The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London. He met a fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, who had already published several volumes of poetry, and Pound helped to get Eliot’s work into print. Although his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), sold modestly (its print run of 500 copies would take five years to sell out), the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, with its picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important literary figures of his day.

He never returned to America (except to visit as a lecturer), but became an official British citizen in 1927, the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England. His last major achievement as a poet was Four Quartets (1935-42), which reflect his turn to Anglicanism. In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He died in London in 1965.

Summary

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.

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 nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired.

Eliot begins by reminding us that it’s difficult to define metaphysical poetry, since there is a considerable difference in style and technique between those poets who are often labelled ‘metaphysical’. We have explored the issue of defining metaphysical poetry in a separate post, but the key frame of reference, for us as for Eliot, was Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century.

Eliot quotes Johnson’s line about metaphysical poetry that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Eliot’s response to Johnson’s censure, however, is to point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry. Indeed, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes:

His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Eliot 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.

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. 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.

Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry: reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was an Elizabethan (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 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 feeling are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience. This is where we come to his thesis concerning the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which occurred in the seventeenth century.

‘Dissociation of sensibility’

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 do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’

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.

This watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented, for Eliot, by two major poets of the later seventeenth century: John Milton and John Dryden. 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. (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.)

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. 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).

In conclusion, Eliot’s essay was important in raising the profile of the metaphysical poets among his own readers: people who looked to Eliot for discerning critical judgement and viewed him as a touchstone of literary taste were inclined to go and reread the metaphysicals. This led to a tendency among critics of Eliot’s work to identify him as a latter-day metaphysical poet, a view which, as the poet-critic William Empson pointed out, isn’t borne out by reading Eliot’s work. Prufrock, the speakers of The Waste Land, and the Hollow Men don’t really speak to us in the same way as Donne or Marvell do: there aren’t really any elaborate and extended poetic conceits (central to the metaphysical method) in Eliot’s work.

So, this connection between Eliot’s own work and the work of Donne, Herbert, and others has been overplayed. (Empson was well-placed to point this out: his own poetry clearly bears the influence of Donne in particular, and Empson is rightly called a modern metaphysical poet for this reason.) However, Eliot himself encourages such a parallel at one point in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, when he writes that poets writing in modern European civilization must be difficult because the civilization is itself complex and various, and so the poet, to do justice to this complexity and variety, must become ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning’. Certainly, this statement is equally applicable to Andrew Marvell and T. S. Eliot.

 

  

Terry Eagleton’s Prose Style in Rise of English

 

Question: Discuss Eagleton’s Prose Style.

Introduction

The style is not mere decoration. It is rather a way of searching and explaining the truth. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. Since Terry Eagleton is the most renowned critic of modern English literature, his critical writing has a number of prominent features.

Dialectical Style

One of the key features of Eagleton’s critical prose is the brilliant inverse logical style. He intelligently considers social and cultural conflicts and raises the opposing arguments so strongly in the conflict that they burst and suddenly some unexpected insight or vision is revealed. In this way, the readers feel seemingly ridiculous and far-fetched assumptions. But immediately they discover how precise and reasonable the arguments are.

“In eighteenth-century England, the concept of literature was not confined as it sometimes is today to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing.”

The above sentence may be seemed positive but expresses the limited concept of literature since it was not creative and imaginative in the 18th century. Thus, the dialectical style is the soul of his prose style.

Lightening Opacity

Absolute ambiguity is one of the most permanent and attractive qualities in Terry Eagleton’s writings. It has helped him to be one of the most colorful and controversial figures in cultural politics today. When we examine his critical writings, we can see that no one explains critical theory with greater clarity than he does. The appeal of his work stems from the bold inquiry. He has introduced the origins and aims of English studies. This is meant that the function of criticism relates to the closely related and equally relentless questions. So, Eagleton’s style is unclear due to the riddle of the question. But whenever questions are solved, his idea shines. His “The Rise of English” is the paradigm of sheer audacity.

Historical References

Eagleton is an outspoken critic of his generation. His best-selling publication “Literary Theory: An Introduction” published in 1983 reflects the breadth of his theory of knowledge. In this book the second chapter entitled “The Rise of English” contains many historical references of literature. His knowledge includes criticism not only of British critics but of Europe, Russia, and America. It is important that Eagleton himself is not a historian but his concept of literature excels the historians. Therefore, he studies how English studies went through changes from adorable drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the venerable middle class and how it replaces religion to perform the ideological platform to enforce social bonding. This approach is certainly unique and has been dispatched in the dialectical style of Eagleton.

Humor

Most of the reversal comments in “The Rise of English” are humorous. In this work, Eagleton offers scathing assessments of various currents of criticism. While discussing the concept of value-judgment, he notes:

“Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was”.

This is a grossly overdone statement, but one should, by no means, ignore the educational or pedagogical problems of Eagleton’s style.

