and given a name according
to their personally made nomenclature in a way that ignores the unique instance of the given
object, and which only serves their need to socially integrate with each other. He discusses truth
in connection to concepts which have language at the base. Nietzsche argues that because they
have language at the base the human-made concepts have no relationship to the external world,
and they can only say something about the human relationship to this world. In Heidegger and
Nietzsche a common point about what constitutes truth can be found and that point will mark the
departure of this essay. That common point can be best illustrated through two quotes of the two
philosophers, one from the aforementioned essay of Nietzsche and one from Heidegger's essay
titled 'The Origin Of The Work Of Art'. To take it chronologically, Nietzsche was the first one of
the two to claim:

"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve
as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its
origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless
more or less similar cases--which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and
thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things."1

Here Nietzsche addresses the 'forgetfulness' to which humans are subjected on a regular basis
when they think of concepts and their relation to truth. Almost a century later, Heidegger, in the
same line of thought, says:

"What presents itself to us as natural, one may suspect, is merely the familiarity of a long-
established habit which has forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose. And yet this
unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and wonder. […] To be
sure, the familiar concept of the thing fits every thing. But it does not comprehend the essence of
the thing; rather, it attacks it."2

From these two ideas one may conclude that the making of truth is a human cultural
practice that develops in time and is subjected to change. This change can be brought by art, and
such was the endeavor in which the ‘Metaphysical poets’ engaged themselves in, consciously or
unconsciously. The Russian formalist thinker Viktor Shklovsky, in his essay 'Art as device',
claims that most human practices are subjected to what he calls 'automatization'. Automatization,
in his conception, is the process in which the unfamiliar is made familiar and habitual. He claims
that, because of our capacity for automatization, things lose their essence and art is one practice
that can make them feel real and new. The current essay will depart from the idea of what
constitutes truth in Nietzsche and Heidegger's conception, and through the theory of Shklovsky
demonstrate how using art as a device for meaning-making can affect our understanding of
concepts and make them unfamiliar and novel to us again. As case studies, John Donne’s ‘The
Flea’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’ will be analyzed, also in the broader picture of
the metaphysical ‘school’ which they were part of, since their poetry was imbued with wit and
guided by the aspirations of bridging together concepts that have nothing in common, in order to
produce this feeling of 'ostrannenyie' and novelty mentioned in Shklovsky.

Classical conceptions of truth (Alétheia)

An inquiry into the nature of truth is perhaps better facilitated by the exploration of its
etymological roots. Alétheia, the Greek concept which is closest to our modern understanding of
truth, comes from a bigger family of words related to it, among which are: atrekes, nemertes,
adolos, ortos, apseudos, etymos and etetymos. In some of these words a pattern can be observed,
which is the presence of the prefix ‘a’ at the beginning. “The most common interpretation of this
lexical phenomenon”, says the Polish scholar Jan Woleński in his work titled ‘Alétheia in Greek

