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Essays on elizabethan drama.

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Essays on Elizabethan Drama Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1960

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Postures of Dying: Eliot, Seneca and the Elizabethans

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Kit Toda, Postures of Dying: Eliot, Seneca and the Elizabethans, The Review of English Studies , Volume 72, Issue 305, June 2021, Pages 540–564, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaa085

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This article analyses the substantial intertextual relations between Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, Seneca’s tragedies, and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly in the depictions of dying speeches. It demonstrates, too, that ‘Gerontion’ is a prominent example of how Eliot’s poetry anticipates the issues explored in his critical prose—in this case, notably ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. Further, the article relates the use of what Eliot called ‘saturated’ images in early modern drama and his own poetry with his theories of poetic creation and originality. In so doing, it argues that, contrary to the accepted critical narrative, the famous description of a ‘profound kinship’ with an unnamed ‘dead author’ that Eliot describes in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, may not primarily and exclusively refer to Jules Laforgue.

There is a kind of stimulus for a writer which is more important than the stimulus of admiring another writer. Admiration leads most often to imitation; we can seldom remain long unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak we do not imitate him, and though we are quite as likely to be accused of it, we are quite unperturbed by the charge. This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author … It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable … We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition. from ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ (1919), T.   S. Eliot 1

Intimate and imitate—it is tempting to draw a nebulous connection between words with aural similarities, even (or perhaps particularly) in the absence of a genuine etymological link. Here, this illusive affiliation adds piquancy; Eliot casts the words in oppositional roles, though admitting that they may look deceptively similar to others, who are ‘quite as likely’ to be fooled by imitation. Yet to Eliot, one makes him a literary lover—the other, a debtor.

In ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, Eliot regrets how the ‘traces’ of a transformative ‘peculiar personal intimacy, with … a dead author’ are ‘conspicuously lacking from contemporary poetry’. This shows, for him, a lamentable deficiency in ‘tradition’ and leads, paradoxically, to the loss of that serendipitous ‘combusting into originality’ occasioned by whole-hearted ‘passion’.

The account of this ‘peculiar personal intimacy’ is as peculiarly personal as what it describes, and it comes as no surprise that elsewhere, Eliot appears to confirm that he was here describing his own experiences. The ‘dead author’ has routinely been taken to refer to Jules Laforgue, the minor nineteenth-century French poet, a symboliste whose work was famously crucial to Eliot’s early development. Christopher Ricks, for example, quotes a large section from this essay in an appendix to Inventions of the March Hare , preceded by the words ‘based largely on TSE’s experience of Laforgue though it does not speak of him’, which is in turn cited in Barry J. Faulk’s essay and becomes, ‘Eliot confessed to a feeling of “profound kinship” with Laforgue’. 2 Colin McCabe, meanwhile, states that Eliot writes ‘very movingly, without naming Laforgue, of the “profound kinship” that a developing poet feels’, while Eric Sigg in The American T.   S. Eliot writes, ‘Eliot recounted the profound psychological and spiritual change his exposure to Laforgue provoked, drawing an analogy between the experience that develops a man and one that develops a writer’, before quoting the above passage. 3 He later repeats that the ‘dead author’ in question is ‘undoubtedly Laforgue’, though conceding that ‘Eliot described F. H. Bradley in similar language’. 4

Certainly, Eliot’s juvenilia show clear signs of the dramatic change that his reading of Laforgue’s poetry effected and it is reasonable to assume that Jules Laforgue is being indicated here. Yet despite the assertions of some scholars, Eliot never explicitly states that his personal experience of ‘profound kinship’ was with Laforgue, let alone that—as many scholars imply—it was exclusively of him that Eliot was thinking.

In fact, in the same essay, Eliot gives an example of this ‘peculiar personal intimacy’ between two writers, which he describes as enabling ‘the saturation which sometimes combusts spontaneously into originality’:

fly where men feel The cunning axletree: and those that suffer Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear is beautiful; and the beauty only appears more substantial if we conjecture that Chapman may have absorbed the recurring phrase of Seneca in signum celsi glaciale poli septem stellis Arcados ursæ lucem verso termone vocat… … [ sic ] sub cardine glacialis ursæ… a union, at a point at least, of the Tudor and the Greek through the Senecan phrase. 5

The comparison of these lines from Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois with those in Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus and Hercules Furens occurs again in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (1933), published 14 years later. (Hereafter referred to as ‘ The Use of Poetry ’.) After quoting the same passage from Bussy D’Ambois and Hercules Furens (though a different one from Hercules Oetaeus ), he also repeats his use of the unusual word ‘saturation’:

There is first the probability that this imagery had some personal saturation value, so to speak, for Seneca; another for Chapman, and another for myself who have borrowed it twice from Chapman. I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation—I will not say with associations, for I do not want to revert to Hartley—but with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were. 6

In ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, Eliot saw Chapman and Seneca as sharing a ‘peculiar personal intimacy’; here Eliot figures himself among their brotherhood. As Matthews suggests in his article ‘T. S. Eliot’s Chapman’, at this juncture in his spiritual development, Eliot may also have seen in Chapman a model for the ‘cross-fertilization of the two sensibilities’: Christianity and Senecan classicism. 7

This indicates that the valuable and transformative feeling of ‘profound kinship’ that Eliot felt was not only with Laforgue (whom he does not mention in The Use of Poetry either), but also with Seneca and Chapman, as well as, perhaps, other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Although in 1961 Eliot gave tribute to Laforgue ‘to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’, his words are exact: he writes of ‘any one poet’. Much earlier, in 1928, he attributed his poetic formation to two great influences: ‘The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama’. 8

Eliot generally follows contemporary usage of the word ‘Elizabethan’ as designating both Elizabethan and Jacobean. Examples of this are numerous, a prominent one being his essay ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’ which is a ‘Preface to an Unwritten Book’ on ‘Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and Chapman’. 9 In this, Eliot was following the general practice of the time. George Saintsbury, the influential critic to whom Eliot dedicated Homage to John Dryden (1924), even includes John Milton and Thomas Hobbes in his work, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1887). This broader use of the term continued into the 1920s: F. L. Lucas’ Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) includes material on Jacobean dramatists, while most of the chapters in Henry Dugdale-Sykes’ Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (1924) deal with Jacobean plays.

Eliot writes in the above quotation from The Use of Poetry that he has ‘borrowed’ the Senecan passages from Chapman ‘twice’. The two presumably refer to ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ (where the unusual word ‘axletree’ occurs) and ‘Gerontion’. Later, he was to use the word ‘axletree’ again in ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935), although, as Ricks and McCue note, this could equally come from Sir John Davies’ use of the word in his Orchestra: or a Poem of Dauncing (1596). 10 This demonstrates an extraordinary fidelity throughout his poetic career, not only to the image itself, but to his conception of what such usage meant to his poetic praxis.

It is, however, in ‘Gerontion’ that one finds the most developed example of this ‘saturated’ image in Eliot’s works. ‘Gerontion’, like almost all of Eliot’s poems, can be profitably studied as an intersection of many different sources, but it is from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that ‘Gerontion’ ‘draws most of its sap’. 11 It is not only a question of the blank verse style, the vocabulary, the contorted allusions—as many earlier critics, including Eric Svarny and Denis Donoghue have noted, there is also a nebulous sense of the macabre, stifling world of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, something Stephen Spender called the ‘sinister backstairs post-Elizabethan atmosphere’. 12 One may go further: ‘Gerontion’ is a poem steeped in the specifically Senecan moments of early modern tragedy, moments that were of great scholarly interest to Eliot, and led him to write both ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ and ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ in 1927.

