Analysis Of T. S. Eliot's The Metaphysical Poet

T.S. Eliot, in his The Metaphysical Poets, claims that it is a pity the poets since the seventeenth century have experienced a “dissociation of sensibility”, from which they have never recovered (Eliot 64). For Eliot, poetry is a union of opposites, the reconciliation of which needs a unified sensibility. By this sensibility, a poet can amalgamate desperate experiences, fuse into a single whole the varied and disparate, and synthesize the sensuous and the intellectual. This synthesis thus enables poetry to be widely read because humans are mentally chaotic. However, poets since the seventeenth century can either feel or think, and this poetic degradation to more elevated language but cruder emotions shackles the development of the modern poetry.

This appreciation of the precursor from a belated poet, however, is described as an “over-idealized imagination” by Harold Bloom (9). Bloom believes that the relationship between precursors and ephebes is in fact, in the Freudian term, a “family romance”, in which the strong son/ephebe should try to overcome the influence imposed by the father/precursor in a fight to the death (Bloom 27). Readers can indeed notice some intended deviations from Donne in Eliot’s poems, but it is hard to tell whether or not these deviations result from the anxiety due to Donne’s influence. Eliot’s apostasy from Donne can only demonstrate his dissatisfaction or disagreement with part of Donne’s ideology, but Donne’s influence at the same time is welcomed by Eliot, serving as a source of Eliot’s own literary sensibility and as representation of Eliot’s own poetic

Clinamen, meaning misreading or misprision, is a poetic swerve from precursors’ works. With this ratio, a belated poet will follow his or her precursor to a certain point and then move towards a new direction, on which the ephebe imposes his or her own faith. Tessera refers to poetic completion and antithesis, through which an ephebe retains the precursor’s terms but pushes them beyond the precursor’s sense. Thus new meanings complete the precursor’s works antithetically. The first two ratios enable belated poets to construct differences from their precursors, so these ephebes gain power to build their