1
See Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth And Lies In a Nonmoral Sense’, p. 249
2
See Heidegger’s 'The Origin Of The Work Of Art', p. 7
thought until Aristotle’, “is to consider ‘a’ as a sign of privativum, that is, as a negative noun or
adjective.”3 Alétheia is composed of three parts: a+ léthe+suffix. In this equation the core of the
word, léthe, comes from the Greek léthein - 'to escape notice, be unseen, unnoticed', and lithe -
'forgetting, forgetfulness'. Thus, the prefix ‘a’, as mentioned earlier in its role of privativum,
reverses the meaning of the above-mentioned words to not be unseen, not be unnoticed or not
forgetting. This is the archaic way in which alétheia was used. For the major philosophers (or
schools of philosophy) of the Greek antiquity this concept came to mean different things. The
Sophists, for example, believed that truth is essentially subjective. They did not believe in
universal truths. One of the principal representatives of the afore-mentioned school of thought,
Protagoras, famously claimed that ‘man is the measure of all things’. This subjective view was
criticized by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Since the Sophists were ‘traveling
teachers’ they were thought to look only for monetary profit and the development of correct
rhetoric that would aid in winning an argument, having no real interest in the profoundness of
philosophy. Socrates, who came out of the Sophist school, had a totally different view on the
matters of truth. He practiced a dialectical method of inquiry into philosophical matters guided
by a question-answer format, believing that knowledge and truth can only be revealed to the
individual through dialogue. All in all, what is known to us about Socrates’ thoughts today came
from Plato, one of his dedicated students. Plato himself delved into an exploration on truth in his
seminal work ‘The Republic’, perhaps most substantially in his allegory of the cave. The central
argument in that story is that humans are usually deceived by their senses in ascribing
truthfulness. Plato believed that in the external world there is another layer of truth, which in his
conception was the world of Ideas, a world unavailable to human senses. Aristotle, Plato’s
disciple, disagreed with this theory. He believed that knowledge came from experience in the
real world and is something that is available to humans through conscious reflection on the said
experience. This mapping of how the notion of truth travelled through time is important for this
essay first and foremost because it shows that this concept always was and still is a struggle for
philosophers. The tension, it seems, always arose from two extremes clashing: either truth was
thought to be an universal thing, individual from human perception, or it was something that was
purely constructed by the human mind, being inherently volatile and subjective to change.
Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Alétheia and Plato’s allegory of the cave
Previously mentioned Jan Woleński says in the essay cited above that the conception of
truth in the 20th century was strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger’s investigation on the
subject. First it is important to mention that ontologically Heidegger read the concept of Alétheia
in its archaic sense as ‘unhidedness’. In analyzing the analogy of the cave proposed by Plato,
Heidegger champions the idea that the said analogy marked the point in which a shift in the
understanding of the concept of truth happened. This shift was marked by thinking of truth as
‘correctness of vision’ instead of ‘unconcealment’ or ‘unhidedness’. In his interpretation of Plato
analogy Heidegger first makes the point that truth as unhidedness is still very much present in the
story. Taking the visual character of the story as departure point, with the image moving from the
shadows to the fire and to the outside of the cave, he argues that alétheia is in the first place

3
See Jan Wolenski ‘Aletheia in Greek thought until Aristotle’, p. 341
invoked here carrying the meaning of ‘unhidedness’. Just, he mentions, another meaning for
truth is violently brought to the fore of Greek thought which consists now in the ‘correctness of
vision’ or orthotes in Greek. Through this analysis Heidegger claims that Plato produced a shift
in the Western tradition of thinking and created ‘metaphysics’ as we came to conceive it in the
modern period, it being entirely reliant on subjectivism. This dichotomy of seeing truth as
unconcealment and correctness of vision was criticized by Drew A. Hyland in an essay from
‘Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato’, where he argues that in
conceiving of truth the two terms can not be separated from each other. He says:

“The issue is, does Socrates’ occasional reference to the importance of “correct looking”
constitute the “change in the essence of truth” that Heidegger claims? I think it does not. It seems
rather than the importance of correct looking is implicit from the beginning in any possible
notion of truth as unhiddenness. How, for example, can truth be wrested from hiddenness to
unhiddenness unless it is brought to unhiddenness to someone who looks correctly?”4
In later works on the question of truth Heidegger seems to subscribe to this opinion, but
never making it explicit. Nonetheless his interpretation of Plato’s analogy of the cave is
important for this paper in that it points out the rise of subjectivism in Western thought when
discussing truth. Stemming from Heidegger’s preoccupation with the concept of Being it can be
said that the distinction that he makes between nonconcealment and correctness of vision has one
important feature that differentiates them at the base: “As nonconcealment truth is still a
fundamental feature of beings themselves. As correctness of "vision," however, it becomes the
designation of man's relationship to beings.”5 In this case the transformation that occurs can be
described as a move from an ontological truth to epistemological truth. Bernd Magnus goes
further in depth in regards to this transformation. According to him, after Plato, Heidegger saw
this mutation in the conception of truth as crucial because it came to show that there are different
modes of thinking about alétheia, and epistemological thinking is just one of them. Thinking
about ontological truth Heidegger says that for the Greeks it meant that the objects’ Being was in
a state of concealment to beings and arriving to alétheia meant to unconceal the Being of the said
objects to beings. From an epistemological perspective truth was marked by the imperative of the
human perception in relation to an object. The relationship of the knower to the known became
primordial. This epistemological mode of thinking marked a long history of thinking about truth
in an unilateral way. Heidegger believed that truth in the ontological sense, as connected to the
notion of Being, fell into oblivion in Western metaphysics since Plato. This forgetfulness of
ontological truth and rise of epistemological truth was further accentuated by St. Thomas
Aquinas and later by Descartes, Heidegger claims. To support his claim he cites both from
Aquinas and Descartes as follows:

4
See ‘Questioning Platonism’, p.61
5
See ‘Heidegger’s Metahistory’, p.76
“As evidence of this it is sufficient to cite the principal propositions which are characteristic of
the perpetual molding of the nature of truth within the principal ages of metaphysics. A statement
of St. Thomas Aquinas holds true for Medieval Scholasticism: V eritas proprie invenitur in
intellectu humano vel divino (Quaestiones de veritate; qu. 1 art. 4, resp.), "truth is really
encountered in the human or in the divine understanding." It has its essential place in the
understanding. Here truth is no Ionger aletheia but homoiosis (adequatio). At the beginning of
the modern age Descartes sharpens the above quotation by saying: veritatem proprie vel
falsitatem non nisi in solo intellectu esse posse (Regulae ad directionem ingenii; Reg. VII, Opp.
X, 396). "Truth or falsehood in the genuine sense cannot be anywhere else except in the
understanding alone."6

Nietzsche on truth as metaphors

Perhaps this is a good moment to turn the page and delve into Nietzsche’s inquiry upon
what truth is, since, as will be presented, Nietzsche also believed that the conception of truth in
Western history is strongly connected to the human perception and the tools that we developed
for designating it. Nietzsche wrote his essay ‘On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense’ in 1873, but
it was only published in 1896. In this essay he addresses epistemological questions on truth and
language, trying to describe the way in which concepts are formed and their role in the formation
of our idea of truth. Nietzsche starts by laying down a short fable-like story that seeks to make
the point that human knowledge occupies only a short time span in the macro-history of the
world. Nonetheless, he claims, humans, through the gift of the intellect, have made it seem like
the essence of the world’s existence is contained within the existence of the human species. In
these regards he sees the intellect as a deceiving tool which humans have abused when talking
about the world around them. Aside from the deceiving factor Nietzsche claims that, rising from
the need of humans to integrate socially with each other, the intellect has been put to use in
creating a uniformly valid designation for things, conceptualizing them as instances of truth.
Here he invokes the role of language, mentioning the incapacity of this artificial tool to express
the real state of things, instead managing to create metaphors for them. This instead reveals
humans’ relationship to things rather than saying anything about the truthful nature of them, he
claims.7 In this essay Nietzsche insists on asserting that our way of conceptualizing the world
misses out on the unique instances of each object with which we interact or try to describe. In
one paragraph he says:

“Every word becomes a concept as soon as it is supposed to serve not merely as a reminder of
the unique, absolutely individualized original experience, to which it owes its origin, but at the
same time to fit countless, more or less similar cases, which, strictly speaking, are never
identical, and hence absolutely dissimilar. Every concept originates by the equation of the
dissimilar. Just as no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other, certainly the concept "leaf' is

6
Ibid. p.78
7
See Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth And Lies In a Nonmoral Sense’, p.247
formed by arbitrarily dropping those individual differences, by forgetting the distinguishing
factors, and this gives rise to the idea that besides leaves there is in nature such a thing as the
"leaf," i.e., an original form according to which all leaves are supposedly woven, sketched,
circled off, colored, curled, painted, but by awkward hands, so that not a single specimen turns
out correctly and reliably as a true copy of the original form.”8

Thus, in concluding this line of thought, he says that the error to which the human mind is
subjected is that it takes the metaphors of objects which it personally makes up as the objects
themselves.
Another important idea in Nietzsche’s text is the idea of ‘forgetfulness’. After
establishing that concepts are just tools invented by humans through the means of language in
order to facilitate communication and social cooperation, he says that we eventually forget about
this creative factor and take them as something preexisting. After a long use of these concepts
they become designators of truth when in reality they should not since their existence is first and
foremost motivated by our need to integrate with each other in society rather than say anything
truthful about the world around us. In Nietzsche’s own words, he accentuates:

“What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a

sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and
adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions
about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory
impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as
coins.”9

Concluding from Nietzsche’s assertions, truth can, in terms of human perception, be rather
understood as a creative act than an universal entity existing outside of the human mind. If it is
so, then an understanding of where this drive of creating truth comes from comes into question.
Nietzsche in his essay can not provide another explanation than the social factor that is fueling
our need to create generally accepted principles in order to coexist as a species. Perhaps delving
into Viktor Shklovsky’s essay ‘Art, as device’ will bring a new perspective upon this inquiry.
Shklovsky’s ‘Art, as Device’ and its relation to truth
Shklovsky’s essay has a few central terms at its core such as: automatization,
defamiliarization (ostrannenye) and art. In the following paragraph I will try to illustrate the
relationship between these three concepts and the relevance of this relationship for the current
essay. To begin with, the concept of automatization in the way Shklovsky understands and uses
it needs to be revealed. Automatization for him means the process in which a unique, novel

