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The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry

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I can't say very much much about this because I haven't, couldn't, read the whole thing. I'll probably come back to it, God willing. But Eliot himself said of these lectures as to why he didn't want to publish them, that they were "immature and pretentious". This, coming from me, would have sounded quite presumptuous, but from him it's rather admirable, and anyway, it's true. They are both pretentious and immature. As to the question of maturity, many of the same ideas and preoccupations would develop later. But the man who wrote the Four Quartets is still well off in the future and this is because his tangling with metaphysics up to this point had been collegiate: in courses and books. The great poems of the later years derive from the patient endurance of life as it actually is and himself as he actually was. Here in his thirties, he is a brilliant young fellow, aglow with the renown of his early successes: Prufrock and the Waste Land primarily. I only read the first four lectures - there are nine altogether; but the only message I could really discern was: I am a very clever, well-read poet with a hint of religious solemnity.
Anyway, let them, the lectures, serve as a reflection to everyone who is or was exceedingly clever that they may blush and take heart remembering that this was the man who later wrote The Four Quartets.