This article will demonstrate that ‘Gerontion’ is not only an example of a dramatic Senecan monologue but also a profound critique of what Eliot called the Senecan ‘posture of dying’, so common in early modern drama. Further, the way Seneca’s works were exploited and refashioned by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists also provided him with the conceptual foundation through which to apprehend and explain his own highly allusive method. As Grady writes in his introduction to Shakespeare and Modernity (2000), there are multiple ‘convergences’ and ‘links between techniques for reading the works of the past and those of contemporary forms and techniques of artistic practice’. 13 In Eliot’s case, this link is made and described by him quite deliberately in an effort to reformulate a new cultural tradition in which he himself might figure.

‘Gerontion’ sets out its Elizabethan credentials even before the poem begins, with an epigraph taken from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure . It comprises a slight misquotation of the first two lines of the following passage:

Thou hast nor youth nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep, Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear, That makes these odds all even. 14

Neil Corcoran likens Eliot’s ‘Ode’ with its ‘also Shakespearean epigraph’ to ‘Gerontion’, suggesting that for both poems, ‘not the least of its cruces is the way we might attach its epigraph to it’. 15 Certainly, in this case, the relation between the epigraph and the poem is a great deal more evident and urgent than the rather inscrutable epigraphs that Eliot has given some of his other poems. (For example, the quotation from a masque by John Marston in the long epigraph to ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ has never been satisfactorily explained by any critic.) The speech itself is a Senecan meditation on death: Claudio has been condemned to death by a tyrannical judge and the Duke, in his disguise as a Friar, advises him to look upon the prospect of death with stoical calm. He points out the futility of life, even of a fortunate one, for ‘death unloads’ all riches, suggesting that even age and youth are as insubstantial and meaningless as dreams.

This speech seems to encourage a dignified serenity in the face of death, exhorting Claudio to adopt a Senecan attitude to life as an interim between two states of non-existence ( non esse ). 16 Death is, according to Seneca, ‘not an evil’, but the ‘one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination’. 17 (In their translation, Margaret Graver and A. A. Long emphasize the idea that death is not unwelcome by translating ius into English as ‘right’, rather than ‘law’.) 18 Further, the Duke also echoes the Senecan denigration of life as a ‘small’ thing, which ‘is taken up with tears and anxieties’, as well as ‘fear’, ‘helpless infancy’ and ‘useless old age’. 19

Such philosophical positions are not, of course, unique to Seneca. His notion that life is a temporary state between the ‘non-existence’ of birth and death bears much resemblance to the ‘symmetry argument’ derived from Epicurus via Lucretius: 20

life is granted to no one for permanent ownership, to all on lease. Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it? Do you perceive anything grim? Does it not appear more peaceful than the deepest sleep? 21

Between the time of Seneca and the Elizabethans, there is a long tradition of Christian inculturation with classical Stoicism. For example, in The Consolation of Philosophy , Boethius also comments on the equalizing nature of death, which ‘lumps together lowly and high-born as one’ and the negligible brevity of life when compared with the ‘infinite’ afterlife. As a Christian, he explicitly rejects the notion that death is ‘total annihilation’ or non-existence, but still uses a similar argument that life is merely a short spell before a state of peace. The loss of earthly fame is therefore not to be lamented, for in death, the ‘enjoyment of heaven’ will mean the soul ‘scorns all earthly business’. 22

Much later, Montaigne also espouses stoical ideas about death integrated into a Christian worldview; for example, in book 1, chapter 33 of his Essais (1580), he quotes a passage from Seneca which advises his friend to quit the voluptuous life of the court or else life itself. Montaigne then states that he has tried to emulate this ‘toughness of the Stoics’ but with ‘Christian moderation’. 23 In a chapter entitled ‘To study philosophy is to learn to die’, he states that his own religion has ‘no surer human foundation than the contempt of life’. 24 Montaigne was proud to acknowledge his great debt to Seneca, dedicating a chapter to a spirited defence of Seneca and Plutarch, which begins by declaring his ‘familiarity’ with them and the ‘assistance’ they have given him. 25

Eliot focused on Seneca, but his friend, the influential critic J. M. Robertson, points to Montaigne’s Essais (which Shakespeare probably read in Florio’s translation) as source for the Measure for Measure speech, although he acknowledges that the thought is ‘nearly all to be found suggested in the Latin classics’. 26 More recently, Fred Parker has suggested Montaigne as a source for Measure for Measure , while also recognizing that the sentiments expressed are ‘profound commonplaces’. Parker, however, differs from Robertson in emphasizing ‘not the similarity but the divergence’, remarking upon the frequency with which a thought ‘characteristic of Montaigne provokes, in its Shakespearean context, an immediate revision’. Certainly, Claudio does not seem to be capable of taking on the Duke’s consolatory speech. He responds politely with a stoical aphorism that suggests the speech has had a miraculously rapid effect on him, but almost immediately afterwards, he attempts to persuade his sister Isabella to concede to blackmail and give up her virginity in order to save him, declaring that:

The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.   (3.1.129–32)

His reaction might be interpreted as a critique of the inefficacy of Senecan wisdom as consolation in the face of death. Parker compares Claudio’s response to Hamlet’s meditation on death, pointing to ‘the same recoil’: Claudio’s fear of going ‘we know not where’ and Hamlet’s fear of ‘what dreams may come’ are both, in short, the fear of the unknown. They both highlight a possible problem in Senecan philosophy—not a flaw in logical, but psychological, thinking: ‘In Shakespeare, the activity of mind … cannot conceive of its own non-being’. 27

But whether the Duke’s speech should be interpreted as an illustration of an attitude that is praiseworthy (if very difficult to emulate), as a satire on useless advice that ignores basic human responses, or, as Parker implies, something in between, is a matter that has been the cause of some debate. In ‘Gerontion’, however, there is an unambiguously bitter note to the stoical philosophy evoked by the epigraph. The implied criticism is not so much that it is absurdly ineffective to encourage a stoical attitude towards death, but that the attitude itself is flawed. The poem carries a troubling suggestion that it is impossible to stay admirably unmoved by strokes of fortune or the imminence of death without also taking on Gerontion’s weary apathy. The unlikeable narrator expresses himself in terms that recall the Duke’s speech:

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact? 28

Whether ‘heat, affection, limb, nor beauty’ or ‘sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch’—the similarity here in both syntax and sentiment conjures up the disquieting notion that Stoicism in the face of death is nothing more than a mere nihilistic indifference to life. 29 Unlike Claudio, Gerontion suffers from a weariness and resentment that allow him to be less attached to life, but this is far from the spirit of heroic Stoicism, whether it be the idealized form set out in Seneca’s letters or its dramatic adaptation as embodied by the heroes of Senecan tragedies—a matter that will be analysed in more detail below. The great stumbling block is that, as Gerontion himself admits quite explicitly, he is no hero: he was ‘neither at the hot gates | Nor fought in the warm rain’ (3–4), and though evidently an unpleasant man, he cannot even claim the grandeur of evil like Flamineo from The White Devil . Yet it is crucial that the spectator does not agree with the stoical hero’s assessment of his life’s value; the scorn of life is impressive only because the person’s life appears to be of great consequence, whether it be for good or evil. Most tragic heroes are those of a high social status, their lives bound up with the fate of the state. But like Prufrock’s, Gerontion’s is a mediocre and inconsequential life. Deprecation is a mode that is only effective when there is something worth playing down; you cannot devalue something already valueless. ‘Gerontion’ appears grotesque because the ordered language of stoical deprecation is used for a life that was genuinely pointless. The word ‘pastiche’ is often used for ‘Gerontion’—‘We hear his voice through it’ writes Helen Gardner, ‘but we hear it rather in spite of a voice he is putting on’. 30

