The metaphysical poets were a loose group of 17^th century British lyric poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell,   Richard Crashaw,  Henry Vaughan, George Chapman and  Abraham Cowley who, despite the absence of a coherent school and organized platform, evinced a radically new sensibility steeped in contemporary cultural ethos, religious sensibility  and metaphysical concerns.  Inventiveness, brevity, concentration, wit, irony, paradox, stylistic maneuvers, abrupt and unconventional beginnings, shocking themes, epigrammatic language,  metrical harshness, sophistication, intellectual quality, simple verse forms, lack of images of nature and allusions to classical mythology, roughness, violence of decorum, rigor, undercurrent of  Neo-Platonism, blending of secular and religious themes, learnedness, unified sensibility and cynicism were the traits of metaphysical poetry. It has been evaluated as a reaction against the smooth and sweet tones of 16th-century verse and an attempt to situate the English lyric firmly within the new tradition of Protestantism which attached importance to matters of individual conscience in religious matters, as opposed to the dogmatism of the Roman Church. The emphasis on individual experience in relation to love poetry was also an important element of Protestant religious experience.  Even though many contemporary critics held hostile views on metaphysical poets, T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921)  helped bring their poetry back into favor.