by T. S. Eliot
“Saint Teresa”; the one producing an e¤ect of great speed by the use of
short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long
ones:
Love, thou art absolute sole lord
Of life and death.20
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson
failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire
whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method:
by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolu-
tion) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and,
without prejudicing their case by the adjective “metaphysical,” consider
whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which sub-
sequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has
hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes
that “their attempts were always analytic”; he would not agree that, after
the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.21
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early
Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is
not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a
man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indi-
rectly (it is at least a tenable theory) a¤ected by Montaigne.22 Even if we
except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and
were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility:
their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and
thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension
of thought, or a re-creation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what
we find in Donne:
In this one thing, all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contained;
t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s
1 9 7
A man to join himself with th’ Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
One with that All, and go on, round as it;
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part,
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessity.23
We compare this with some modern passage:
No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man’s worth something. God stoops o’er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet—both tug—
He’s left, himself, i’ the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!24
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are
concerned with the perpetuation of love by o¤spring), to compare with
the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert’s “Ode” the following from
Tennyson:
One walked between his wife and child,
With measured footfall firm and mild,
And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure,
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.25
The di¤erence is not a simple di¤erence of degree between poets. It is
something which had happened to the mind of England between the time
of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Brown-
ing; it is the di¤erence between the intellectual poet and the reflective
1 9 8
e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not
feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to
Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind
is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate
experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.
The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have
nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the
smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always
forming new wholes.26
We may express the di¤erence by the following theory: The poets of
the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of ex-
perience. They are simple, artificial, diªcult or fantastic, as their prede-
cessors were; no less or more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinizelli,
or Cino.27 In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in,
from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural,
was due to the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century,
Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions
so magnificently well that the magnitude of the e¤ect concealed the ab-
sence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved;
the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies
some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or
King.28 But while the language became more refined, the feeling became
more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in “Country Church-
yard” (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in
the “Coy Mistress.”29
The second e¤ect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed
from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental
age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted
against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, un-
balanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley’s “Triumph of
Life,” in the second “Hyperion,” there are traces of a struggle toward unifi-
cation of sensibility.30 But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Brown-
ing ruminated.
After this brief exposition of a theory—too brief, perhaps, to carry
conviction—we may ask, what would have been the fate of the “meta-
physical” had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them,
t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s
1 9 9
as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not, certainly, be
classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited;
the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more
likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them
into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical
theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity
in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved.
The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were,
at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states
/> of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and
they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in
philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely
that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be diªcult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety
and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various
and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehen-
sive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this
view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean
Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui. )31 Hence we get something which looks
very much like the conceit—we get, in fact, a method curiously similar
to that of the “metaphysical poets,” similar also in its use of obscure words
and of simple phrasing.
O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges,
Sacrilèges monomanes!
Emballages, dévergondages, douches! O pressoirs
Des vendanges des grands soirs!
Layettes aux abois,
Thyrses au fond des bois!
Transfusions, représailles,
Relevailles, compresses et l’éternel potion,
Angélus! n’en pouvoir plus
De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales!32
The same poet could write also simply:
2 0 0
e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
Elle est bien loin, elle pleure,
Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . .33
Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière in many of his poems, are nearer to
the “school of Donne” than any modern English poet.34 But poets more
classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas
into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!35
In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century—Racine
—and the great master of the nineteenth—Baudelaire—are more like
each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of dic-
tion are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of
the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that
two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden,
triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce
Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is
a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object
to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into
our hearts and write.” But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or
Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into
the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.
May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert
and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct cur-
rent of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this
standard rather than coddled by antiquarian a¤ection? They have been
enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are
“metaphysical” or “witty,” “quaint” or “obscure,” though at their best they
have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On the other
hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous person to
disagree with) without having mastered it, without having assimilated the
Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay
on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly means something
more serious than we usually mean to-day; in his criticism of their versifi-
t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s
2 0 1
cation we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but
also how well trained; we must remember that Johnson tortures chiefly
the chief o¤enders, Cowley and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and
one requiring a substantial book, to break up the classification of John-
son (for there has been one since) and exhibit these poets in all their di¤er-
ence of kind and of degree, from the massive music of Donne to the faint,
pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend—whose “Dialogue between a Pil-
grim and Time” is one of the few regrettable omissions from this excel-
lent anthology.
