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CHAPTER 1
[Introduction: On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry]
My purpose in these lectures is to arrive if possible at a systematic description of the commaon characteristics of the poetry of the Seventeenth Century in England commonly known as metaphysical, and further to seek for a definition of the nature of metaphysical poetry in general. It suits my purpose if the subject has, as I believe it has, a certain actuality and contemporary bearing. We have seen in the present century and increasingly within the last few years, an awakening of interest in this seventeenth-century poetry. However this arose, it undoubtedly contains besides pure literary appreciation, a consciousness or a belief that this poetry and this age have some peculiar affinity with our own poetry and our own age, a belief that our own mentality and feelings are better expressed by the seventeenth century than by the nineteenth or even the eighteenth. Donne is more frequently used as a critical measure than ever before. Even the obscurer poets receive recognition: last year the Nonesuch Press, which is a pretty good index of popular cultivated taste, produced a sumptuous edition of the poems of Bishop King. Contemporary poets are by their admirers likened to Donne or to Crashaw; some of them no doubt study these writers deliberately and elect to receive their influence; there are not wanting voices to declare that the present age is a metaphysical age.
This actuality of the subject does not merely make it fashionable; it is a subject upon which it is vital to have clear and distinct ideas. If the likeness exists, then it is valuable to understand the poetry of the seventeenth century, in order that we may understand that of our own time and understand ourselves.
If the likeness is only fancied, then it is worth the trouble to clear up the misconception, for the same reason. And if as is antecedently probable, the likeness exists in certain particulars along with utter dissimilarity in other particulars, then it will still more usefully clear up our notions about the seventeenth century and our own, if we can arrive at a proper analysis. It may reveal to us tendencies and attitudes in ourselves and our age of which we were conscious and which we must make up our minds either to forward or oppose. But in any case we should be able to find good reasons for our likes and dislikes in this age or any other.
And here it is necessary for me to point out, both in guidance towards the method to be adopted and in common modesty, that these lectures will not continue or develop the work of scholarship. I shall make use, with due sense of obligation, of the work of scholars, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Grierson, who have done so much to make the material available and to make possible a proper understanding of it. But my point of view is not that of scholarship, but that of literary criticism, and particularly that of one type of literary criticism. My attitude is that of a craftsman who has attempted for eighteen years to make English verses, studying the work of dead artisans who have made better verses. The interest of a craftsman is centred in the present and the immediate future: he studies the literature of the past in order to learn how he should write in the present and the immediate future; and no matter how profound and disinterested his studies, they will always so to speak come out at the finger tips, and find their completion in the action of the chisel, the brush or the typewriter.
What I have just said is really a reservation: for the difference between the two kinds of pure literary criticism is more evident in the defects and limitations of individual critics than it is in theory. You can distinguish but you cannot dissect; the end of criticism is both practical and theoretic. The speculative critic refines and intellectualises our enjoyment, heightens, not destroys, the keenness of our immediate and irreflective apprehension; establishes standards which create a demand for the highest form of art, and so affects production. And the artisan critic, whose aim is production and novelty, production of the best possible, and novelty because we can only capture the enduring by perpetual movement and adaptation, must also adopt disinterestedness in the pursuit of such kind of truth as exists in his material. My interest in enquiring after a definition of metaphysical poetry is that I wish to know what value the term "metaphysical" as applied to verse can have for the present day; whether it is a will-of-the-wisp formed by the combustion of confused and irreconcilable ideas, or whether it represents a legitimate and possible ideal. And now, as Mr. George Herbert would say, let us tune our instruments.
