Presentation is designed to help students for better understanding of T.S. Eliot's article "Metaphysical Poetry". Eliot defines the "metaphysical" poets as the poets who had a unified sensibility, which allowed them to fuse together thought and feeling into a new poetic experience that the poets who followed them did not or could not imitate. Eliot sees the "metaphysical" poets as fully developed poets who advanced English poetry with their work. This presentation is not a mere creation of the author, as it is based on various sources and purely designed to assist students in their examination. Quality of this presentation cannot be compared with original text and genuine resources. Students are advised to prefer the authentic texts and resources for better results.

1. The
Metaphysical
Poets
T.S.Eliot

2. •Originally Eliot’s review of Herbert J.C.
Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of
the seventeenth century: Donne to Butler, an
anthology of metaphysical poems.
•This work revived the tradition of metaphysical
poetry in the twentieth century and influenced
many writers and critics.
•An account of the characteristic features of
metaphysical poetry, the history of English
poetry, his theory of the dissociation of
sensibility and his recommendations for the
poetry of the twentieth century.

3. •T.S.Eliot’s assertion: the metaphysical poets
such as Donne, Marvel, Crashaw, Vaughan,
Lord Herbert, George Herbert, Cleveland,
Bishop King and Cowley were in the direct
current of English poetry and had not digressed
from it.
•Efforts to correct the impression about the
metaphysical poetry e.g.: Dr Johnson’s
derogatory definition of the term “metaphysical”
created.
•Rejects Dr Johnson’s complaint that in
metaphysical poetry the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together.

4. Eliot’s observations and appreciations:
Donne and King couple heterogeneous
elements into unity with their poetic
sensibility.
Donne and Cowley expand figures of
speech to logical extremes.
Donne displays his genius in the use of
brief words and sudden contrasts-
telescoping of images and multiplied
associations.
a simple and pure language- a complex
syntax

5. Continuation of Sixteenth Century
Dramatists’ tradition.
look into the cerebral cortex, the
nervous system and the digestive
tracts.
verbal equivalents to states of mind
and feeling.
mechanism of sensibilty to bring
together disparate experiences and
thoughts into new wholes.

6. Direct sensuous apprehension
of thought or recreation of thought
into feeling by John Donne.
Eliot observes that “a thought to
Donne was an experience.

7. Eliot complains:
the poetic mode of the metaphysical
poets was disturbed in the
seventeenth century.
Resulted into dissociation of
sensibility.
a cleavage occurred between
thought and emotion during the
seventeenth century.

8. Influence of Milton and Dryden
aggravated the dissociation of sensibility
and their merits overshadowed the
presence of metaphysical poetry.
led to the refinement of language but
resulted in the crudity of thought and also
sentimentalism in the eighteenth century.
Keats and Shelley in the Romantic age
and Victorians, Tennyson and Browning
made feeble attempts to achieve the
unification of sensibility.

9. Appeal to the twentieth century poets-
become more and more comprehensive,
more allusive, more direct, in order to force,
to dislocate if necessary, languages into
meaning.
the modern poets should use conceits,
obscure words and simple phrasing.
they should be deliberately difficulty in
order to match the modern civilization
characterized by a great variety and
complexity.