The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry

T. S. Eliot

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780544358379
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 intellectual development.
 
This annotated edition includes the eight Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry that Eliot delivered at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1926, and their revision and extension for his three Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1933. They reveal in great depth the historical currents of poetry and philosophy that shaped Eliot's own metaphysical moment in the twentieth century.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Frontispiece
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Short Forms
• Editor’s Introduction
• Note on the text and editorial principles
• THE CLARK LECTURES
• LECTURES ON THE METAPHYSICAL POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
• [Author’s Preface]
• Lecture I
• Lecture II
• Lecture III1
• Lecture IV
• Lecture V
• Lecture VI
• Lecture VII
• Lecture VIII
• THE TURNBULL LECTURES
• Editor’s Introduction
• THE VARIETIES OF METAPHYSICAL POETRY
• Lecture I
• Lecture II
• Lecture III
• Textual Notes
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Index to The Lectures
• Index to Editorial Material
• About the Author
• Footnotes