This deficient mimicry is troubled and troubling because, by hearing Gerontion’s discordant voice through it, we may hear also that ‘the voice he is putting on’ is itself assumed, dramatizing itself through other voices and unravelling a tightly wound polyphony of ‘postures’. 31 It is this—what he called the ‘posture of dying’—that is Eliot’s primary concern in the poem: not only the attitude towards death but the attitude struck by the dying person. (That this was the central concern is also supported by the deleted second epigraph from Dante’s Inferno , which can be translated as ‘How my body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge’, a statement made by Friar Alberigo, whose soul is already in hell despite his body being still alive. 32 )

‘Gerontion’ follows the path laid out by the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, not only in its rhythm, syntax and vocabulary, but also in this central issue at stake. And, as Eliot recognized in ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, this path is one with a Roman foundation: ‘No author exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca’. 33

Among all Eliot’s poetry, ‘Gerontion’ is the poem that bears the most obvious and urgent relation to his essays, particularly the two Seneca essays mentioned earlier: ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. These may be read as critical prose re-visitings of the issues explored in ‘Gerontion’ some years earlier. In these essays, Eliot posits that the Stoicism exhibited in Seneca’s tragedies was particularly appealing to the Renaissance dramatists, for though Elizabethan England had ‘conditions apparently utterly different to those of imperial Rome’, it was nevertheless ‘a period of dissolution and chaos; and in such a period any emotional attitude which seems to give a man something firm, even if it be only the attitude of “I am myself alone”, is eagerly taken up’. 34

Eliot’s highly critical attitude to this Senecan strain of Stoicism is implicit in ‘Gerontion’, but explicit in ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’: ‘the “beliefs” of Stoicism are a consequence of scepticism; and the ethic of Seneca’s plays is that of an age which supplied the lack of moral habits by a system of moral attitudes and poses. … The ethic of Seneca is a matter of postures’. 35 However, his disapproval of Stoicism per se did not mean he felt the same about the way Stoicism was exploited in literature. In The Use of Poetry , Eliot expresses his doubts that one could be both a good poet and a good philosopher at once:

I believe that for a poet to be also a philosopher he would have to be virtually two men; I cannot think of any example of this thorough schizophrenia, nor can I see anything to be gained by it: the work is better performed inside two skulls than one. Coleridge is the apparent example, but I believe that he was only able to exercise the one activity at the expense of the other. 36

Seneca is not mentioned until 30 pages later, but if Eliot’s opinion here is applied to Seneca, it is probable, given his disapproval of the stoical position, that he would suggest that it is Seneca’s philosophy that suffers at the expense of his work as tragedian. The passage also confirms something strongly implied by his critical writings on Seneca—notably his two major essays on Seneca and Elizabethan literature: Eliot did not regard Seneca the philosopher as a separate entity to Seneca the tragedian; he makes very little distinction between the Stoicism expressed in these two different types of Seneca’s work. The few points where Eliot acknowledges the two, it is to emphasize their continuity. He suggests that the substance of Stoicism shows that ‘the plays and the prose are by the hand of the same Seneca’ even if the form it takes slightly differs so that the plays are more tempting to the Elizabethans: ‘As the dramatic form of Seneca is no growth, but a construction, so is his moral philosophy and that of Roman Stoicism in general’. 37 For Eliot, it seems, Seneca failed at being ‘virtually two men’ and this failure was at the expense of philosophy to the benefit of poetry. In his view, the superficial ‘postures’ of Senecan Stoicism may be suspect for a philosophy but adapt very well to dramatic displays of subjective emotion. (One must note, however, that Eliot is often inconsistent in his ideas, or at least changes his mind: around three years before he wrote the above, he published an article in The Bookman entitled ‘Poetry and Propaganda’ in which he writes that Goethe ‘more or less combines the functions of philosopher and poet’. 38 )

In the unsigned TLS review of a book by the French scholar Franck L. Schoell, Eliot suggests that there was a ‘numerous tribe’ in the early modern era ‘for whom the value of a philosophy resides in the subjective emotion which they can relevantly or irrelevantly impose upon it’; it is unsurprising, perhaps, that a philosophical movement already championed and exploited for dramatic uses by a tragedian would become so popular. 39 Among these ‘postures’, Eliot identifies the posture of dying as having the most dramatic potential and as such, the one that had the most impact on the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period: ‘The posture which gives the greatest opportunity for effect, hence for the Senecan morality, is the posture of dying: death gives his characters the opportunity for their most sententious aphorisms—a hint which Elizabethan dramatists were only too ready to follow’. 40

Eliot comments on the frequency with which borrowings from Seneca are found in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly when a ‘moral reflection is required’, as in a dying speech: ‘when an Elizabethan hero or villain dies, he usually dies in the odour of Seneca’. As Eliot points out, Senecan borrowings are common even for those plays that fall into the category of the ‘Tragedy of Blood’ or revenge tragedy, which is ‘very little Senecan, though it made much use of Senecan machinery’. 41 This tallies with Jessica Winston’s verdict in her 2006 article on ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’ in which she writes that there were two phases of Elizabethan interest in Seneca, and ‘playwrights in the second phase wanted their Seneca in parts—his sentences, rhetoric, devices, and structures’. 42 Given Eliot’s desire to perceive a ‘profound kinship’ among writers across time, it is unsurprising that he often focused on George Chapman, whose reputation for learning and direct verbal translations of Senecan tragedies indicate that he actually studied them, unlike many of his fellow dramatists who may, as Braden notes, simply have read ‘commonplace books and rhetorical manuals in which a very wide and confused mixture of Greek and Latin writers was digested into isolated sentiments and tricks of phrase’. 43

Certainly, even in the lurid Revenger’s Tragedy , which is ‘very little Senecan’, Vindice’s meditation on death adopts the Senecan mode. ( The Revenger’s Tragedy was generally attributed in Eliot’s time to Tourneur, but the consensus of literary historians now gives Middleton as author. 44 ) Eliot found this speech compelling enough to quote from several times, briefly in ‘Cyril Tourneur’ and at length in both ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and ‘Philip Massinger’, where he praises it as an example of ‘a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled’. 45

Vindice’s betrothed was poisoned by the Duke nine years before the play’s action starts, and in this scene, he holds her skull, which is grotesquely dressed up to create a fatal trap for her murderer. He begins by addressing the skull and the reflection expands to become a meditation on how the knowledge of mortality affects the human condition:

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships, For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute? Why does yon fellow falsify highways, And put his life between the judge’s lips To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men To beat their valours for her? (3.4) 46

Here the phrase ‘bewildering minute’ accentuates the futility of procuring riches for the ‘benefit’ of such a brief time. This phrase is in fact erroneous, the correct word being actually ‘bewitching’, but Eliot quoted and preferred this reading, which he found in J. A. Symonds’ Mermaid edition: ‘ Bewildering is the reading of the “Mermaid” text; both Churton Collins and Mr Nicoll give bewitching without mentioning any alternative reading: it is a pity if they be right, for bewildering is much the richer word here’. 47 The word ‘bewitching’ is more consistent with the idea that the enchantment of sexual love prompted by fleeting female beauty is an absurd motive for ‘labours’ in the face of the permanency of death, while ‘bewildering’ widens the scope to a more general sense of existential powerlessness. In ‘Gerontion’, Eliot exploits a similar idea: that of ‘reconsidered passion’. Like the skull of Vindice’s lover bedecked in fineries, he suggests a sensuality that has become grotesque decadence through being embellished to excess after the moment, in analytical cold blood:

