Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits.
Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below
Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.
If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has been often
thought, but was never before so well expressed", they certainly never
attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in
their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope's account
of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural
dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of
language.
If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as
wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious,
is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that
which he that never found it wonders how he missed; to wit of this
kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often
new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they
just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders
more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.
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