The Metaphysical Poets- edited version

Chapter: 1 Introduction Of all Western modernists, T S Eliot (1888-1965) has been the most influential through both his poetry and his literary criticism.This American-English poet playwright,and literary critic can be undoubtedly said to be the paragon of the modernist establishment. Much of his work is a pioneering force in the modernist movement, which gave him a position of high respect, even by those who didn't necessarily imbibe his literary technique or philosophy. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965. Thomas 2 For many, T.S. Eliot is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to under gird and order atomized modern experience — collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning. Eliot was initially influenced by the American New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More and his early ideas owed a great deal to the emphasis on tradition,classicism and impersonality. He is also indebted to the 19th century French poets and particularly Ezra Pound and the imagist movement. His critical prose bore an ambivalent relationship to the claims of New Criticism and set the aesthetic standards for this particular formalist movement. The journal Criterion, established by Eliot was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s. Eliot’s wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work – the precocious “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the seminal The Waste Land (1922), and the later Four Quartets (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece – has made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent generations (Tate). Eliot’s theory claimed that major works of art both past and present ,formed an “ideal order” which is continually modified by subsequent works of art. The central implication here was that contemporary writers should find a common ground with tradition even as they extend it. Eliot was able to continue the humanists’ onslaught against the Romantics —brought Dante,the Metaphysical poets, and French symbolists into prominence, thereby further redefining the European literary tradition. Eliot’s contribution to the critical canon are the ideas of the notion of poetic ‘impersonality’— further expounded in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”. The notion of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ extensively developed in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, and his notion of ‘objective correlative’ set forth in his essay on Thomas 3 Hamlet . Many of Eliot’s critical notions and terms were developed and explained primarily in his first volume of criticism called The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. .His criticism gave new direction to the course of English literary criticism.Arnold’s orthodoxy was challenged by Eliot’s critical ventures (KS and Varghese 38). In order to have a better grasp of the essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, its good to have a detailed understanding about the above said critical concepts Eliot introduced through his essays. i) The “impersonal” notion of poetry Eliot advanced delineates the importance of the poet not expressing a personality but a precise formulation of thought and feeling such as is lacking in “ordinary” experience ii) The notion of “objective correlative” refers to objects and events in the external world being used to express complexes of thought and emotion. According to Eliot, a “dissociation of sensibility” had set in after the 17th century ,that entailed a bifurcation of the various human faculties such as reason and emotion which was earlier integrated within a unified sensibility((KS and Varghese 39). Who Are The “Metaphysical Poets” The coinage of the term metaphysical poets for the first time is alluded to the literary critic John Dryden in his criticism of his contemporary John Donne. Dryden derisively comments the following in his work, Discourse Concerning Satire (1693) “He affects the metaphysics,not only in his satires,but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign”. In their own time, however, the epithet “metaphysical” was Thomas 4 used pejoratively: in 1630, way before Donne, the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to “abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities”(qtd in Britannica). At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne and later in 1779 Samuel Johnson extended the term “metaphysical” from Donne to a school of poets,in the critique he incorporated in his “Life of Cowley.” The name is now applied to a group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether or not directly influenced by Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry— Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley and in religious poetry —Herbert, Vaughan,Crashaw, and Traherne (Abrams 158). Of all these poets, each of whom has his special claim, we can consider here only Donne and Herbert, who in different ways are the types of revolt against earlier forms and standards of poetry. In feeling and imagery both are poets of a high order, but in style and expression they are the leaders of the fantastic school whose influence largely dominated poetry during the half century of the Puritan period.(Long 208) What does the term metaphysical mean in relation with Metaphysical Poetry There are certain meanings of Metaphysical that one can now apply but for two hundred years it was rather a term of vague abuse. If one break it down into its two component parts, world of ‘physic’ for the renaissance was the world of actual science ,those things that happened in the material world but also phenomena such as the physical attraction we might feel for one another. The Greek word ‘meta’ means ‘after’ in this sense, so meta was in a sense after those things in the physical world. The world of ideals , the abstract qualities, the very essence and nature of being itself and for renaissance too it was the world of the divine — all those things which take place beyond the natural world. Also the Greek word meta mean ' along side’ or ‘with’ .So Thomas 5 there’s an important way this poetry explored those ideas, those essences, the senses of ideas of higher being, what it is to be in love, what is to be fundamentally human , through the process of the physical world. So they brought together the images , metaphors , analogies from the everyday world of experience but used them to direct to these higher, more abstract questions, indeed and often towards the divine, the nature of one’s relation with the spiritual (Bragg and Healy) “The Metaphysical Poets” by T.S Eliot Eliot had studied the canon of great English poetry, and his essay on