I am of opinion that the failure to arrive at a satisfactory definition of metaphysical poetry — and we shall presently examine two or three definitions of this poetry and some of its elements — is due to a preliminary misconception of the nature of the problem. As a consequence, most of the definitions have destroyed that which they attempted to define. We have on the one hand an idea, or a term which by being a term claims to represent some idea; and on the other hand we have a considerable mass of literature which appears to embody this idea. Nothing, at first sight, more easy. We have only to evolve from our insides a definition of what metaphysical poetry must be, then apply it, separate the metaphysical authors from the non-metaphysical, and if we are inclined to be a little more analytical, the metaphysical from the non-metaphysical portions and passages of their works. But consider the idea and the material more closely. This term "metaphysical", used by Dryden, adopted by Johnson, was first used as a convenient term, and as much defined by the material in hand, as defining it. It was used by persons who were not themselves metaphysicians, or of a philosophical cast of mind, and they certainly did not employ the term with any thought of Lucretius or Dante in their heads. The more metaphysical branches of philosophy were neither much practised, nor in high repute in England, either in the age of Dryden or in the age of Johnson. Incidentally, there is room to examine whether the meaning of the term had not somewhat altered between Dryden and Johnson. We have first therefore to consider how much community of intension may be found between the term as thus used and the term as we can use it; whether the term can be retained at all for the poets to whom it was originally applied. Second, we must remember that we use the term not only for a larger number of poets than did Dryden or Johnson, but also for these poets seen in a different order. Both these differences are important. We stretch the term to include virtually all of the poets flourishing under James I and Charles I who can be called lyric poets (though we include many who were not). There is no evidence that Johnson had in mind, or would have included, or would have thought worthy to include, many poets who seem to us to belong more or less to this category: Crashaw, Marvell, King, George and Edward Herbert, Vaughan, Carew, Stanley, Benlowes, Chamberlayne and of course Traherne pass unmentioned. Johnson is indeed far from giving satisfaction: he speaks of Donne and of Ben Jonson as setting the fashion (he makes a vague allusion to Marino) and enumerates as their "immediate successors" who still possessed some shreds of honour in his own time, Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland and Milton. Waller, Denham and Milton he presents only to withdraw instantly: Suckling he dismisses as negligible; there remain only Cowley and Cleveland, and these two, with Donne, are the poets from whose work he draws all the illustrations for his famous essay. And remember that he attaches a higher absolute value to the work of Cowley than to the work of Donne. Dryden, in his "Preface to Sylvae", refers to Cowley with what seems to us unmeasured praises; and in his references to Donne, seems more impressed by the Satires, than by any other portion of that poet's work.
It will be seen, accordingly, that the invention and use of the term "metaphysical poetry" spring from what for us is hardly better than an accident. To this race of authors, Dryden and Johnson, neither fully qualified to judge, conceded profundity of thought and learning; and thought and learning, dressed in outlandish and difficult imagery, seemed to Johnson metaphysical. His description is perfectly just, and his criticism both legitimate and felicitous, when measured by the sort of passage which he quotes; but on the whole his use of our term is rather libellous of metaphysics, than illuminating of his authors. And these qualities which seemed to Johnson to make Donne and Cowley metaphysical, are themselves attributes which we must call into question: we shall scrutinise sceptically both the profundity of their thought, and the quality of their learning.
At this point we inevitably say to ourselves: let us then make a fresh start. It is possible that the designation may be a complete misnomer. Let us then begin with those poets whom we can agree to be echt metaphysisch, disengage the essential metaphysical quality from their work, and apply it in the form of a definition to Donne and his fellows. They may prove to be more or less metaphysical, or not at all; in the latter event we will find a new name for them. You can make the term "metaphysical" equivalent to Mr. Santayana's term "philosophical" in his book Three Philosophical Poets. This book, too little read, though one of the most brilliant of Mr. Santayana's works, consists of studies of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. It is clear that for Mr. Santayana a philosophical poet is one with a scheme of the universe, who embodies that scheme in verse, and essays to realise his conception of man's part and place in the universe. This is not the place for a full consideration of Mr. Santayana's point of view or of his arguments. I will only say this much. If you identify "metaphysical" with "philosophical" and limit "philosophical" to those poets who have given expression to a system or some view of the universe, and man's place in it, which has some philosophical equivalent — as Epicurus, Aquinas, or, for Goethe, [the Faust legend,] which expresses half the philosophy of Europe from his own time to William James — then the distinction is perfectly clear. Mr. Santayana's three will exhaust the list of metaphysical poets. But I think that the effect of Mr. Santayana's book is a little too clearly to trancher les genres. As a philosopher, he is more interested in poetical philosophy than in philosophical poetry. This stricture needs one qualification. I think that Mr. Santayana and myself have this common ground, that we do not mean by philosophical poetry that poetry which is given the sort of interpretation which is called "occult" — the term "occult", it must be remembered, includes a wide range of types from the Sortes Virgilianae to certain interpretations of Shakespeare and Blake. We have both, I imagine, a prejudice in favour of the clear and distinct; we mean a philosophy which is expressed, not one which is inexpressible.
