The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins Univers [Hardcover]

T. S. Eliot (Author), Ronald Schuchard (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Editor Schuchard (English, Emory Univ., and a board member of the T.S. Eliot Society) gathers Eliot's Clark and Turnbull lectures into one volume. These lectures expand the entire notion of metaphysical poetry and escort the reader into Eliot's mind, revealing how he formed his own definition of such verse. Eliot explores verse from three centuries-using Dante, Donne, and Laforgue as his main models but not excluding their contemporaries. His research provides a broad foundation for other scholars to study poetry. What is truly helpful is the diligent scholarship of Schuchard, who has clarified many of Eliot's thoughts and ideas by providing extensive footnotes. An excellent study of metaphysical poetry and the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest literary thinkers. Recommended for scholars.
Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Literary fashion may have turned our attention away from Eliot in the latter part of this century, but there can be no doubt that he will continue to tower over most other poets of his generation and in some sense to be the defining poet of his time. Eliot lived in the last age in which poetry really mattered, and this collection of his Clark Lectures (delivered in 1926 at Trinity College, Cambridge) suggests a reason why: poets like Eliot were deeply immersed in the problems of language and imagery and the role it played in Western intellectual history. Eliot quotes in Italian, French, and Latin and, in setting out his thesis, draws on the work of philosophers and poets that range from Augustine to Dryden, from Dostoevsky to Mallarm{‚}e, and from Plato to Santayana. His subject is the "metaphysical" poets Dante, Donne, and Laforgue and the synthesis of sensuality and intellect in their language. The eight Clark Lectures and three Turnbull Lectures--none published though famous in their time--are relatively dry but fascinating. Their appearance now suggests how wilted is the modern Western intellect in the grasp of its culture. Stuart Whitwell

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 343 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; First U.S. Edition edition (May 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151000964
• ISBN-13: 978-0151000968
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #637,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British subject in 1927. The acclaimed poet of The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, among numerous other poems, prose, and works of drama, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. T.S. Eliot died in 1965 in London, England, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dante was philosophical, but then . . ., September 25, 2003

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Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins Univers (Hardcover)

This is more than the texts of a lecture series. There are eight lectures given by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) in 1926, "On the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Donne, Crawshaw and Cowley." Then there are three lectures, "The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry," given at The Johns Hopkins University in 1933. There is an Author's Preface which is more like a note of the author to himself, on "the intention of the author to rewrite these lectures as a book." (p. 41). That book "is intended as one volume of a trilogy under the general title of `The Disintegration of the intellect' " (p. 41).

This book is edited and introduced by Ronald Schuchard, who has provided information about the circumstances in which the lectures were written and given, additions and corrections noted on the manuscript, literary context, translations of quotations, corrections of mistranslations (some of which were noted on the manuscript), notes on similar themes in other works by T. S. Eliot, and in Appendix I, a French translation of the lecture on pages 93-117 published as "Deux Attitudes Mystiques: Dante and Donne" in 1927. (pp. 309-318).

Dante ? A great poet, is mainly of interest in this book as a philosophical poet, as recognized in the book THREE PHILOSOPHICAL POETS by George Santayana, which T. S. Eliot "had read and mastered at Harvard, a book that had stimulated his theory and that was to become a central document in his Clark lectures." (p. 2). T. S. Eliot also accepted as a definition of metaphysical the conventional identification of poets and critics familiar with the great anthology, METAPHYSICAL LYRICS AND POEMS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by Herbert Grierson. In addition, an example of great poetry, Sappho's `Ode to Anactoria' (c. 600 B.C.) is printed in full in a note where it is mentioned by T. S. Eliot as "a real advance, a development, in human consciousness; it sets down, within its verse, the unity of an experience which had previously only existed unconsciously; in recording the physical concomitants of an emotion it modifies the emotion." (p. 51).

The first lecture attempts to establish the function of poetry, but students of Freud's "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" will be interested in how often the quotations on the fly by T. S. Eliot have been modified by his memory to apply specifically to him. On page 52, he substituted necessity in place of nervousness for the reason two characters, "not from good will, Marched along shoulder to shoulder" in THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll. On page 53, "When Shakespeare says `Man must abide'" he is quoting from KING LEAR, v. ii. 9-11 which says "Men must endure." On page 56 the same line is compared with some lines from PURGATORIO by Dante, after asserting, "If you recall my tentative division of the three types of philosophical poetry, you will see at once that Dante is the great exemplar not only for the type which forms the theme of these lectures, but of every type." (p. 56). The translation of the Italian in the notes does not attempt to inform readers of what the few Italian words misremembered in the text might have indicated in a Freudian analysis.

There is an Index to Editorial Material on pages 335-343, following the Index to the Lectures on pages 327-334. Items not included in the indices include the lists of lectures given in Appendix II and Appendix III, indicative of a range of scholarship at the highest intellectual level, mentioning a 1992-3 series on `Three Models of Truthfulness: Thucydides, Diderot, Nietzsche.' (p. 322). People who find that exciting might also discover that they missed `Irony and Solidarity' by Richard Rorty in 1986-7. How close is this book to real philosophy? The historical approach to its subject matter includes: "Not only a diversion of inquiry; it is rather as if, at certain times, the constitution of the human mind altered to adapt itself to new categories of truth, and new elements of thought." (p. 79). "But dissolution so frequently begins within, that I think that the Jesuits had a great deal to do with it: their fine distinctions and discussions of conduct and casuistry tend in the direction of a certain self-consciousness which had not been conspicuous in the world before. I am here more concerned with defining clearly the difference in point of view, a true Copernican revolution which occurred centuries before Kant was born, a difference which marks the real abyss between the classic scholastic philosophy and all philosophy since." (p. 80). Nietzsche shows up as the author of a motto in a work "which TSE told Hesse he would have published in translation in the `Criterion' had it been shorter (L1 [THE LETTERS OF T. S. ELIOT] 510)." (p. 81, n. 38). "Mankind suddenly retires inside its several skulls, until you hear Nietzsche - pretty well tormented in his cranial lodging - declaring that `nothing is inside, nothing is outside'." (pp. 80-81).

The combination of poetry and philosophy in these lectures is leading to consideration of a minor poet. "Jules Laforgue was a young man who died at the age of twenty-seven in the year 1877. . . . His poetry, and even his prose, is immature, rough and sentimental. . . . He had an innate craving for order: that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification, and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its sentimental justification. The only world in which he could have satisfied himself, therefore, was a world such as Dante's." (p. 212). Similar information is given at the beginning of the final lecture on pages 281-282. As an example for poets in our time: "One positive contribution towards poetry is all that one can hope to make; beyond that it does not matter whether one is Shakespeare or Jules Laforgue; whether one is `original' or `derivative'." (p. 289).