Metaphysical poets English poetry. Colin Burrow's opinion, on the other hand, is that the term 'Metaphysical poets' still retains some value. For one thing, Donne's poetry had considerable influence on subsequent poets, who emulated his style. And there are several instances in which 17th-century poets used the word 'metaphysical' in their work, meaning that Samuel Johnson's description has some foundation in the usage of the previous century. However, the term does isolate English poets from those who shared similar stylistic traits in Europe and America. Since the 1960s, therefore, it has been argued that gathering all of these under the heading of
Metaphysical nihilism Metaphysical nihilism Metaphysical nihilism is the philosophical theory that there "might" have been no objects at all—that is, that there is a possible world in which there are no objects at all; or at least that there might have been no "concrete" objects at all, so that even if every possible world contains some objects, there is at least one that contains only abstract objects. To understand metaphysical nihilism, one can look to the subtraction theory in its simplest form, proposed by Thomas Baldwin. The idea is that there is a possible world with finitely many things. One can thus