The Poetry of Religious Paradox - T.S. Eliot and the Metaphysicals

Abstract

It is well known that Eliot was deeply impressed by the poetry and by the dramatic verse of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; it is also well known that he came to experience a growing allegiance to the doctrines and rituals of the Church of England, an institution which flowered at the time when those much admired poets were producing their best work. It is reasonable, therefore, that Eliot's verse should demonstrate signs of both influences, the literary and the spiritual, the cultural and the religious, to such an extent, indeed, that it is frequently impossible to determine whether a particular poem or passage relies on the works of those poets or on the rituals and teachings of religion. In all probability, the best of Eliot's overtly or implicitly religious verse relies on both, and fuses their elements into an independent, individual and harmonious whole. That the fourth section of "Little Gidding" recalls the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan may be less important than its clear dedication to the doctrinal stand of High Anglicanism: Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove That intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. Occasionally, nevertheless, we come upon certain poems which represent something other than the rich fusion of cultural and ecclesiastical traditions. In those poems, and there are not many in the canon, we may discern imitations (in the respectable sense of that term) of the old masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such poem is "The Journey of the Magi", not one of Eliot's best, perhaps, but notable because it allows us to glimpse the manner in which he employed the models provided by Donne and Herbert, to whom, in different ways, this poem might have been dedicated.