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e London Letter, March 1921
1. The essay was published in the Dial 70, no. 4 (April 1921): 448–453. “March 1921” was supplied by the editors of the Dial, who wanted it to seem up-to-date when it appeared in the April issue. But the essay was actually written
over the weekend of 22–23 January, as Eliot informed his mother in a letter
dated 22 January 1921: “I have been working this weekend on an overdue
article for the Dial, the first I have written for many months. It came very hard, and I do not think that it is very good or very well written, but it is
a start, and I hope that I shall soon get my hand in again” ( LOTSE, 432).
Confirmation for this date comes from the essay itself, in which Eliot writes:
“Next week the admirable Phoenix Society will perform Volpone or the
Fox . . . ” Performances took place on Sunday, 30 January, and on Tuesday,
1 February 1921.
The Dial, published in New York City, was co-owned and co-edited by
two men. One was Scofield Thayer, the scion of a wealthy family who manu-
factured woolens in Worcester, Massachusetts; Thayer had known Eliot both
at Milton Academy and at Harvard, and he was the more active and domi-
nant editor. The other was James Sibley Watson, Jr., an heir of a family that
had founded the Western Union Telegraph Company. The journal was heav-
ily subsidized by the owners at the rate of nearly $70,000 per year. It had
a total circulation of 9,500—6,400 via subscription, the rest via retail sales.
The readership was made up entirely of Americans, though Thayer wanted
to enter into the English market. This essay was the first “London Letter”
that Eliot wrote for the Dial.
2 0 2
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 13 5 – 13 6
2 0 3
2. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, The American Credo: A Contribution
toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (New York: A. Knopf, 1920).
3. The writer who charged Eliot with “elegant anguish” has not been identified.
Eliot may have made up this phrase, just as he assigns the phrase “general
reading public” to the publisher of Some Contemporary Poets: 1920 below in
this essay (see n. 6), when in fact the publisher never used those words.
4. The phrase “elegant Jeremiah” was used to describe Matthew Arnold by an
anonymous contemporary journalist writing in the Daily Telegraph, 8 Sep-
tember 1866. The reviewer has since been identified as James Macdonnell.
Arnold had antagonized the sta¤ at the Daily Telegraph by referring to them as “young lions” and otherwise attacking them in his essay on “The Function
of Criticism at the Present Time.” The tag “elegant Jeremiah” stuck and has
been repeated countless times in books and essays on Arnold.
5. Harold Monro, Some Contemporary Poets: 1920 (London: Leonard Parsons,
1920). Monro (1879–1932) ran the Poetry Bookshop at 35, Devonshire Street,
Theobold’s Road, from its opening in January 1913, until his death. It was
the principal bookshop for London poetry readers during this period. Before
the First World War he edited the journal Poetry and Drama, which came
out in eight quarterly numbers between March 1913 and December 1914,
and after it the Chapbook, which was published monthly between July 1919
and June 1921, quarterly in February and May 1922, monthly again from
July 1922 to June 1923, and annually in 1924 and 1925. Eliot’s relations with
Monro were strained. In 1914, when Conrad Aiken had o¤ered Monro the
chance to publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Monro dismissed it
as “absolutely insane.” But in both 1920 and 1921 Eliot contributed essays to
the Chapbook. (See “A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry,” Chapbook 2.9
[March 1920]: 1–10 and “Prose and Verse,” Chapbook 22 [April 1921]: 3–10;
reprinted here, 158–165.) When Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922,
however, Monro expressed serious reservations. (See Harold Monro, “Notes
for a Study of ‘The Waste Land’: An Imaginary Dialogue with T. S. Eliot,”
Chapbook 34 [February 1923]: 20–24.) Notwithstanding this criticism, Eliot
contributed three poems to the Chapbook in 1924. (See “Doris’s Dream
Songs,” Chapbook 39 [November 1924]: 36–37.) Monro was also the pub-
lisher of five editions—1911–1912, 1913–1915, 1916–1917, 1918–1919,
and 1920–1922—of Georgian Poetry, a popular anthology which had large
quantities of pastoral poetry and was much criticized by Eliot and Pound.
In Some Contemporary Poets: 1920 Monro reviewed seven established poets
(Robert Bridges, William Scawen Blunt, Charles M. Doughty, Thomas Hardy,
Rudyard Kipling, Alice Meynell, and W. B. Yeats) and forty-seven younger