The Satirical Reversal In Arguments

Another technique often employed by Eagleton is the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments. He describes in detail a seemingly plausible case only to knock it down unexpectedly with a penetrating observation and expose it with faults. This technique is used to create a great effect in “The Rise of English”. When the critic satirizes the English short-lived poet and politician Ernest Dowson, it creates the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments.

Tiresome Extent

Pointless is not the staple of Eagleton’s prose. In fact, his style is clearer than most of the formal methods. But long stretches of text can be tiring. In spite of the tedious limitations, there is something different in his prose that can regenerate the text and the readers separately and independently.

Conclusion

Thus, writing in a style is accessible. Eagleton has specifically argued in the field of literary theory. His rhetorical skills are perhaps unequaled by contemporary critics. These are something that many critical theorists could benefit from studying.

 

Rise of English by Terry Eagleton

 

The Rise of English”- by Terry Eagleton

 

In eighteenth-century England, literature was considered to be that which conformed to the standards of ‘polite letters’, meaning that which embodied the values and tastes of the upper classes (usually).  After the bloody civil war of the previous century, literature became even more important in bringing the middle classes into unity with the upper classes.

 

Literature, in the modern sense, really emerged around the nineteenth century during the Romantic period; the idea that literature is something imaginative or inventive while prosaic writing is dull or uninspiring is a relatively new concept in history.

 

During the Romantic period, types of literature like poetry no longer were simply a technical way of writing, they had significant social, political, and philosophical implications (many major Romantic poets were political activists themselves).  The stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination was another emphasis finding its way into the concept of literature.  The rise of the ‘symbol’ also came towards the end of the eighteenth century; with it, various contradictory concepts could finally be captured together.

 

Literature, as defined by Eagleton earlier, IS an ideology.  Eagleton suggests that the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century was caused by the failure of religion, something he believes was a very simple yet powerful form of ideology that was above all else a pacifying influence.  Apparently, English literature worked as a suitable replacement.  English became a subject used to cultivate the middle class and infuse them with some values of the leftover aristocracy; thus, English literature became the new way to pacify the working and middle classes.  Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the masses from their present commitments and c0nditions; it was also a way to experience things or events that were not possible to experience in a person’s life.  English as an academic subject was nothing more than the poor man’s Classics.  In addition, English became the new vehicle for transferring the moral law, which was no longer taken from religion.

 

Because English was not exactly considered a ‘real’ subject, it was often given to the ladies of higher learning institutions when were now grudgingly admitting women; however, as the century drew on, English took on more of a masculine aspect.  It still took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally English literature came into power, mostly because of wartime nationalism.  The new subject was created by the offspring of the bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.

 

Now the study of English was ‘in’, and people may have wondered how it had ever been otherwise.  Deep and intense questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny.  Literature was also perhaps the only place where creative language was allowed to flourish.  In addition, those studying felt that they were a part of a larger movement that was moving civilization back to the way it should have been, as in the seventeenth century.

 

“Scrutiny” didn’t seek to change society in any way; rather, their goal was to withstand it.  Teaching children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of making them memorize pointless passages of literature.  Eagleton said that the Scrutiny project was “hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd.”  In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of the elitists.  The ‘organic’ society desired by Scrutiny was unobtainable, nothing more than a lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of the past.

 

Some types of English were considered more English than others, which ironically reminds one of the types of arguments given by the upper class before.  When T.S. Eliot came to England, he upgraded the status of the poets and dramatists while toppling Milton and the Romantics.  Literature becomes that which has the Tradition flowing through it; all poetry may be literature, but not all poetry may be Literature.  Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in light of the war, and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in poetry that would speak to a person’s senses rather than their intellect.  Many contradictions began showing up in the ideas that the ‘big wigs’ of Literature of that day came up with.

 

Practical criticism meant a method that was unafraid to take a text apart, but also assumed that you could judge literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from their cultural contexts.  Close reading also mean detailed analytic interpretation, but also seemed to imply that former methods of criticism read only three words per line.  Also assumed that any literary work could be understood in isolation from its context.

 

Richards, an advocate of modern science, felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such pseudo-questions, society would fall apart.  Poetry’s role is to supply such answers.

 

American New Criticism was deeply marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human impulses more effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too dissimilar from the old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will ensure the survival of the upper ones).  New Criticism was not too different from Scrutiny: it reinvented in literature what it couldn’t find in reality.  They came up with something called the Great Man theory of literature, which says that even if the author’s intentions in writing were recovered, they were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text.  At the same time, neither could the emotional responses of readers be confused with the poem’s true meaning.  Ultimately, reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing, a rejection of anything in particular.

Executive summary “The Rise of English” is an outstanding essay where Eagleton surveys how the concept of literature as we understand today has developed, how its studies have begun academically and how literary criticism in English has evolved. He discloses the capitalist motif behind using English as an academic discipline in British colonies. As a post-modern theorist, Eagleton elaborately discusses the drawbacks of New Criticism and paves the way forward to look at the literary texts with newer insight. However, in the essay “The Rise of English” he criticizes the theoretical development in the English up to the New Criticism phase.