8
Ibid. p.249
9
Ibid. p.250
action becomes habitual and thus, automatic. He gives the example of using a pen for the first
time or speaking a new language. When performing these actions for the first time we are struck
by a feeling of unfamiliarity and our perceptual sense are heightened. The more we do it the
more used we get to the experience until, he says, these phenomena become so familiar to us that
our level of engagement with them decreases substantially. This is when, for example, we start
shortening sentences or words in a native language, while still being able to understand each
other. In his text Shklovsky makes the difference between recognizing and seeing. The
difference might not be self-evident at first, but what he means by this is that recognition
happens when we perceive things without seeing them, such as when one drives a car or cleans
the house without being fully consciously engaged in the activity. Seeing on the other hand
happens when a things makes us look at it again, carrying a sense of seeing it for the first time.
He develops this idea in an often quoted passage from ‘Art, as device’, which says as follows:

“And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats
away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. If the complex life of
many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never
been. And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make
a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a
knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "enstranging" objects
and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual
process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of
experiencing the process of creativity.”10

Here he asserts the role of art in making us see things instead of just recognizing them. In this
passage Shklovsky clearly says that art is a device (he calls it tool here), but how can art used as
device create this sense of novelty that is necessary for deautomatization? His answer is
‘ostrannenye’, a term that has been translated to English as defamiliarization or estrangement. In
translating Shklovsky’s text this term has been interpreted in different ways, usually erroneously.
Some thought of it as an analogy for metaphor, while others thought that defamiliarization meant
anything novel in art, such as putting an artwork in a nonconventional place or in an unusual
position etc. But when interpreting the term ostrannenye one should not forget that Shklovsky
comes from a Formalist background and the interests of the formalists were mainly in the
intrinsic devices of the artistic act. Thus, in this sense, ostrannenye is produced solely through
the use of the artistic devices. Since Shklovsky himself was a literary critic he was interested in
how these devices are used in literature. In relation to poetry he said that when investigating
poetic speech one comes to realize that it is the “hallmark of the artistic” in the sense that poetic
speech is speech taken out of “the domain of automatized perception”.11

10
See Viktor Shklovsky’s ‘Art, as device’, p.5-6
11
Ibid. p.12
 Although he believed that the task of art is to defamiliarize the observer he did not
believe that within a work of art all artistic devices should be employed in a novel way
simultaneously, since then the work would have no foundation to be called necessarily a work of
art. Thus, some conventions still are to be respected. At the end of the essay, while pondering
upon this, he says:

“There is indeed such a thing as "order" in art, but not a single column of a Greek temple fulfills
its order perfectly, and artistic rhythm may be said to exist in the rhythm of prose disrupted.
Attempts have been made by some to systematize these "disruptions." They represent today's
task in the theory of rhythm. We have good reasons to suppose that this systemization will not
succeed. This is so because we are dealing here not so much with a more complex rhythm as
with a disruption of rhythm itself, a violation, we may add, that can never be predicted. If this
violation enters the canon, then it loses its power as a complicating device.”12

Metaphysical poets: stylistic properties and the misunderstanding of the term ‘metaphysical’
Before diving into the realm of metaphysical poetry the term ‘metaphysical’ should be
defined, since it must not be confused with the philosophical branch of metaphysics. Although
the metaphysical ‘school’ of poetry deals with some themes found in metaphysical philosophy
such as time, space, knowing etc., it is not defined by it. The American poet Sona Raiziss, in her
only book of literary criticism called ‘The Metaphysical Passion: Seven Modern American Poets
and the Seventeenth-Century Tradition’ accentuates that such a distinction should be mandatorily
made before delving into discussions about metaphysical poetry. Thus, she provides both the
definitions for the branch of philosophy and for the adjective used to describe a period in literary
history. The dictionary definition for metaphysics as in the branch of philosophy begins with the
etymology of the word which originates from the two Greek words: meta (beyond) and physikos
(relating to external nature). It also mentions that this branch is concerned with the analysis of
experience For verse, the definition of ‘metaphysical’ paints a different picture: “Designating, or
pertaining to, a so-called "school" of 17th-century poets, whose works abound in elaborate
subtleties of thought and expression; so-called by Dr. Johnson. Donne, Cowley, Herbert, and
Crashaw are of this group.”13 It is clear then that metaphysical used to designate the poetry of
Donne, Cowley and others refers strictly to the style and the qualities of their poetry; it defines a
way in which poetry was written at a certain time in history. As pointed out by Joane Bennett in
‘Five Metaphysical Poets’: […] "metaphysical" refers to style, not to subject-matter; but style
reflects an attitude to experience.”14