the metaphysical poets shows that he identified his own approach to poetry with these poets from the seventeenth century. This is somewhat strange, when one analyse it more closely.Although the metaphysical poets were a distinctly English ‘movement’ or ‘school’ (Eliot uses both words, while acknowledging that they are modern descriptions grouping together a quite disparate number of poets), Eliot also draws some interesting parallels between the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets and nineteenthcentury French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired. Eliot’s article on the metaphysical poets is actually a review of a new anthology— Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Eliot uses his review of Grierson’s anthology, however, as an opportunity to consider the value and significance of the metaphysical poets in the development of English poetry and also includes poets like Aurelian Townshend and Lord Herbert of Cherbury ,thereby expanding the list metaphysical poets compiled by professor Grierson. Eliot justifies the position of these school of poets with a unified sensibility — which later on dissociated in the 17th century. One of the main feature which unite the so called Metaphysical poets is this quality of a unified sensibility they Thomas 6 all held. However ,the poets said to belong to this school also span out to different periods of English literature —John Donne, the de facto father of the Metaphysical poets, belonging to the Jacobean age, Herbert in the Caroline age, Cowley,Vaughan, and Marvell writing during the Puritan age, and William Congreve in the Neoclassical period, adds up to their differences. In the first few paragraphs of the essay Eliot seriously contemplates on this very idea of distinction of Metaphysical poets from the rest of the poets of the time. He says that it is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile or other conceit ,which is common to all the poets and the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. According to Eliot only Cowley and Donne employed devices which could be characteristically called ‘metaphysical’—they used figures of speech to the furthest degree to which ingenuity can carry it. To make the idea more clear, Eliot gives examples of Cowley comparing the world to a chess board in “To Destiny” and Donne liking two lovers to a pair of compasses in “A Valediction”. Instead of mere explication of content of comparison, these poets develop a rapid association of thought which requires an agile reader to grasp the meaning of the poem. In Eliot then goes on to substantiate this point by quoting a few lines from “A Valediction : On Weeping” by Donne. Donne here uses brief words and sudden contrasts. The world is compared to a globe or round ball which is nothing before the workman copies the map on it,this very act elevates the position of the round ball,which was ‘nothing’ to ‘all’.Donne then compares this well constructed image of a globe to a tear drop of the lover who weeps overcome by the sadness as her man is departing to a long journey.The tear reflects the world of the lovers, their tears mix and finally Donne introduces the image of a deluge made by the overflowing tears which dissolves the parting lover’s heaven. Eliot remarks that this connections were forced upon by the poet. Thomas 7 Telescoping of images and multiplied associations found in the metaphysical poets can be attributed to the dramatists of this age, primarily to Shakespeare.The intimacy of the soliloquies of Shakespeare,and the vitality in Wesbster and Tourneurthe is reflected in the poems of Donne. The key frame of reference for Eliot in the essay is Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century. Dr.Johnson remarked that, the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked together by violence ,when it came to metaphysical poetry. To point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry, and to substantiate the argument further, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and argues that, whilst such lines as these are different in degree from what the metaphysical poets did in their own work, the principle is in fact the same. Johnson is ‘guilty’ of that which he chastised Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and other metaphysical poets for doing in their work. Another example Eliot provides is “An Exequy to His Matchless Never to Be Forgotten Friend” by Henry King. An extended comparison is used in the poem . The idea and simile becomes one in the stanza where bishop illustrates his impatience to see his young dead wife Anne,under the figure of a journey. King here turns and speaks again to his wife. Full of the idea that she will rise from her grave warm and breathing, the same young wife that he lost, he begs her to wait for him in the churchyard, by her empty tomb. “Stay for me there; I will not fail To meet thee in that hallow Vale. And think not much of my delay I am already on the way”. The tone suddenly changes, and the rest of the poem is a series of variations on the now-triumphant thought that he is sure to join her. Now he uses yet another metaphor : he compares himself to a ship sailing westward--to death and her. “Each minute is a short degree ,And every hour a step towards thee. At night when I betake to rest, Next morn I rise nearer my West Of Thomas 8 Life, almost by eight hours' sail, Than when sleep breathed his drowsy gale.” The poem ends by King entreating his dead wife to listen to his pulse softens as he slowly marches to sit down by her —joining her in afterlife (The Washington Post) Eliot then goes on to consider the style of numerous metaphysical poets. He points out that, whilst someone like George Herbert wrote in simple and elegant language, his syntax, or sentence structure, was often more complex and demanding.Eliot considers a few stanzas from Lord Herbert’s “An Ode Upon a Question Moved Whether Love Should Continue Forever” and remarks that there is nothing in the lines that fit Dr.Johnson’s general observation about metaphysical poetry other than the possible exception of a simile about stars.Key to Herbert’s method is ‘a fidelity to thought and feeling’, and it is the union of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry which will form the predominant theme of the remainder of Eliot’s essay.he goes on to contrast an compare Marvell’s Coy Mistress and Crashaw’s Saint Teresa—one producing the effect of abruptness and the other exuding calm ecclesiastical solemnity with long lines despite both poems written in the same metre. Eliot also urges us to not define metaphysical poets based on their faults as Johnson did but to shed the prejudice and see them as a direct normal development of the normal. Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was a Jacobean (Donne wrote many of his greatest love poems in the 1590s, when he was in his early twenties), Eliot compares Donne’s ‘analytic’ mode with many of his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and George Chapman, who wrote verse drama for the Elizabethan stage.These playwrights were all influenced by the French writer Montaigne, who had effectively invented the modern essay form in his prose writings—We can arguably see Thomas 9 the influence of Montaigne, with his essays arguing and considering the various aspects of a topic, on the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, where we often find a character arguing with themselves about a course of action: Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ is perhaps the most famous example. The key thing, for Eliot, is that in such dramatic speeches – the one he cites is from George Chapman’s drama – there is a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’, i.e. reason and emotion are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience.The idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous critical theories. The key statement made by Eliot in relation to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is arguably the following: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Or, as he had just said, prior to this, of the nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Browning —they did not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose,rather ruminated on them. Eliot further elaborates on this by delineating how the seventeenth century poets who were the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth possessed a mechanism to of sensibility that could devour experiences—they were simple ,artificial or fantastic like their predecessors. However after these poets a dissociation of sensibility set in the seventeenth century,Which was later aggravated by the influence of two of the most powerful poets of the time—Milton and Dryden. Eliot interprets this watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented through them. Both poets did something consummately, but what they did was different. Dryden’s style was far more rational and neoclassical; Milton’s was more focused on sensation and feeling. While the language got refined the feelings became more crude—This can be seen in Thomas Gray,Collins,Johnson, and even Goldsmith..The second effect of this Thomas 10 dissociation was later reflected during the romantic age, where poets revolted against the ratiocinative and descriptive. In other words , they were preoccupied with reflection thoughts they felt by fits ,which were unbalanced in nature. Eliot suggests that there was an attempt to unify the sensibility by Keats’ “Hyperion” and and in Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” but their struggle was fruitless and the later poets like Tennyson and Browning ruminated.. It is worth noting, although Eliot doesn’t make this point, that the Romantics – whose work rejected the cold, orderly rationalism of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and, before him, John Dryden – embraced Milton, and especially his Paradise Lost. Wordsworth references Milton in several of his sonnets, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in Milton. In other words, whereas poets like Donne, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt their thoughts with the immediacy we usually associate with smelling a sweet flower, later poets were unable to feel their thought in the same way. The change – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, i.e. the moment at which thought and feeling became separated – occurred, for Eliot, in the mid-seventeenth century, after the heyday of metaphysical poetry when Donne, Herbert, and (to an extent) Marvell were writing. Eliot concludes ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ by drawing some comparisons between the metaphysical mode and nineteenth-century French Symbolists, to demonstrate further that the ‘metaphysical’ was not some entirely distinct variety of poetry but that it shares some core affinities with other schools of poetry. This idea is demonstrated through a few lines from two of Jules Laforgue’s poems. The first one is something which looks very much like the metaphysical conceit,similar in use of obscure words. The English translation is as follows; Thomas 11 O diaphanous geranium, spell warriors, monomane sacrileges! Packaging, shamelessness, showers! O presses Harvests on great evenings! Layettes at bay, Thyrses deep in the woods! Transfusions, reprisals, Relevailles, compresses and the eternal potion, Angelus ! cannot be any more Of nuptial debacles! nuptial debacles!(1-10) But Laforgue himself was also capable of writing in a simple style like: “she’s faraway,shes crying.the big wind is lamenting.” Eliot also quotes from Le Voyage of Baudelaire to prove this point. He then returns to Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets’ techniques and metre, and argues that, whilst we should take Johnson’s critique seriously, we should nevertheless value the metaphysical poets and look beyond poets like Cowley and Cleveland —who are Johnson’s chief focus. The point of this essay is not a matter of whether Eliot’s assessment of the comparative value of the techniques of the English metaphysical poets and the state of contemporary English versification was right or wrong. By and large, Eliot is using these earlier poets, whom the Grierson book is more or less resurrecting, to stake out his own claim in an ageless literary debate regarding representation versus commentary. . Whatever Eliot’s judgments in his review of Grierson’s book on the English metaphysical poets may ultimately reveal, they are reflections more of Eliot’s standards for poetry writing than of standards for poetry writing in general. Thomas 12 Works cited Tate, Allen ,et al. “T.S. Eliot”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Sep. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot. Accessed 5 November 2021. K.S, Saju and Varghese. Literary Criticism and Theory.Macmillian Publishers India, 2019. NeoEnglish. TS Eliot: Select Critical Concepts, https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/t-s-eliot-select-criticalconcepts/. Accessed 31 October 2021. Long, William J. English Literature: It’s History and It’s Significance For the Life of The English Speaking World. Rupa Publications India; First edition. 4 October 2015 Bragg, Melvin and Tom Healy. “The Metaphysical Poets.”Spotify,https://open.spotify.com/episode/6rXjde5dTZxEupIoPCN9k6?si =C4TRo Dn5Qai5ZaqVxcZ9yg&utm .22 October 2021. Thomas 13 Thomas 14 Thomas 15