In this important and influential anthology Dame Helen Gardner has collected together those seventeenth-century poets who, although never self-consciously a school, did possess in common certain features of argument and powerful persuasion which have come to be described as 'metaphysical'. Contains amongst others: John Milton, Thomas Carew, Sir William Davenant, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Southwell, John Donne and Richard Crashaw.