12
Ibid. p. 14
13
See ‘The Metaphysical Passion’, p.4
14
Ibid. p.7
 So if the poetry of Donne, Cowley and others was called metaphysical due to its style, the
next logical step here is to inquire which qualities essentially formed the style in which these
poets wrote. Perhaps the first important thing to mention in terms of stylistic devices used in
metaphysical poetry was the use of conceits. A conceit is defined by Helen Gardner as “a
comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness. ... All comparisons discover
likeness in things unlike; a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness
while being strongly conscious of unlikeness”.15 The notion of conceit is strongly connected to
another element defining the ‘metaphysical’ style which is wit, also known in discourses on
metaphysical poetry as agudeza. Agudeza is characterized by sharpness of mind. It resides in the
ability of making ingenious associations between things that apparently have nothing in
common. T.S. Eliot in his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, quoting Johnson, remarks on this
aspect of metaphysical poetry that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
together.”16 Even though this type of poetry was characterized by sharpness of mind and
ingenious juxtapositions of things unlike, Eliot claims that it was rather clear in meaning. The
phrasing used by these poets, according to him, denoted “simple and elegant” language.17 This
linguistic property also defines the poetry of the metaphysical ‘school’. Eliot, though, also says
that, despite the fact that the language was simple and clear, the sentence structure in
metaphysical poetry is far from simple. He does not see that as a bad thing, though, claiming that
it is a sign of “fidelity to thought and feeling”.18 These are some of the common elements found
in the poetry of Donne, Crashaw, Marvell and others who have been ascribed to the said ‘school’
of metaphysical poetry. As a small parenthesis, it is important to say that the reason why the
word school was used between apostrophes until now is because literary scholars still disagree
on naming it a school of poetry or literary movement, since at the time of its existence it was not
identified as such by the above-mentioned poets. Nonetheless, some critics ascribed this term to
them, because of the aforementioned similarities in style.
Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’ and John Donne’s ‘The Flea’
This last chapter will focus on analyzing two famous poems of two equally famous poets
of that period in order to illustrate the points made previously on style, but also in order to
reference back to Shklovsky’s theory on how their poetry produces the effect of ostrannenye. I
will also touch upon how their use of universal concepts, such as love or time, in unique ways
refers back to Nietzsche and Heidegger’s theory of truth being a creative act, making the
instances of these concepts unique and novel to the reader.
First, Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To his coy mistress’ will be analyzed. In this poem the
lyrical self is addressing to his/her lover to seize the moment and profit of their limited time on
Earth. In order to make my points an excerpt from the poem will be of help:

15
See A. A. Parker’s ‘"Concept" and "Conceit": An Aspect of Comparative Literary History’, p. xxii
16
See T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p.194
17
Ibid. p.195
18
Ibid. p.196
 I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.19(7-18)
As can be noted, the conceit here resides in the way in which the notion of time is distorted. The
human time is stretched to unconceivable limits for a human life, such as when the lyrical self
says that they will love their partner ten years before the flood and their partner can refuse until
the conversion of the Jews, which in Christianity is considered the end time event. The lyrical
self then goes on even further with stretching time to their own desire to express their love for
their partner, mentioning timespans of centuries and millennia, which is, again, an inconceivable
span for the short human life. As T.S. Eliot pointed out in one of the previously cited quotes, the
language of the poem is indeed simple and clear. By comparing the human time to eternal time
Marvell manages to create the feeling of defamiliarization that Shklovsky talks about. The reader
is forced to stop and ponder upon how love distorts the feeling of time, and also is able to
experience time in a different way than he/she does usually, being engulfed in the modern
routine. Aside from the use of literary devices, though, such as conceits, Marvell’s respects
traditional conventions of writing poetry, such as rhyme and rhythm, which reaffirms
Shklovsky’s idea that a work of art still needs some sort of order in order for the defamiliarizing
element to produce the right effect.
John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ is an erotic poem about a man and a woman who get ‘stung’ by
a flea, which sucks blood from both of them, marking the linking of their blood inside the body
of the flea. The poem is an allegory of a sexual union between the man and the woman, with the
man seemingly trying to convince his lover to let this union happen. The comparison of their
sexual union to their blood linking within the body of the flea is the first conceit used by Donne.
Further in the poem he writes:

19
See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress.
 This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.20 (12-15)

In this passage he uses another conceit by supposedly comparing their marriage temple and its
walls to the insides of the flea’s body. In this poem, too, the language is not sophisticated, Donne
using common concepts such as the flea, blood, marriage – all of them very earthly elements.
Structure-wise, though, the reader should keep a sharp eye for the implications intended by
Donne. It can be noted that the last three verses of each stanza either strengthen or clarify the six
lines that precede them. This stylistic techniques denote the metaphysical poets’ quest for
agudeza. Going back to Shklovsky, it can be said that the comparison between the union of the
two lovers in the body of a flea with sexual union produces indeed a defamiliarizing effect,
while, again, the poem generally preserves conventional rules of writing.
These two poems are viable examples of showing that universal concepts such as love
and time, as mentioned by Heidegger and Nietzsche, are constructed concepts with a dynamic
nature. Marvell and Donne managed to compare them to things unlike or distort them in ways
that would not be possible in the ‘real world’, which in turn makes the reader think in novel ways
about these concepts, and that is the ultimate capacity of art as Shklovsky believed.
Conlcusion
Establishing the trajectory of the notion of truth in Western thought was useful for this
essay to demonstrate that it is a concept which philosophers have wrestled with for millennia,
without ending up with a conclusive answer on what it is. Thus, it seems, the only sure thing that
can be said about truth is that it is a dynamic concept and that it takes different meanings and
degrees of signification for humans depending on the times and the environment which they live
in. Art is one cultural practice which has the potential of affecting the change in understanding
or, better said, trying to understand what truth is. It should not be forgotten though that the way
through which the Western civilization has tried to explain what truth is until now was language
and when language is at play it is often forgotten that it is also a construct of the human mind.
This means that, as Nietzsche and Heidegger argued, making sweeping statements about truth is
an exercise of self-deception. Things eventually become habitual to us, and at some point we
forget that the way we perceive them is created by our mind which has the mechanism of
automatizing repeated patterns. The error that follows is that we start taking them as natural and
our perception changes from seeing them to recognizing them without paying too much
attention, as Shklovsky said in his essay. In this matters art comes to aid, and, as was hopefully
demonstrated through the examples of Donne and Marvell from above, if used right it has the
potential of refreshing our perception and make us see again. Nietzsche claimed that language

20
See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea.
did not have any connection to the external world. I will end this with a quote by the previously
mentioned poet, Sona Raiziss, which touches upon the nature of metaphysical poetry and which,
perhaps, would have made Nietzsche rethink his statement. Sona says:

"Metaphysical poetry is born where the points of two cones coincide: one cone
represents the real world and the other the metaphysical world, both contracted to a tiny circle or
a point. Thus the images and the meanings give the sense of looking two ways”.21

21
See ‘The Metaphysical Passion’, p.32
Works cited

i. Primary sources:

1. Heidegger, Martin, Julian Young, and Kenneth Haynes. 2002. Off The Beaten Track. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Sander L Gilman, David J Parent, and Carole Blair. 1989. Friedrich
Nietzsche On Rhetoric And Language. New York: Oxford University.
3. Shklovskiĭ , Viktor, Benjamin Sher, and Gerald L Bruns. 2009. Theory Of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey
Archive Press.

ii. Secondary sources:

1. Bennett, Joan, and Joan Bennett. 1989. Five Metaphysical Poets. Cambridge: University Press.
2. Eliot, T. S. 1999. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber.
3. Hyland, Drew A. 2004. Questioning Platonism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
4. Magnus, Bernd. 2014. Heidegger's Metahistory Of Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
5. Parker, Alexander A. 1982. ""Concept" And "Conceit": An Aspect Of Comparative Literary
History". The Modern Language Review 77 (4): xxi. doi:10.2307/3726577.
6. Raiziss, Sona. 1952. METAPHYSICAL PASSION E-BOOK. Pennsylvania: The University of
Pennsylvania Press.
7. "The Flea By John Donne". 2019. Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea.
8. "To His Coy Mistress By Andrew Marvell". 2019. Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress.
9. Woleński, Jan. 2004. "Aletheia In Greek Thought Until Aristotle". Annals Of Pure And Applied
Logic 127 (1-3): 339-360. doi:10.1016/j.apal.2003.11.020.