These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors. (61–5)

These lines have also often been noted as being related to Sir Epicure Mammon’s speech from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist : 48

 Then, my glasses Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse And multiply the figures, as I walk Naked between my succubæ. 49

Here Sir Epicure Mammon, having been conned into believing that Subtle and Face will supply him with a philosopher’s stone, imagines the various voluptuous delights he could indulge in once it is in his possession. His speeches in this scene are studies in debauchery combined with gullibility. It is vanity in vain: the ‘glasses | Cut in more subtle angles’ and the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ both reflect moribund desires, like the silkworm’s ‘yellow labours’. Vindice’s bitter rhetorical question about the worm’s futile efforts is subtly echoed in the lines immediately following the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ in ‘Gerontion’:

   What will the spider do, Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? (65–7)

These lines similarly imply the contemptible nature of life by using the imagery of invertebrates but add another facet: the relentless march of time and the consequent inexorable nature of death, in the face of which ‘Neither fear nor courage saves us’.

That the Elizabethans found so much potential in Seneca’s death scenes is perhaps unsurprising. As James Ker points out in his study on the cultural history of depictions of Seneca’s death, Seneca’s own writings are ‘closely identified with death’ and one can infer that his own famously noble posture in death was likely to have been inspired by a death he witnessed that excited his admiration:

we may observe that the image of Seneca dictating while bleeding resonates with Seneca’s own description, in the De tranquillitate animi , of the execution of one Julius Canus by Caligula. Seneca admires Canus’ efforts to console his assembled friends ( Tranq . 14.9–10): … ‘I have determined,’ said Canus, ‘to observe at that most fleeting moment whether my mind will feel itself depart.’ Behold tranquillity in the middle of a storm! Behold a mind worthy of eternity, which summons its own fate to serve as evidence of the truth—which, poised in that final step, interrogates its departing soul and learns something not only right up until death but even from death itself! No one ever philosophized longer! 50

In this eulogy with its repeated ‘ ecce ’ (translated here by Ker as ‘Behold’), Seneca recreates this moment as spectacle, one with considerable dramatic force. One reads here, too, obvious parallels with the death scenes of his tragic heroes, in which they philosophize on the nature of death while ‘poised in that final step’—a practice imitated in turn by the Elizabethan tragic heroes. These Senecan dying moments were, Eliot suggests, ultimately performative, designed as spectacle.

It was to Othello that Eliot turned to exemplify his notion that Senecan philosophy is a ‘posture’, a self-dramatization whose moral force is as superficial as its aesthetic force is profound. Eliot often courted critical controversy, particularly early on in his career, and his unflattering interpretation of Othello flew in the face of the admiring assessment of his character that formed the general critical approach—an approach that still more or less exists today despite the slowly increasing tendency to see him in the context of widespread domestic violence and spousal murder.

Eliot, however, argues that the ‘last great speech of Othello’ should not be taken at its ‘face value’ of ‘greatness in defeat of a noble but erring nature’, but rather as a ‘terrible exposure of … universal human weakness’:

What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. … Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself. 51

In this reading, Othello’s ‘last great speech’ is also a self-consoling posture, an effort to mitigate the humiliating consciousness of his contemptibility by creating a profound sense of pathos and thus assuming the comforting mantle of a great tragic hero.

Soft you; a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well; Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum. Set you down this; And say, besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him, thus. 52

Eliot uses Othello to illustrate what he posits as the central paradox of a Senecan death, the paradox which constitutes the main cause of his accusation that it is merely a ‘posture’. It requires a supposedly manly disdain for life, but such Stoicism, he implies, is never pure, never free of the consciousness of the spectator’s eye and the chronicler’s pen. Othello requests that those left ‘Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate’, but as Othello of all characters must know, the truth can be refracted into any number of aspects, and ‘ocular proof’ may be stage-managed. In this speech, Eliot contends, Othello’s supposed disdain for life has the meta-theatrical appearance of performance: ‘I have done the state some service, and they know’t, | No more of that’, he says, but the phrase ‘some service’ is a deliberately provocative understatement. Othello is a man who knows his own worth; he is aware that the great deeds carried out in ‘service’ is what won the Venetians’ approbation, that recounting these deeds won Desdemona’s heart, and that, ultimately, he was forgiven for marrying her because Venice needed his martial competence. Othello’s consciousness of his own value in this respect is evident in the dramatic climax of his death scene. Despite saying, ‘No more of that’, it is the memory of this great service, a patriotically framed killing in a battle, that he chooses as the backdrop of his suicide: ‘he has ceased to think of Desdemona, and is thinking about himself’. 53

A misery so profound that suicide is preferable does not, then, necessarily translate to a disdain for life in the sense of earthly affairs; rather, Eliot reads Othello’s ‘posture of dying’ as designed specifically to direct what life will say of him after death: ‘Set you down this; | And say besides, that in Aleppo once’. (This recalls Friar Alberigo’s concern of how his body is faring in the world above in the aforementioned deleted epigraph to ‘Gerontion’ from Dante’s Inferno .) A parallel is suggested by Donoghue between what he calls the ‘self-justifying swagger’ of Othello here and Gerontion’s ‘Think at last | We have not reached conclusion, when I | Stiffen in a rented house’ (48–9). He argues that like Othello, Gerontion is cheering himself up ‘by making words give him the splendour and the grand appearance that “History” has denied him’. 54 In fact, Gerontion goes further; he blames his contemptible state on the manipulations of a personified and deceptive ‘History’ whose ‘cunning passages’ are, like Iago’s, too subtle to be resisted. Othello claims that he ‘loved … too well’; Gerontion similarly implies that his loss of ‘passion’ was only because he had an abundance of it: ‘why should I need to keep it | Since what is kept must be adulterated’. His use of the passive form (‘was removed’) assumes a lack of agency and consequently a lack of blame, just as Othello’s phrase ‘unlucky deeds’ elides the perpetrator of such deeds and the idea of ‘luck’ glosses over the fact that his killing of Desdemona was no accident, but deliberate murder.

In his article ‘Othello Furens’, Robert S. Miola analyses the debt the play owes to Seneca’s Hercules Furens . For Miola, like many before and after him, Othello’s death is admirable. Rather than seeing his invoking of fate as an implication that he is not to blame for his crime, Miola, unlike Eliot, reads it as a moment of humility: ‘Like Herakles before him, he recognizes the uncontrollable power of fate’ and their tears ‘signify their membership in the world of humanity’. 55 This follows the vein of more traditional twentieth-century readings, exemplified (and largely influenced) by A. C. Bradley’s admiring and sympathetic attitude towards Othello in his seminal Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), where he emphasizes his ‘open’, ‘trustful’ nature and calls him ‘a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth’. 56 Eliot’s unflattering assessment remains anomalous, particularly since it cannot be categorized with those numerous negative opinions of the last two centuries that rest upon racial othering; unlike, say, the German poet August Schlegel, Eliot does not suggest that the source of Othello’s troubles is that he is a ‘savage’ whose ‘blood’ hails from ‘burning climes’. 57 Rather, for Eliot, Othello exemplifies a terrible yet ‘universal human weakness’. (In this sense, there are some points in common with Miola’s universalist reading, despite Eliot’s contrastingly negative conclusions.) Eliot evokes Jules de Gaultier’s celebrated essay on the character of Madame Bovary in applying the word bovarysme to this weakness: ‘the human will to see things as they are not’, a self-deception that renders a wretched state a little more bearable. 58

Cary DiPietro emphasizes the creative aspect inherent in all readings of history and historical texts, calling ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ an explication of ‘Eliot’s own Shakespeare’, who was ‘placed, not in the renaissance, but in a modernist setting (an indifferent or hostile world), and demonstrative of a Nietzschean resistance to modernity (the individual seeking refuge), Shakespeare an early precursor in a transcendental literary tradition of Senecan Stoicism’. 59 This statement might easily describe Gerontion himself, who bitterly perceives a world indifferent to the approaching end of his undistinguished life. He seeks refuge in his own twisted re-working of Senecan Stoicism, wandering aimlessly through the ‘many cunning passages’ of ‘History’: the ancient classical world where he was markedly absent from the ‘hot gates’ (the battle of Thermopylae); a nineteenth-century Belgian estaminet where he sneers in anti-Semitic resentment at a Jewish landlord; the Biblical period of ‘Christ the tiger’—all recounted in verse that recalls the seventeenth century.

