This essay concludes the study of a metaphysical sentience in Renaissance poetry which I carried forward in two earlier books, Literary Love, 1983, and The Metaphysics of Love, 1985. Wit focuses an interest in the rendering of our ambiguous state when sensation and idea interfuse in the language itself, opening an absolute consequence in the momentary encounter and registering the shock of metaphysical predicaments posed in the play of the senses.

Versions of poetic wit evolved in Europe from the fifteenth century on. To ask how these versions bear upon the wit of the English metaphysical poets is to seek the qualities which distinguish that mode of wit. The enquiry is of more than literary concern. Wit followed out divergent expectations of the created order, as of poetry. When metaphysical wit simply ceased to have point in the later seventeenth century, an entire way of thinking had changed.

A few expositors of English metaphysical poetry have allowed that the poems owe their general character to a distinctive metaphysical apprehension. The argument that follows engages with the discussions which serve to further it, notably those by James Smith, S. L. Bethell, W. J. Ong and Robert Ellrodt. In contesting an issue with these savants I implicitly acknowledge a debt and a shared – if unfashionable – concern.

I have modernised the spelling of poems in English but otherwise followed the form of my source-texts.