THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

T.S ELOIT
LIFE AND WORKS
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4
January 1965) was
a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary
critic and editor.
He is considered to be one of the 20th century's
greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-
language Modernist poetry.
His use of language, writing style, and verse structure
re-invigorated English poetry.
He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-
evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent
Boston Brahmin family
His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful
businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-
Press Brick Company in St Louis.
His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote
poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession
in the U.S. in the early 20th century.
Eliot was the last of six surviving children.
Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the
namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
He moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and
went on to settle, work, and marry there.
He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39
and renounced his American citizenship
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy,
the boys college preparatory division of
Washington University, where his studies included
Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German.
 He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the
influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
 His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a
school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in
February 1905.
 Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem
in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as
"Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student
literary magazine.
 He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale
of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King".
 The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot
Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.
 His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological
studies at Harvard.[19]
Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended
Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year,
where he met Scofield Thayer who later published
The Waste Land.
He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning
a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to
comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in
English literature the following year. Because of his year at
Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of
Arts after three years instead of the usual four.
He became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the
American writer and critic.
SOME LETTERS OF ELIOT’S TO HIS
FRIEND
 Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate
university towns and university people, who are the same
everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books
and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but I
don't like to be dead.“
 Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. This city
had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several
reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the
influential American literary figure Ezra Pound.
 A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on
22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound
instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's
fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot
through social events and literary gatherings
Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a
friend that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a
deeper impression on me than any other part of the
world
In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for
Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but he failed to return
for the viva voce exam.
Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in
London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at
Golders Green Crematorium.
 In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken
to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the
village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had
emigrated to America.
 A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with
a quotation from his poem East Coker: "In my
beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."
POEMS
THE LOVE SON OF J. ALFRED
PREFROCK 1915
THE WASTE LAND 1922
THE HALLOW MEN 1925
ASH WEDNESDAY 1927
OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF
PRACTICAL CATS 1939
FOUR QUARTETS 1941
PLAYS
Sweeney Agonistes, 1933
Murder in the Cathedral, 1935
The Rock (play), 1934
The Family Reunion, 1939
The Cocktail Party, 1949
The Confidential Clerk,1953
The Elder Statesman1958
CRITICAL ESSAYS

TRADITION AND INDIVIDUAL

TALLENT 1919
HAMLET AND HIS PROBLEMS
1920
METAPHYSICAL POETS 1921
AWARDS
NOBLE PRIZE 1948
ORDER OF MERIT 1948
TONY AWARD 1950
PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF
FREEDOM FROM U.S 1964
WHAT IS METAPHYSICAL
POETRY?
Metaphysical poetry is marked by the use of elaborate
figurative languages, original conceits, paradoxes, and
philosophical topics.
Metaphysical poetry was at its peak during the
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY in England and
continental Europe.
During this period, poets relaxed their previously strict
use of meter and explored new ideas.
History of Metaphysical Poetry
The word “metaphysical” was used by writers such as
John Dryden and Samuel Johnson in regards to the poets
of the seventeenth century.
These poets are noted for their “unnaturalness”. Johnson
wrote in Lives of the Most Eminent Engish Poets in the
late 1700s, that a “race of writers” had appeared that
might be termed “metaphysical poets”. The term was
likely taken from Dryden who had described John Donne
as affecting “metaphysics” in his “satires” and his
“amorous verses”. It was not until the twentieth century
that many of these poets were adequately recognized for
their talent and originality.
Who Were the Metaphysical Poets?

The best known of the metaphysical poets is John

Done.
He is followed by others such as Henry Vaughan,
Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert.
 Donne is most often cited as the best of this shortlist
of writers and the originator of the basic tenants of the
genre.
 It is because of his writing that many writers who
came after took on some or all of the features of
metaphysical writing.
Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
One of the most prominent characteristics of this
movement is the spoken quality of the poetry,
something that many other writers of that time did not
approve of.
Other common features include the use of
 COLLOQUIAL DICTION,
 PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION,
 NEW AND ORIGINAL CONCEITS, IRONY, AND
 THE RELAXED USE OF METER.
Johnson about metaphysical poetry
The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic
Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century
English poets whose work was characterized by the
inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the
spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse.
In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81),
Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century
in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be
termed the metaphysical poets".
‘THE MOST HETEROGENEOUS IDEAS ARE YOKED
BY VIOLENCE TOGETHER’.
DRYDEN ABOUT META
PHYSICS
 Witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne:
He affects the metaphysics,(The term was invented by the 1st-century
BCE head of Aristotle's Peripatetic school, Andronicus of Rhodes.) not
only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should
reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with
the softnesses of love. In this...Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault.

 Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of the new style of poetry
was Drummond of Hawthornden, who in an undated letter from the 1630s
made the charge that "some men of late, transformers of everything,
consulted upon her reformation, and endeavored to abstract her to
metaphysical ideas and scholastical qualities, denuding her of her own
habits, and those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some
thousand years"
THE METAPHYSICAL POETS BY
T.S.ELIOT
T. S. Eliot, review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems
of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Selected
and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson in
the Times Literary Supplement, October 1921.