As successful as ‘Gerontion’ may be as a work of poetry, it is a moot point whether such dry, bitter words confer on the narrator any of that ‘splendour’ that Donoghue suggests that he seeks. Where Othello may be accused of self-aggrandisement, Gerontion is open-eyed about his lack of heroic value—yet crucially, he does not recognize this in the spirit of Christian humility. Instead he demonstrates a mixture of deep-rooted rancour and self-pity. What the two do have in common, however, is that they illustrate how ‘Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve’: as death approaches, it is not forgiveness or salvation but the worldly concern of reputation that consumes these dying men.

As exemplified in Measure for Measure and Othello , Senecan dying speeches involve two main modes, not infrequently found together. The first draws attention to the character’s admirable disdain for life with all its worthless brevity, while the second emphasizes life’s pre-destined nature, which (in a theologically dubious leap) absolves the individual of any blame. This second mode often makes references to the controlling influence of the stars or God/gods, in the face of which the dying are helpless. As Jocasta in Seneca’s Oedipus puts it: ‘Fate’s is that fault of thine: by fate no one is made guilty’. 60 In ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Eliot also quotes from the chorus’ commentary in the final section of Seneca’s Oedipus , which illustrates this fatalistic attitude:

Omnia certo tramite vadunt primusque dies dedit extremum non illa deo vertisse licet quae nexa suis currunt causis. it cuique ratus prece non ulla mobilis ordo. multis ipsum timuisse nocet. multi ad fatum venere suum dum fata timent. 61 All things move on in an appointed path, and our first day fixed our last. Those things God may not change which speed on their way, close woven with their causes. To each his established life goes on, unmovable by any prayer. To many their very fear is bane; for many have come upon their doom while shunning doom. 62

Eliot suggests comparing this passage with ‘ Measure for Measure Act III, sc.i’, the very scene from which he took the epigraph for ‘Gerontion’. This is, again, one of the many illustrations of how closely linked his essays and his poems are: the passages he quotes and the issues he raises in his essays can often be directly seen in his poetry. Though less obvious, one can even see in the poem traces of the other text suggested for comparison to the passage, Lord Audley’s speech on death in Edward III : 63

If we do feare, with feare we do but aide The thing we feare to seize on us the sooner If wee feare not, then no resolued proffer Can ouerthrow the limit of our fate; For whether ripe or rotten, drop we shall, As we do drawe the lotterie of our doome. 64

The sentiment here is very similar to Gerontion’s statement that ‘Neither fear nor courage saves us’, although Gerontion shows perhaps less acceptance and a greater sense of injury for his suffering at the hands of ‘History’ and her ‘supple confusions’.

It is the Senecan metaphor of fateful stars, however, that Eliot seemed to have found particularly appealing. This is most obvious in his treatment of Chapman’s borrowings from Seneca, discussed below, but one can see it too in his interest in the dying speech of Beatrice-Joanna from Middleton’s The Changeling , from which he quotes twice in his essay ‘Thomas Middleton’ and once in ‘Philip Massinger’. 65 She is far from being a stoical hero like Chapman’s Clermont D’Ambois but even this amoral anti-heroine ‘dies in the odour of Seneca’:

O, come not near me, sir, I shall defile you! I that am of your blood was taken from you For your better health; look no more upon’t, But cast it to the ground regardlessly, Let the common sewer take it from distinction: Beneath the stars, upon yon meteor [ Pointing to De Flores . Ever hung my fate, ’mongst things corruptible; I ne’er could pluck it from him; my loathing Was prophet to the rest, but ne’er believed: Mine honour fell with him, and now my life.— 66

Here Beatrice-Joanna addresses her father, Vermandero, who is appalled to discover that his seemingly virtuous daughter is guilty of murder. In his essay ‘Thomas Middleton’, Eliot quotes the erroneous ‘I that am of your blood was taken from you’ instead of the textually correct ‘I am that of your blood’, presumably because he used the Havelock Ellis edition from which I quote above, where the mistake originated. 67 This change is notable, for it renders this line much closer to Eliot’s transmutation of it in ‘Gerontion’: ‘I that was near your heart was removed therefrom’. Kermode comments negatively on this misquotation, calling it ‘weaker and indeed indefensible’ because it results in ‘losing the idea of bloodletting and making nonsense of her request that they “cast it to the ground regardlessly; Let the common sewer take it from distinction.” He reduces the figure to a mere assertion of blood relationship’. 68 Nevertheless, both versions allow Beatrice to suggest her father’s innocent detachment from his daughter while also simultaneously emphasizing his innate responsibility for her as her father. Further, it facilitates her assumption of the role of tragic heroine, fallen from the virtue represented by her good father and yet retaining enough to be concerned about polluting him by association. The word ‘honour’ is vague enough to encompass both the narrow sense of her virginity and the broader sense of her virtue. Yet though she was a virgin, there is little sign that she was ever virtuous: in Act II she blithely contracts out a murder with seemingly no sense of the enormity of her sin. Eliot has a relatively sympathetic view of Beatrice-Joanna’s character, writing in ‘Thomas Middleton’ that she ‘accepts the offer of an adventurer to murder the affianced’, a description which is only technically true since it is evident that she uses his lust for her to manipulate him into making the offer. Eliot’s moral diagnosis involves the strange word ‘unmoral’, rather than ‘immoral’ or ‘amoral’. He admits that ‘Beatrice is not a moral creature’ but suggests that she is ‘not naturally bad’, merely ‘irresponsible and undeveloped’. While Beatrice herself strongly implies a tragic fall from virtue, Eliot suggests the less dramatic but more terrible ‘frightful discovery of morality’; hers is the tragedy of one who finds herself ‘suddenly trapped in the inexorable toils of morality—of morality not made by man but by Nature—and forced to take the consequences of an act which it had planned light-heartedly’. 69

