The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry
T. S. Eliot
The famed series of Trinity College and Johns Hopkins lectures in which the Nobel Prize winner explored history, poetry, and philosophy.
While a student at Harvard in the early years of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot immersed himself in the verse of Dante, Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue. His study of the relation of thought and feeling in these poets led Eliot, as a poet and critic living in London, to formulate an original theory of the poetry generally termed "metaphysical"—philosophical and intellectual poetry that revels in startlingly unconventional imagery.
Eliot came to perceive a gradual "disintegration of the intellect" following three "metaphysical moments" of European civilization—the thirteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. The theory is at once a provocative prism through which to view Western intellectual and literary history and an exceptional insight into Eliot's own...
While a student at Harvard in the early years of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot immersed himself in the verse of Dante, Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue. His study of the relation of thought and feeling in these poets led Eliot, as a poet and critic living in London, to formulate an original theory of the poetry generally termed "metaphysical"—philosophical and intellectual poetry that revels in startlingly unconventional imagery.
Eliot came to perceive a gradual "disintegration of the intellect" following three "metaphysical moments" of European civilization—the thirteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. The theory is at once a provocative prism through which to view Western intellectual and literary history and an exceptional insight into Eliot's own...
Year:
1994
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Language:
english
Pages:
400
ISBN 10:
0156002566
ISBN 13:
9780156002561
File:
EPUB, 5.80 MB
IPFS:
,
english, 1994