Metaphysical Poetry, Prufrock And Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot: Metaphysical Poetry, Prufrock and Hollow Men

In the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” T. S. Eliot explicates and praises the anti-Romantic and intellectual qualities of metaphysical poetry which Johnson had disapproved. Eliot writes “the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” Eliot praised the metaphysical poets’ ability to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling while using clear, simple, pure language, and unexpected analogies to makes their reader sit up and consider a thought or emotion in a completely nuanced way, such language of metaphysical poetry is evident in Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollow Men.
Eliot states that the term metaphysical has been used as a term of abuse or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. Johnson himself, who employed the term ‘metaphysical poets’ with the poet Donne chiefly in mind, remarks, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Johnson apprehended the metaphysical style where the “effects are due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree, but the same in principle.” The force of Johnson’s argument lies in his belief that the metaphysical poets could only correlate dissimilar ideas with violence, and that they could not fuse their analogies into a whole. Eliot remarks that this, however, is not the case and that many of the metaphysical poets have succeeded in combining heterogeneous ideas. Eliot quotes from Bishop King, Herbert and Cowley and other such poets to support his assertion. Thus, Eliot concludes that the fault Johnson references is not valid and the unity of heterogeneous ideas is com...

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... as corrosive and cowardly. In the final lines of the poem, the prickly pear rhyme ends in a song about the end of the world. And this is how the world ends in the realm of the hollow men, “not with a bang, but with a sad and quiet whimper.”
Eliot creates a desolate and alienated world where the hollow men dream of a kingdom that could release them from the constant state of nothingness. He focuses on the hollow men’s inability to transcend although it is their only hope. He uses the imagery of disembodied eyes and fading stars to depict the state of the men’s consciousness. Aspects of the form copy the characteristics of the hollow men, as well. The speakers desire to avoid speech and his inability to complete full sentences are shown in the final lines of the poem. Eliot deploys, the hollow men represent all humankind, and their tragic existence concerns everyone.