Kuldeep Walia
Assist. Prof & Head of Applied Sciences Department
Rayat-Bahra Institute of Engg. & Nano-Technology Hoshiarpur. (146001)
Punjab, India
Eliot was generally influenced by the technique of John Donne. For Eliot, his techniques had energy, variety and wit. From him Eliot adopted conversational tone, a colloquial vocabulary, ironical conceits, surprising images, rapid connections of ideas, irregular verse, brilliant wit and shocking juxtaposition.
In the fifth section of T. S. Eliot’s Selected Essays 1932 we come across two specific essays-The Metaphysical poets and Andrew Marvel both written in 1921. These two essays contain Eliot’s valuable views about Metaphysical poets and their way of writing. Even as a student Eliot had studied Donne in 1906, and he paid him rich tribute in “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Donne in our Times” and in the poem “whispers of immortality”. Donne appealed to Eliot for various reasons – for his ‘jagged brokenness of thoughts’ and ‘suddenness of verse’, for his ability to convey his genuine whole of ‘tangled feelings’ and for ‘subtlety and flexibility of tone’ and ‘complexity of attitude’. (New Bearings in English Poetry 76)
Prof Grierson is credited with the revival of current interest in the Metaphysicals, especially in Donne. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and poems of seventeenth century which captured the attention of T. S. Eliot. Eliot Submits that Donne is in the direct current of English poetry, and that peculiar quality of Metaphysical derives from “a mechanism which could devour any kind of experience.”(The Metaphysical poets 287) In his essay “Donne in Our Time” Eliot admits that there was an element of fashion in the current popularity of Donne. Eliot remarks that Donne’s poetry is “a concern of the present and the recent past, rather than of the future.” (Donne in Our Time 5). Eliot Observes in “The Metaphysical Poets” “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility” (287).
Two traditions are found in Eliot’s early poetry-The English Metaphysical and nineteenth century French Symbolist Tradition. Eliot learnt the subtle use of natural speech rhythms from Donne and discovered the choice of dramatic form and a lively play of intellect or wit through the Metaphysicals and he learnt a skilful variation in the rhythm of verse, use of sharply visualized images and a deliberate avoidance of direct statement from the French symbolist.
Eliot advocates “unification of sensibility” (288) which implies “a direct sensuous appreciation of thought, or a recreation of thought into a feeling” (286) as to be found in the works of Champman and Donne.
A poem which is highly compressed and condensed in barely 433 lines, Eliot alludes to Frazer, J. L. Weston, Dante, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, Spenser, Milton, Webster, Marvell, St. Augustine, Lord Buddha and the Brihadaranyaka Upnishad. The poet’s technique of giving a number of allusions in one place is illustrated in the following passage:
Above the antique mantle was displayed
As though the window gave upon a sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with the inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears (The Waste Land 66)
Here is the touching picture of Philomela raped by Tereus and changed to nightingale; it is decidedly derived from Ovid. The phrase Sylvan Scene comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. Eliot’s literary allusions, thus, function integrally in the poem and this fact established Eliot’s kinship to the metaphysical.
Eliot is preoccupied with the problem of objectifying and externalizing an emotion and he finds in metaphysical a valuable hint for it which led Eliot to coin new critical phrase-that critical phrase is “objective correlative” (Hamlet 145). The theory of “objective correlative” is necessitated by a plea for a new kind of poetry which should be both ‘intense and dramatic in nature’ Eliot’s poems “Prufrock”, “Portrait of Lady”, and “The Waste Land” are quite dramatic in the projection of an emotion, in their linking together different planes of experiences, in the creation of a situation through “a set of objects” Donne projects the same technique in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent. (Selected Poems 172)
In place of elaborately analytical method of metaphysical, Eliot employs elliptical and allusive method. Unlike Donne, Eliot avoids immediate personal notes but like him he tends to be ‘intense and dramatic’ in his poetry.
The packed and condensed style of Eliot’s early verse reaching its culmination in “The Waste Land” is close to the strong lined style of Donne’s conceits are scholarly and learned, a piece of super-imposed machinery or setting but an organic part of the poetic process. Donne blends thoughts and feelings in his conceits to achieve the ‘unification of sensibility’. The situation is emotional, almost explosive while its treatment and description are wholly intellectual. Mark the description of cheeks of the beloved in “The Second Anniversary”
Her sure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought.
Eliot’s imagery in his early poems has the same condensation, and his method of packing it with varied associations is verily in the manner of the Metaphysicals. Here is an instance of Eliot packing his image with rich and subtle associations:
I should have been the pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas (The Love Song 14)
Both Eliot and Donne had conversational tone and colloquial vocabulary. “His [Eliot] acute perception of similarity and difference between the same things, his mixed use of the intellectual wits that Hobbes called fancy and judgment, is common in metaphysical poetry or the poetic wit of seventeenth century” (A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot 18) The method of Eliot perceiving both similarity and dissimilarity is typically metaphysical and a by- product of ‘wit’ and wit is a common property of Donne, Marvel, Cowley and other Metaphysicals. In both Eliot and Donne’s poetry we find “the flash of wit which results from the shock of such unexpected contrasts.”(The Achievements of T. S. Eliot 15)
Like Donne Eliot builds the effect of his poetry on a kind of witty surprise which may be at times in a single line:
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (The Love Song 14)
This is an example of condensed conceit recalling Donne’s Line “A bracelet of white hair about the bone” Similarly we come across the “alliance of levity and seriousness” (Selected Essays 296) in the fashion of Donne:
I grow old…I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (The Love Song 17)
The well known ‘yellow fog’ image in “The Love Song” is a remarkable instance of ‘expanded conceit’ so characteristic of John Donne who compares two lovers with a pair of compasses, where one leg remains fixed at the centre and the other rotates. Conceit in the hands of Donne and Eliot is not decoration. While the Elizabethan conceit is traditional And ornamental, conceit in the poetry of Donne and Eliot is basic and structural.
Sometimes Eliot’s conceits are far-fetched like that of Donne’s. The opening Lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” bears example of the same:
Let us go then you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon the table…. (The Love Song 13)
In trying to perceive similarity in dissimilar things lies the essence of Eliot’s wit and the practice is very much in the true tradition of Metaphysical poets.
To conclude Eliot establishes modern link with Metaphysicals and its influence is apparent in his early poetry(Up to Waste Land). Both Donne and Eliot possess a dramatic imagination, power of thinking in images and an unusual interest in yoking together disparate experiences of life. In the poetry of both there is a sort of tension or magnetic force holding together the apparently dissimilar objects. This tension holds the two together, while keeping their identities separate. They make an abundant use of wit and conceit in their poetry and they can transmute their thoughts into sensuousness by the means of ‘unified sensibility’.
Works Cited:
F. R. Levis, New Bearings in English Poetry (Hutchinson : Hutchinson University Library,
1961)
T. S. Eliot’s “The Metaphysical Poets” pp 281-91, Selected Essays 3rd, ed. (London Faber & Faber, 1951) ‘
T. S. Eliot’s “Donne in Our Time” A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spenser (Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press, 1931)
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, pp 66, Collected Poems (London : Faber & Faber, 1993)
T. S. Eliot’s “Hamlet” Selected Essays 3rd, ed. (London Faber & Faber, 1951)
T. S Eliot’s “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock”pp13-17, Collected Poems(London : Faber
& Faber, 1993)
George Williamson, “Introduction”, A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York : The Noonday Press, 1957)
F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York : O.U.P.,1959)