Metaphysical poets the Metaphysical style. The choice of style by the young Milton and the young Dryden can therefore be explained in part as contextual. Both went on to develop radically different ways of writing; neither could be counted as potentially Metaphysical poets. Nor could Alexander Pope, yet his early poetry evidences an interest in his Metaphysical forebears. Among his juvenilia appear imitations of Cowley. As a young man he began work on adapting Donne's second satire, to which he had added the fourth satire too by 1735. Pope also wrote his “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717) while
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