Textuality » 4ALS Textuality
The text that i have read is a comment written by Eliot that regards the Metaphysical poets aand the representations of his ideologies concerning poetry.
The most important informations that he find into the Metaphysical poems are:
In his essay, The Metaphysical Poets, he has highlighted the appreciative features of metaphysical poets according to his own perception
The metaphysical poets investigate the world by rational discussion based on its phenomena rather than by intuition or mysticism.
Metaphysical Poets, draws people’s interest towards metaphysical poets.
Metaphysical poets are descendants of Elizabethan dramatists and have unified sensibility,they found the world as a unified whole. In their poetry, thought and feeling affected each other as both are unified whole.
Were able to combine thought and emotion and sensation in one untroubled unity. They were not self-conscious in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry should be impersonal and unconscious of one’s own self. Their language exactly matched their experience and their feeling.
They were self-conscious, instead of feeling a thought, they thought about their thoughts as Arnold depicted, “the dialogue of the mind with itself had begun.”
Dissociation of sensibility is the division of thoughts and feelings, which according to Eliot is done by Dryden and other poets of the age. They are responsible for the dissociation. There is a loss of union of thought and feeling whereas in metaphysical poetry there is no separation of thought and feeling.
Why were they called metaphysical?
One of the reason is that Donne and Cowley use a device considered metaphysical and that is the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to a level a mind can think,(Donne compares two lovers to a pair of compasses)
The other reason of why were they called metaphysical is that, there is “a development by
rapid association of thought”, which means that one thought leads to another, one idea
generalizes the second; is a rapid movement in the thinking process.