However, as Eliot pointed out, ‘nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself’, and it suits Beatrice to dramatize her fate as a fall from virtue caused by De Flores. It is not a question of her sincerity, for it is consistent with her character that she herself believes it: as he says of Othello, ‘He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself’. She further stresses the idea of falling from grace by using the cosmic Senecan imagery of a ‘meteor’, which doubles as both her fateful star and a metaphor for Deflores, her hired assassin and blackmailing lover—or rather the suggestion is that the two are the same: Deflores is her fateful star. As Eliot writes, ‘she belongs far more to Deflores’ than to Alsemero, the man whom she desired so much that she ordered Deflores to assassinate her fiancé Alonzo. The phrase ‘’mongst things corruptible’ has an almost dual meaning, which in the end amounts to the same thing: it both implies that it is her lodestar Deflores who is corrupt and not she herself, while also suggesting that she is ‘corrup tible ’ but not innately corrupt, thus assuming an original virtue ruined by the external force of Deflores. She claims helplessness (‘I ne’er could pluck it from him’) as well as giving a sly hint of reproach to others that her sense of ‘loathing’ for Deflores was ‘ne’er believed’. It is possible that she is referring more to her own heedless attitude towards her prophetic ‘loathing’ of Deflores, but the passive construction means that there is a useful ambiguity as to where the blame lies. It suggests, too, the blurring of hate and love, loathing and sexual fascination. In ‘Gerontion’, Eliot recreates this sense of the (self)-pity of it all by similarly having him imply a tragic fall from grace:

I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.  (51–6)

Not only is there the verbal echo of ‘I that am of your blood was taken from you’ in ‘I that was near your heart was removed therefrom’, there is also a similar belief in his own former and residual virtue, as well as the convenient passive tense which diffuses responsibility. Here again, as in Seneca’s Oedipus , there is an emphasis on the futility of human agency and the consequent, paradoxical innocence of the sinner.

In the dying speeches of Bussy D’Ambois, the titular character in the play by George Chapman, Bussy denigrates the events on this mortal plane, talking of his ‘worthless fall’: ‘Let my death | Define life nothing but a courtier’s breath’. The image is apt: his life is as brief and inconsequential as the insincere ‘courtier’s breath’ with its suggestion of hot air, but it also points to one of the reasons for his death: the whispered insinuations of the courtier, Monsieur. 70

However, Bussy relies more on the idea of fate than political intrigue as cause for his death. Although he is murdered by the Guise and Monsieur, both are immediately allegorized as ineluctable ‘Death and destinie’. Bussy makes no mention of his own sins which are partly responsible for leading him to his death: his bloody, choleric nature, his ambition, his adulterous lust and his own clumsy efforts at intrigue.

Instead, like Othello, Bussy concentrates on his posthumous reputation. He props himself up with his sword so that his posture of dying may be upright, and in so doing he seeks to ‘exceed’ Emperor Vespasian who decided to die standing but had to be helped up by his ‘chamber grooms’. He calls on his fame to ‘Live in despite of murther’ and ‘Fly’:

Fly, where the evening from th’Iberian vales, Takes on her swarthy shoulders Hecate, Crown’d with a grove of oaks: fly where men feel The cunning axletree: and those that suffer Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear: 71

This passage provides, of course, a crucial source for ‘Gerontion’. It fascinated Eliot, not just for its own sake, but—if anything— more for its close relation to some passages from Seneca’s Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules) and Hercules Oetaeus (Hercules on Oeta). 72 In every single instance of his discussion of this passage, he talks about its status as a borrowing from Seneca. Where he does not quote the Senecan source passages directly, he seems to regret it: in his lecture ‘A Neglected Aspect of Chapman’, he says: ‘This paper should have started by an examination of Chapman’s sources’, mentioning in particular ‘Stoic philosophy’ as one. Further, Eliot showed consistent interest in Chapman’s borrowings elsewhere. He writes of it in the aforementioned review of Schoell’s book (the review being entitled ‘The Sources of Chapman’) and makes a reference to Schoell’s work on Chapman in another TLS review of two critical works on Elizabethan literature, presenting it as a model study in source and influence. 73 Schoell, for his part, goes as far as stating that the ‘most precious’ of the ‘passages of moral magnificence’ that Swinburne identifies in Chapman are simply ‘antique gems, re-polished and re-cut by a jeweller of the great Elizabethan generation’. 74

The relevant lines from Hercules Furens that Eliot himself pointed out (in reverse order to how they occur in the play) are,

sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis Ursae? Beneath the sun’s rising or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen Bear? signum celsi glaciale poli septem stellis Arcados ursæ lucem verso temone vocat the icy sign high in the north, the Bears of Arcas, with their seven stars, with wheeling pole summons the dawn 75

Here, I have provided Frank Justus Miller’s 1917 translations for the extracts. However, Elizabethan translations also comprise a crucial part of this intertextual relationship that spans over a millennium. The highly influential Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh (1581), which includes translations by five different authors, was published when Chapman was 22. (Some of the plays included in the collection were published singly before this.) Eliot’s ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ was originally written as the introduction to a new 1927 reprint of this Elizabethan collection in the Tudor Translations series edited by Charles Whibley. 76 While Eliot was always more a poet-critic than a scholar, in his writings on the Elizabethan dramatists he pursued academic rigour, even going as far as to apply for a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, to work on a book on the Elizabethan age. While he did not succeed in this, the long-lasting influence of Eliot’s intertextual approach to Seneca and the Elizabethans is suggested by the fact that almost 60 years later, Gordon Braden found it valuable enough to try ‘a possible updating of Eliot’s case’. 77 Even in 2012, James Ker and Jessica Winston ‘follow Eliot’s lead’ in providing a ‘detailed guide to the process’ of Elizabethan adaptation in their study of three translations of Seneca. 78

Jasper Heywood’s translation of Hercules Furens gives the first extract as ‘under rise of sun, | or bo[u]nd else uttermost | Of the icy bear?’ and the second extract as follows:

The ycye signe of haugtye poale agayne, With seven starres markt, the Beares of Arcadye, Do call the light with ouerturned wayne. 79

The word ‘wain’ (or ‘wayne’) is the almost obsolete word for wagon, another name for the seven stars of the Ursa Major (Great Bear) constellation, also called the Plough or the Big Dipper. The bear is from the Greek astronomic tradition, where the stars were identified with the mythical figure of Callisto who was turned into a bear, while the wain is thought to be Mesopotamian in origin. (Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey explicitly mention these two nomenclatures as interchangeable. 80 ) Chapman, too, uses these two ways of referring to Ursa Major, although he opts for the word ‘chariot’ instead of ‘wain’.

In discussing Chapman in The Use of Poetry , Eliot also quotes four lines from the following passage in Hercules Oetaeus : 81

O decus mundi, radiate Titan, cuius ad primos Hecate vapores lassa nocturnae levat ora bigae, dic sub Aurora positis Sabaeis, dic sub occasu positis Hiberis, quique sub plaustro patiuntur ursae quique ferventi quatiuntur axe, dic sub aeternos properare manes Herculem et regnum canis inquieti, unde non umquam remeabit ille. 82 O glory of the world, O ray-girt Sun, at whose first warmth Hecate loosens the bits from the weary steeds of her nocturnal car, tell the Sabaeans who lie beneath the dawn, tell the Iberians who lie beneath thy setting, tell those who suffer ’neath the Wagon of the Bear, and those who pant beneath thy burning car: Hercules is hasting to the endless shades, to the realm of sleepless Cerberus, whence he will never more return. 83

The Elizabethan translation of Hercules Oetaeus included in Tenne Tragedies is by John Studley; it is more a version than a translation proper. Certain words and images are found not where they occur in the Latin original but in other scenes. The translation of the above quotation is, for example, rather free:

O Titan crownd with blasing bush whose morning moystures make The Moone her foamy bridell from her tyred teame to take. Declare to’th Easterlinges whereas the ruddy morne doth ryse. Declare vnto the Irishmen aloofe at western Skies. Make knowne vnto the Moores annoyed by flaming axentree. Those that with the ysy Wayne of Archas pestred bee. Display to these that Hercules to th’eternall ghostes is gone And to the bauling mastriffes den from whence returneth none. 84

