The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [129]
T. S. Eliot endorsed this view, with equal eloquence and considerably more enthusiasm in his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets.” Seeking to distinguish between “the intellectual poet” of the seventeenth century and “the reflective poet” of the nineteenth, Eliot had recourse to some cognitive metaphors of his own. Here is his famous account of the difference between Donne and a Victorian writer like Tennyson or Browning:
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.24
Of the poets called metaphysical, he writes, in a sentence from the same essay that seems half-consciously to echo Johnson on the necessity to read and think, “they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.”25 He draws some comparisons between French poetry and poetry in English, and returns to the physical body and the senses:
Those who object to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write.” But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.26
Is T. S. Eliot, then, a cognitive theorist avant la lettre? Does his invocation of the cerebral cortex and the nervous system suggest that he finds in Donne’s work some hardwired connections or some metaphors to live by? I think his argument points in the reverse direction, toward the mind of the poet, not the poetry of the mind. Here is a passage from the essay in which he tries to explain how these poets use rhetorical figures in their work:
Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically “metaphysical”; the elaboration (contrasted with condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction [Forbidding Mourning], the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet; from the geographer’s glove to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the