Do you think John Milton is a metaphysical poet?

The Metaphysical movement, which is said to have begun at
the start of the seventeenth century (1600s), preceded and overlapped John Milton's
writing career as he was born in 1608 and some of his earliest notable works were
written while in Cambridge around 1625-1626. Lists of Metaphysical poets include John
Donne (1572 – 1631), the most notable of all metaphysical poets, George Herbert (1593 –
1633) and Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678), who was younger than and secretary to John
Milton, but exclude John Milton.

According to the Academy
of American Poets, href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5662">Metaphysical poets
established a poetic mode that sought to unify thought and feeling in a meditational
style and to employ reason in delving into philosophical and spiritual subjects they
addressed in poetry. As the leader of the metaphysical poets, Donne centered
his poetry on his personal spirituality as it interacted with realism in describing
intimacy and with his analysis of what is now called human psychology. Though Milton
isn't labeled as a Metaphysical poet, his stylistics share commonality with
metaphysicalists on at least two points.

Firstly, Milton
adapted his religious beliefs to suit his own understandings and held a spiritual view
that reflected monism as he had adopted an animist materialist point of view. This
spiritual belief held that everything from angels to souls to bodies to stones is
composed of one single substance. Milton therewith solves the problem of mechanistic
determinism attributed to Hobbes and the duality of mind and body described by Plato and
Descartes.

Secondly, animist materialism, an approach to
philosophical and spiritual questions from a heterodoxly reasoned point of view, is a
key component of Milton's greatest work, Paradise Lost, while the
legions of Satan both eat and engage in acts of intimacy. These features of Milton's
work indicate an influence from the Metaphysical school, although critics don't
acknowledge Milton as one of the metaphysicalists.

One
reason that Milton is excluded is that while Milton shared at least these two points
with them, he was also intently focused on the practicalities of political and social
reform commentary as is confirmed by the pamphlets he wrote on many controversial topics
such as advocacy of divorce, opposition to episcopacy (church governance by hierarchy)
and opposition to reestablishing the monarchy.