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 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