Metaphysical Poetry: Article by T.S. Eliot

Presentation is designed to help students for better understanding of T.S. Eliot's article "Metaphysical Poetry". Eliot defines the "metaphysical" poets as the poets who had a unified sensibility, which allowed them to fuse together thought and feeling into a new poetic experience that the poets who followed them did not or could not imitate. Eliot sees the "metaphysical" poets as fully developed poets who advanced English poetry with their work.

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1. “ The Metaphysical Poets T.S.Eliot

2. Originally Eliot’s review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the seventeenth century: Donne to Butler, an anthology of metaphysical poems . This work revived the tradition of metaphysical poetry in the twentieth century and influenced many writers and critics . An account of the characteristic features of metaphysical poetry, the history of English poetry, his theory of the dissociation of sensibility and his recommendations for the poetry of the twentieth century.

3. T.S.Eliot’s assertion: the metaphysical poets such as Donne, Marvel, Crashaw, Vaughan, Lord Herbert, George Herbert, Cleveland, Bishop King and Cowley were in the direct current of English poetry and had not digressed from it . Efforts to correct the impression about the metaphysical poetry e.g.: Dr Johnson’s derogatory definition of the term “metaphysical” created. Rejects Dr Johnson’s complaint that in metaphysical poetry the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

4. Eliot’s observations and appreciations: Donne and King couple heterogeneous elements into unity with their poetic sensibility. Donne and Cowley expand figures of speech to logical extremes . Donne displays his genius in the use of brief words and sudden contrasts-telescoping of images and multiplied associations . a simple and pure language- a complex syntax

5. Continuation of Sixteenth Century Dramatists’ tradition. look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system and the digestive tracts. verbal equivalents to states of mind and feeling . mechanism of sensibilty to bring together disparate experiences and thoughts into new wholes .

6. Direct sensuous apprehension of thought or recreation of thought into feeling by John Donne. Eliot observes that “a thought to Donne was an experience .

7. Eliot complains: the poetic mode of the metaphysical poets was disturbed in the seventeenth century. Resulted into dissociation of sensibility. a cleavage occurred between thought and emotion during the seventeenth century.

8. Influence of Milton and Dryden aggravated the dissociation of sensibility and their merits overshadowed the presence of metaphysical poetry. led to the refinement of language but resulted in the crudity of thought and also sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. Keats and Shelley in the Romantic age and Victorians, Tennyson and Browning made feeble attempts to achieve the unification of sensibility.

9. Appeal to the twentieth century poets- become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more direct, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, languages into meaning . the modern poets should use conceits, obscure words and simple phrasing. they should be deliberately difficulty in order to match the modern civilization characterized by a great variety and complexity.