T.S. Eliot was inspired by his interest in the Renaissance period and south Asian religions, and influenced by F.H. Bradley, "whose emphasis on the private nature of individual experience, a 'circle enclosed on the outside,'" which Eliot mentions in his essay, The Metaphysical Poets (1921): "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 comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning." (p. 2608)
Eliot's writing is based partly on the classical viewpoint with an "insistence on order and discipline than on mere self-expression in art" making him somewhat a Romanticist, and partly on symbolic imagery, but overall his use of wit and colloquialisms suggest just the opposite. Eliot critiqued other works and drew from it what he felt applied to him as a writer/poet. In his own writing he attempted to "unify sensibility he found in Donne and other early seventeenth century poets and dramatists who were able, he suggests in The Metaphysical Poets, to feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose." While he was note revered as a poetic genius, things changed for him in 1948 when King George VI honored him with a 'Order of Merit,' historically defining him as "the poet of the modern symbolist-metaphysical tradition." (p. 2608-09)
"Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their poetry, which investigates the world by rational discussion of its phenomena rather than by intuition or mysticism. . . .Reacting against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and rigorous. . . .T. S. ELIOT argued that their work fuses reason with passion; it shows a unification of thought and feeling which later became separated into a 'dissociation of sensibility'." - Luminarium
Major Metaphysical Poets
- Robert Southwell (c. 1561–1595)
- John Donne (1572–1631)
- George Herbert (1593–1633)
- Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649)
- Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
- Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
- Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
- Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637 – 1674)
Work Cited:
Greenblatt, S. et al. (Eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature: The Romantic Period through the twentieth Century and After. (8th ed., Vol. B). pp. 2607-10. 2006. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.