1. "The Collar" for an example of this chaotic and rather disordered form.

Metaphysical poetry was popular around the same time as cavalier poetry. Where the cavalier poets wrote about love and parties and living lives of excess, the metaphysical poets were much more serious and particularly witty.

Metaphysical poetry was not popular at the time it was written, but enjoyed a strong following in the 20th Century with the help and admiration of T.S. Eliot.

Dryden and Dr. Samuel Johnson thought...

...that these writers were too concerned with showing how clever they were.

And whatever their motivation, metaphysical poets wrote very sophisticated material:

...[expressing] themselves in elaborate intellectualized images (often called "conceits").

Conceits were actually extended metaphors. Rather than simply comparing two dissimilar things, as was the case with a simple metaphor, a conceit would introduce an idea and then carry the comparison on—extending it beyond the initial comparison.

In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely conceptual, and thus tenuous, relationship between the things being compared.

For example, one of John Donne's most famous conceits is a poem called "The Flea." Donne (during youthful years, before the serious years of religious dedication that would follow) wrote his poem to convince a woman to sleep with him. His argument was slightly convoluted...and certainly wove a flimsy and tenuous fiber of reasoning with which to convince her. In essence, he told the young lady that if they were both bitten by the same flea, their blood was mingled, making them intimately acquainted, so she should not resist going to his bed—for theirs would be like a marriage bed. (She did not agree.)

Metaphysical poetry allowed the author to write, and in selecting specific words, play word games with them in his poem.

The metaphysical poets wrote both love poems and religious or meditative lyrics.

In some of these poems, there was actually the "application of religious images and ideas to human love, and vice versa."

So metaphysical poetry was often written in the form of conceit: a fancy, clever extended metaphor in which the author plays games with words and means. They were sometimes love poems, or lyrics reflecting one's religious theology. Religious components were applied sometimes to "human love."

The term "metaphysical poets" was coined in the 18th century to describe a style of poetic writing found in many late sixteenth and seventeenth century writers that combined intellectual speculation, especially religious, but also philosophical and scientific, with highly wrought extended metaphors and sensuous imagery. The most typical writer of the school was John Donne (1572-1631); others include George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-1674), Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), and Richard Crashaw (c. 1612-1649). They typical used highly complex syntax and made novel connections, often between philosophic and scientific ideas on the one hand and human emotions on the other. Their poetry was often metrically irregular, syntactically compressed, and used striking and unusual phrases and words. A good example of an extended metaphysical conceit is John Donne's use of alchemy in his "A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day":

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Probably the best way to begin researching and writing about the Metaphysical poets is to examine the poets individually. The major poets associated with this seventeenth century British movement include by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. Their work is characterized by use of extended and often erudite metaphors that often exemplify “wit”, a combination of cleverness and irony. In their poetry, the philosophical, scientific, and emotional are often fused together, providing a reading experience that engages both mind and fellings of the readers. One of the works that most influenced our appreciation for their poetry was a seminal essay by T.S. Eliot:

http://personal.centenary.edu/~dhavird/TSEMetaPoets.html

It was via Eliot that the metaphysicals influenced much of modernism. The links below, and searches in the MLA International Bibliography, should give you good starting points for writing your 3000-word treatment.

The term metaphysical comes from the Greek words meta, which means after, and physica, which means physics; thus, metaphysics deals with questions that are beyond physics or beyond science. Metaphysical poetry, therefore, is poetry that is characterized by conceits; intellectual, philosophical, and complicated thoughts and expressions; strange imagery; paradoxes; religious, spiritual, and mystical themes; and other topics that analyze the nature of life, existence, and reality.

In his 1779 book Life of Cowley, the English author, poet, playwright, and literary critic Samuel Johnson shared a list of several seventeenth-century British poets whom he called "metaphysical poets," including John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. Johnson criticized these poets for their tendency to express their intellectual capacity and complex thoughts, or their "learning endeavors" and "heterogeneous ideas."

To show their learning was their whole endeavour. … The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Later on, it was American poet and essayist T. S. Eliot who pointed out that all poets, not just the metaphysical poets, have heterogeneous ideas that they combine with different concepts within their poetry, including Johnson himself.

In his 1921 essay "The Metaphysical Poets," Eliot explained how metaphysical poetry is difficult to define due to its complexity and indirectly praised the metaphysical poets for managing to both unite thought and feeling (unification of sensibility) and to separate intellectual thought from emotion (dissociation of sensibility).