Eliot y Los Poetas Metafísicos

Dr. Rich ard Clarke LITS3001 Notes 09C

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T. S. ELIOT “THE METAPHYSICAL POETS” (1921) This essay, one which ends up being m ore a self-defence and a call to rethink the English canon, was written by Eliot in response to a recently published anthology of poetry, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poem s of the Seventeenth century: Donne to Butler, edited by Herbert Grierson, a collection described byEliot as a “provocation of criticism ” (241). As the title indicates, it was devoted to the Metaphysical poets, a group of 17 th century English lyric poets, nam ely John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell, who were not highly thought of and even ignored prior to their ‘rediscovery by critics such Grierson in the early Twentieth century andEliot’s intervention in particular. The term , Eliot points out, “has long done duty as a term of abuse or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste” (241). Their influence on Eliot was enorm ous, as a result of which he sought to canonise and reinsert them into the great tradition of English literary history which, he thought, had taken a wrong turn som etim e around the tim e of Milton, leadingpoetry in the direction of the Rom antics. Eliot’s goal here is to ask “to what extent the so-called m etaphysicals form ed a school . . . and how far this so-called school or m ovem ent is a digression from the m ain current” (241). Eliot begins by contending that it is “difficult to define m etaphysical poetry” (241) and to “decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses” (241). Itis hard, he says, to find a “precise use of m etaphor, sim ile, or other conceit, which is com m on to all the poets and at the sam e tim e im portant enough as an elem ent of style to isolate these poets as a group” (242). Donne and Cowley, he asserts, often used a “device which is som etim es considered characteristically ‘m etaphysical’; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of afigure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it” (242). Donne, for exam ple, com pares two lovers to a pair of com passes. Elsewhere, however, one finds “instead of the m ere explication of the content of a com parison, a developm ent by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader” (242). At other tim es, too, Donne m akes useof “brief words and sudden contrasts” (242), that is, the “telescoping of im ages and m ultiplied associations” (243). It was Johnson, Eliot rem inds us, who coined the term ‘m etaphysical’ in his discussion of Cowley in his fam ous Lives of the Poets. It was Johnson too who rem arked that the hallm ark of their poetry was that ‘the m ost heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.’Eliot stresses that Johnson’s point concerned the ”failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united” (243). Eliot claim s that a “degree of heterogeneity of m aterial com pelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s m ind” (243) is in all poetry, even Johnson’s, ironically. Though there is a “richness of association” (244-245), the “m eaning is clear, thelanguage sim ple and elegant” (245). However, the “structure of the sentences . . . som etim es far from sim ple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling” (245). Eliot contends that rather than trying to define Metaphysical poetry “by its faults” (245), we should adopt the “opposite m ethod: by assum ing that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were thedirect and norm al developm ent of the precedent age” (245). W e should consider “their virtue . . . som ething perm anently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared” (245). He thinks that Johnson “hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes that ‘their attem pts were always analytical’” (245) but failed to realise that “after the...