Metaphysical poets still young, introducing into it a string of Metaphysical conceits in the lines beginning “Most souls, ‘tis true, but peep out once an age” which in part echo a passage from Donne's “Second Anniversary”. By the time Pope wrote this, the vogue for the Metaphysical style was over and a new orthodoxy had taken its place, of which the rewriting of Donne's satires was one expression. Nevertheless, Johnson's dismissal of the ‘school’ was still in the future and at the start of the 18th century allusions to their work struck an answering chord in readers. During the course of the
Metaphysical poets was a fellow student at Christ's College, Cambridge, on whom the influence of the Metaphysical style was more lasting. In Milton's case, there is an understandable difference in the way he matched his style to his subjects. For the ‘Nativity Ode’ and commendatory poem on Shakespeare he deployed Baroque conceits, while his two poems on the carrier Thomas Hobson were a succession of high-spirited paradoxes. What was then titled “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” was included anonymously among the poems prefacing the second folio publication of Shakespeare's plays in 1632. The poems on Thomas Hobson were