Metaphysical poets was established, however, it was occasionally adopted by other and especially younger poets to fit appropriate circumstances. In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets" (1779–81), Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". This does not necessarily imply that he intended "metaphysical" to be used in its true sense, in that he was probably referring to a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne: He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires,
Metaphysical art legacy of Metaphysical painting influenced the work of Felice Casorati, Max Ernst, and others. Exhibitions of Metaphysical art in Germany in 1921 and 1924 inspired the use of mannequin imagery in works by George Grosz and Oskar Schlemmer. Many paintings by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and other Surrealists make use of formal and thematic elements derived from Metaphysical painting. Between the two World Wars in Italy there were numerous architectural vulgarisations of the metaphysical poetics of the "Piazze d'Italia", whose timeless atmosphere seemed to be congenial to the propaganda needs of the time. Squares of metaphysical flavor were built in