"The Metaphysical Amorist" by J.V. Cunningham

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The "Plain Style" -Epigrams -"Stoner" by John Williams -Stanzaic asymmetricity -Wacky rhyme schemes as evidence of revision -Stanzaic palindromes -The triplet as the couplet of couplets -Ladies (feminine endings) last -The curious case of iambic tetrameter -A gloss of glose -Plato, the worst third-wheel ever, returns -Earthy kids -"Love" as heuristic -Western love poets as pseudo-incels -Christianity is Platonism for the masses -Do we ever really know the ones we love? -Plato gets dumped, again -Hume slides in the DMs, gets curved -Duns Scotus lookin like a snack tho -Scotistic realism -Plato's epistemology in the Theaetetus -Amor Vincit Philosophia

Text of the poem:

The Metaphysical Amorist

You are the problem I propose, my dear, the text my musings glose: I call you for convenience love. By definition you’re a cause inferred by necessary laws— you are so to the saints above.

But in this shadowy lower life I sleep with a terrestrial wife and earthy children I beget. Love is a fiction I must use, a privilege I can abuse, and sometimes something I forget.

Now, in the heavenly other place Love is in the eternal mind the luminous form whose shade she is a ghost discarnate, thought defined. She was so to my early bliss, she is so while I comprehend the form my senses apprehend, and in the end she will be so.

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, her whom my mind infers I know. The one exists in time and space and as she was she will not be; The other is in her own grace and is She is eternally.

Plato! you shall not plague my life. I married a terrestrial wife. And Hume! She is not mere sensation in sequence of observed relation. She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!— I know her in both ways at once. I knew her, yes, before I knew her, and by both means I must construe her, and none among you shall undo her.

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Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /) Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u) Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /) Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u) Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u) Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /) Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u) Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)