I have no concern to attack any critic who finds in any poet an occult philosophy; nor to attack any poet who chooses to make his verse the medium for conveying it; but its connexion with the poetry seems to me of no literary interest, whereas the connexion of the thought of Epicurus with the verse of Lucretius, or the thought of Aquinas with the verse of Dante, seems to me of very considerable literary importance. And I should agree with Mr. Santayana that Shakespeare is not a philosophical poet. But at this point I must offer, in distinction to Mr. Santayana's poets of complete systems, and on the other hand in distinction to the champions of the poetry of occult significance, a humble tentative account of the nature of philosophical poetry. It must be, a priori, an account which will include Dante and Lucretius, whom we take to be philosophical by immediate inspection and common consent. And it must be an account which will not include all good poetry, for that would be an absurdity. And it must proceed from the side of poetry, not from the side of philosophy. That is to say, we must restrict it to poetical work of the first intensity, work in which the thought is so to speak fused into poetry at a very high temperature. Consequently we must leave out of account those works, even very fine works, such as Pope's 'Essay on Man', in which the blend is effected at a lower temperature, and those such as Blake's in which we are not certain that it takes place at all.
It is a function of poetry both to fix and make more conscious and precise emotions and feelings in which most people participate in their own experience, and to draw within the orbit of feeling and sense what had existed only in thought. It creates a unity of feeling out of various parts: a unity of action, which is epic or dramatic; a union (the simplest form) of sound and sense, the pure lyric; and in various forms, the union of [things] hitherto unconnected in experience. You will see that Sappho's great ode, for instance, is a real advance, a development, in human consciousness; it sets down, within its verse, the unity of an experience which had previously only existed unconsciously; in recording the physical concomitants of an emotion it modifies the emotion. When Catullus suddenly turns with the immense meditation:
soles occidere et redire possunt sed nobis ...
he is modifying an emotion by a thought and a thought by an emotion; integrating them into a new emotion, an emotion which with all its variations of subsequent poets, has been experienced, doubtless, by many generations of lovers. Not that I suggest that the history of human emotion has been a steady accumulation, a progress onward and upward due to the united efforts of poets all pulling together. Not at all. Many feelings have to be abandoned, many are mislaid, many are corrupted, some seem to have disappeared, like the lost Atlantis, forever. What is left behind, the empty shell of a vanished unity of feeling, is usually called Literature.
Well! it can hardly be doubted that in any period all the poets have a [feeling] more or less in common — not from any co-operative zeal, but like the two characters in The Hunting of the Snark, who purely
from necessity, not from good will, Marched along shoulder to shoulder.
In our time, when there are more social circles than there were circles in Dante's Inferno, when there are more philosophies, complete, incomplete, and inchoate, than there were builders at Babel, more theories, more tastes, when physical communication between nations is almost perfect, and intellectual communication almost extinct, it is more difficult, certainly, to find a common denominator; but it can be found; for as genius tends towards unity, so mediocrity tends toward uniformity. But it is obvious that in certain periods the revolution of the sphere of thought will so to speak throw off ideas which will fall within the attraction of poetry, and which the operation of poetry will transmute into the immediacy of feeling. It is these moments of history when human sensibility is momentarily enlarged in certain directions to be defined, that I propose to call the metaphysical periods. Obviously, this statement needs a good deal of elucidation.
There are three principal forms in which thought can invest itself and become poetry. One is when a thought, which may be and most often is a commonplace ("rien de plus beau que les lieux communs" said Baudelaire) is expressed in poetic form though in the language of thought. When Shakespeare says
Man must abide His going hence, even as his coming hither; Ripeness is all,
it illustrates this type. Such gnomic utterances occur very frequently in drama, where they gain a great deal of their force from the position which they occupy and the light which they cast on the dramatic action: the Greek choruses are full of them. The second type is the discursive exposition of an argument, such as we find in the "Essay on Man", and at its highest, in the passages in the Purgatorio expounding the Thomist-Aristotelian theory of the origin and development of the soul. Immense technical skill is necessary to make such discourse fly, and great emotional intensity is necessary to make it soar. And the third type is that which occurs when an idea, or what is only ordinarily apprehensible as an intellectual statement, is translated in sensible form; so that the world of sense is actually enlarged. An illustration. One of the capital ideas of Donne, the one which is perhaps his peculiar gift to humanity, is that of the union, the fusion and identification of souls in sexual love. To state it, to deposit it gnomically or to analyse it is nothing; to express it, to evoke it, is everything. It is hardly a thought at all; it differs radically from the two types mentioned a moment ago: but how many centuries of intellectual labour were necessary, how much dogma, how much speculation, how many systems had to be elaborated, shattered and taken up into other systems, before such an idea was possible! The soul itself had to be constructed first: and since the soul has disappeared we have many other things, the analysis of Stendhal, the madness of Dostoevski, but not this. Even Browning, who might have been a more philosophical poet had he been more of a philosopher, gives us only
Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry"
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Copyright © 1993 T. S. Eliot.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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