Imagery similar to the extract from both Oetaeus and Furens quoted above also occur in other places in Studley’s version:

Hercules alone. [...] My prayse hurtes not my health: my fame doth fly, from land to land: The ysy poale doth know mee, where the northerne beare doth stand 85 Chorus. [...] Then all that lies within The scorching Libicke clyme, The poale antarticke of the South. shall ouerwhelme in tyme. Poale articke of the North Shall iumble, all that lyes Within the Axeltree, whereon, drye BORES blasinge flyes The shiuerynge Sunne in Heauen Shall leese his fadyng lighte 86

Eliot would have been aware that, as these extracts illustrate, Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois was embedded in a wider and more complex set of intertextual allusions, one in which Eliot deliberately chose to take part. While the striking example of the word ‘axletree’ being found in both ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ and ‘Burnt Norton’ has already been mentioned, the most interesting allusion to Seneca and Chapman is found in the ‘shuddering Bear’ from ‘Gerontion’, evidently a literary heir to Chapman’s ‘snowy’ one:

De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims, And an old man driven by the Trades To a sleepy corner.                             (67–73)

Eliot’s version is perhaps an ancestral throwback, for ‘shuddering’ is possibly prompted by Seneca’s ‘quatiuntur’ of ‘quique ferventi quatiuntur axe’, which is given by Miller as ‘those who pant beneath thy burning car’ but more literally translates as ‘those who are shaken by the burning axis’. (It may also be informed by Studley’s ‘shivering sun’.) The word ‘quatere’ can also be translated as ‘to set in motion’, which strengthens the link between the Senecan original and Eliot’s characters who are ‘whirled | Beyond the circuit’. Further, as I have demonstrated in an earlier article, the language describing the sinister actions of the anthropomorphized History also echoes that used by Chapman for the political machinations of Monsieur, which lead to Bussy’s downfall, weaving the poem even more closely into this intertextual fabric that covers many ages. 87

The frequency of Eliot’s borrowings from this play (and this passage in particular) is extraordinary, but the great debt that Eliot owed to it can be found even when there are no such obvious verbal links. Eliot himself intriguingly points to George Chapman as a key figure in the composition of ‘The Hollow Men’. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell, he mentions ‘Doris’ Dream Songs’ which eventually turned into parts of ‘The Hollow Men’, saying, ‘I am pleased that you like the poems—they are part of a longer sequence which I am doing—I laid down the principles of it in a paper I read at Cambridge, on Chapman, Dostoevski and Dante’. 88 The paper, given on 8 November 1924, was meant to be revised and published as ‘A Neglected Aspect of George Chapman’ in The Criterion , but Eliot was prevented from carrying out his intentions due to illness. It was lost until its recent discovery in the course of the Eliot editorial project, which released it to The New York Review of Books for publication in their issue of 7 November 2013. Following a long quotation from, once again, the dying speech of Bussy D’Ambois, Eliot writes: ‘I get almost equally the impression from the earlier as from the later play, that more or less consciously the personages are acting, and accepting, inevitable roles in this world, and that the real centre of their action is in another Kingdom’. 89 The suggestively capitalized use of the phrase ‘another Kingdom’ indicates that Eliot’s reading of Chapman had directed his vision of ‘death’s dream kingdom’ in ‘The Hollow Men’, where he achieved a similar sense of ‘another plane of reality from which these persons are exiles’. 90

In Eliot’s efforts to write verse drama, one might suggest a less precise and more generic influence of Seneca, Chapman and other Elizabethan dramatists. However, critics such as Subhas Sarkas have also identified a more pointed intertextual relation in the ‘double pattern’ of Eliot’s plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Sarkas points out that this is closely related to the ‘working of fate as found in classical tragedy’, which was identified by Eliot in John Marston and Shakespeare, as well as Chapman. (It is notable that Murder in the Cathedral was written just after his essay on John Marston, published in 1934.) In a famous passage of that essay, Eliot describes this double pattern as ‘the pattern drawn by what the ancient world called Fate; subtilized by Christianity into mazes of delicate theology; and reduced again by the modern world in crudities of psychological or economic necessity’. 91 Characters such as Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman (1958) and Harry in The Family Reunion (1939) are modern figures whose deeper motivations have been plucked from the ‘crudities’ of psychological urges and reconfigured into the mystical stimuli of one ruled by the fates, ‘whirled’ helplessly beyond worldly comprehension. This transfer from psychology to fate is perhaps most explicit in The Cocktail Party (1949), where the ‘renowned psychiatrist’ Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly gives gnomic utterances, culminating in his quoting a poem about Zoroaster and stating that he had a vision on first meeting Celia Coplestone, which revealed that violent death was ‘her destiny’. One of the few moments in which Reilly speaks in a way that seems at least adjacent to psychotherapy is a description (encased in modern trappings) of the bovarysme that Eliot identified in Othello in ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’: ‘they are absorbed in an endless struggle | To think well of themselves’. 92

Eliot thus continued to reshape Senecan tragedies to create new work, even in his later career. This method of creation was crucial to Eliot; it is a moot point as to whether theory or praxis came first, but it is evident that for Eliot, the way Chapman transmuted Seneca constituted a perfect example of his paradoxical conception of ‘originality’. As mentioned above, in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, Eliot found this kind of originality sadly ‘lacking in contemporary poetry’. Originality here is conceived not as creation but ‘ re -creation’, even ‘reincarnation’ (my italics). In the same year, Eliot wrote in an article on Ben Jonson that ‘Appreciation is akin to creation’. And about six years later, he wrote to J. M. Cohen that ‘we must develop our originality in the same way; that is by steeping ourselves in the work of those previous poets whom we find most sympathetic’. 93

‘Steeping ourselves’, ‘saturation’—Eliot often visualized profound influences in immersive terms. Matthews writes that for Eliot the word ‘saturation’ would have had ‘resonances from chemistry and physics’, suggesting ‘a technical intention in Eliot’s use of the word, correlative to his use of “catalyst” to describe the poet’s function in the contemporaneous “Tradition and the Individual Talent”’. 94 It is certainly clear that the word had connotations for Eliot beyond its primary meaning; it also intimated the transformative potentials of a poet’s mind. The poet is not just ‘metamorphosed’ but also gains the power to stimulate metamorphosis, to effect a ‘re-creation of word and image’. He uses Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’ as an example: ‘The imagery of the fragment, certainly, whatever its origins in Coleridge’s reading, sank to the depths of Coleridge’s feeling, was saturated, transformed there—“those are pearls that were his eyes”—and brought up into daylight again’.

What makes this unusual conception of originality and creation into something even more ‘rich and strange’ is that Eliot indicated that the reuse and transformation of an image gives it greater power. In discussing this favourite Chapman passage, he writes, ‘what gives it such intensity … is its saturation’, implying that the imagery becomes more powerful the more it has been ‘re-incarnated’: it becomes louder the more that dead voices speak through the living voice. Eliot wanted to participate in this almost mythic power, to both exploit and maintain the ‘saturation value’ of this image. By borrowing it from Chapman, who borrowed it from Seneca, he forges a link to them and finds himself a place within their brotherhood—he becomes one of the ‘bearers of a tradition’.

However, Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ is no mere homage. In using the Senecan ‘posture of dying’ for an unimportant and bitter ‘little old man’ like Gerontion instead of a great hero, Eliot pierces through the dazzling dramatization and intimates its ultimate hollowness. Unlike Othello, Gerontion does not succeed in ‘tak[ing] in the spectator’. Yet at the same time, the poem is a dramatic monologue, an heir to the great tradition of dramatic Senecan dying speeches. As I quoted earlier, Eliot thought that such ‘postures of dying’ were particularly appealing in ‘a period of dissolution and chaos’ like the Elizabethan age, like , I hazard, the waste land of his own age. ‘Gerontion’ shows us—is itself an example of—the enduring appeal of dying in the ‘odour of Seneca’.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, Egoist , 6 (1919), 39.

Christopher Ricks, ‘Appendices’, in T. S. Eliot, The Inventions of the March Hare , ed. Christopher Ricks (New York, NY, 1996), 399; Barry J. Faulk, ‘Symbolism and Decadence’, in D. E. Chinitz and G. McDonald (eds), A Companion to Modernist Poetry (Oxford, 2014), 148.

Colin McCabe, T.   S. Eliot (Tavistock, 2006), 10.

Eric Sigg, The American T.   S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings (Cambridge, 1989), 33–4.

Eliot, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, 39.

T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism , 2 nd edn (London, 1964), 147. First edition published in 1933.

Steven Matthews, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Chapman: “Metaphysical” Poetry and beyond’, Journal of   Modern   Literature , 29 (2006), 27.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (London, 1928), 8.

The Poems of T.   S. Eliot , vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London, 2015), 483.

Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet (New York, NY, 1959), 135.

Stephen Spender, Eliot (London, 1975), 67. Eric Svarny writes that there is ‘an atmosphere of moral and sexual corruption which refers us back to the whispering galleries of Jacobean revenge drama’ (Eric Svarmy, The Men of 1914: T.   S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Michigan, 1988), 178). Denis Donoghue writes that ‘we smell the Jacobean smoke and sulphur’ in ‘Gerontion’ (Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.   S. Eliot (New Haven, CT, 2000), 84).

Hugh Grady, ‘Introduction’, in Hugh Grady (ed.), Shakespeare and Modernity (London, 2000), 8.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure , ed. Israel Gollancz (London, 1902), 3.1.32–41. This is the edition that Eliot owned. See Kit Kumiko Toda, ‘Editions of Early Modern Drama Used by T. S. Eliot: A Resource’, Resources for American Literary Study , 41 (2019), 277.

Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge, 2010), 104.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales , ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1965), 143.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Letter CXXIII’, in Letters from a Stoic , tr. Robin Campbell (London, 1969), 231.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Letter 123’, in Letters on Ethics , tr. Margaret Graver and A. A. Long (Chicago, IL, and London, 2015), 497.

Seneca, ‘Letter 99’, tr. Graver and Long, 392.

James Warren, ‘Lucretius, Symmetry Arguments, and Fearing Death’, Phronesis , 46 (2001), 466–91.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things , rev. edn, tr. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis, IN, 2001), 94.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , tr. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 1999), 36–27.

Michel de Montaigne, Essais , vol. 1 (Bordeaux, 1580), 336 (pubd online October 2006) < http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Consult/index.asp?numfiche=235 > accessed 27 March 2020. Note that the chapter numbering differs by one between this first edition and the majority of later editions. Translations are my own.

Montaigne, Essais , vol. 1, 95.

Montiagne, Essais , vol. 2, 529.

John M. Robertson, Shakespeare and Montaigne (London, 1897), 22.

Fred Parker, ‘Shakespeare’s Argument with Montaigne’, The   Cambridge   Quarterly , 28 (1999), 15.

‘Gerontion’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot , vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London, 2015), 31–3, ll.57–60. All subsequent quotations come from this edition

Ricks and McCue also note ‘ As You Like It II vii: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”’. The Poems of T.   S. Eliot , 481.

Helen Gardner, The Art of T.   S. Eliot (London, 1949), 19. She writes, ‘But magnificent as ‘Gerontion’ is, there is a flavour in it of pastiche ’. Stephen Spender also calls it ‘Jacobean pastiche’ in Eliot (London, 1975), 67. Hugh Kenner writes of ‘ventriloquial pastiche’ in The Invisible Poet (New York, NY, 1959), 138.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn (London, 1952), 65.

The Poems of T.   S. Eliot , 470. First mentioned by Ronald Bush, T.   S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (Oxford, 1983), 33.

Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 65.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn (London, 1952), 132.

Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 72.

Eliot, The Use of Poetry , 90.

‘Poetry and Propaganda’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion 1930– 1933 , vol. 4, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD, 2015), 26. Originally published in The Bookman , 70 (1930), 595–602.

‘The Sources of Chapman’, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Literature, Politics, Belief 1927– 1929 , vol. 3, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD, 2015), 32. Originally published in TLS , 1306 (1927), 88.

Eliot, Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 72.

Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 83.

Jessica Winston, ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance   Quarterly , 59 (2006), 31.

Gordon Braden, ‘Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance’, Illinois Classical Studies , 9 (1984), 278.

Macdonald P. Jackson, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford, 2007), 360–3.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, in Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn, (London, 1952), 209.

Cyril Tourneur, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Webster and Tourneur , ed. John Addington Symonds, (London, [1903]), 392.

Tourneur, Webster and Tourneur , 192. The earliest example of the word given in the OED is from Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (1792).

See, for example, Grover Smith, T.   S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays , 2 nd edn (Chicago, IL, 1974), 323; Benjamin G. Lockerd, Aethereal Rumours: T.   S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics (Lewisburg, PA, 1998), 112.

Ben Jonson, ‘The Alchemist’, in The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson , vol. 2, ed. Ernest Rhys (London, [1910]), 2.1.

James Ker, The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford, 2009), 5.

Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, 130–1.

William Shakespeare, Othello , The Moor of Venice , ed. Israel Gollancz, (London, 1903), 5.2.338–56.

Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, 130.

Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T.   S. Eliot (New Haven, CT, 2000), 88.

Robert S. Miola, ‘Othello Furens’, Shakespeare   Quarterly , 41 (1990), 63–4.

A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy , 2 nd edn (London, 1919), 189.

Augustus William Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature , 2 nd edn, tr. John Black, (London, 1840), 196.

Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert (Paris, 1892).

Cary DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge, 2006), 34.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Oedipus , in Seneca’s Tragedies , vol. 1, tr. Frank Justus Miller (London, 1917), 519.

As quoted in Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 96. Eliot acknowledges that he alighted on this particular extract of Oedipus through John William Cunliffe’s short book, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893). Cunliffe quotes the same passage and compares it to a speech in Edward III , 3.4.

Seneca, Oedipus , tr. Miller, 515.

Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 97. Eliot refers the reader to Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy , 87.

‘The Raigne of King Edward the Third’, in The Shakespeare Apocrypha , ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1908), 4.4.143–8. An edition of this work was owned by Eliot according to Vivienne Eliot’s inventory in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Eng let, b. 20.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Thomas Middleton’, Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn, (London, 1952), 164–9; ‘Philip Massinger’, 209.

Thomas Middleton, The Changeling , in Thomas Middleton , ed. Havelock Ellis, vol. 1 (London, [1904]), 5.3.

Apart from this change in syntax, the spelling and punctuation in Eliot’s quotation of the passage matches that of the Ellis edition aside from two instances (after ‘distinction’ and ‘believed’) where he provides a full stop instead of a colon.

Frank Kermode, ‘Change’, in Robert Alter (ed.), Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon (Oxford, 2004), 46.

Eliot, ‘Thomas Middleton’, 163.

George Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois , in George Chapman , ed. W. L. Phelps (London, [1904]), 5.1.

Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois , 5.1. The correct reading is ‘burning axletree’, but Eliot used the incorrect reading found in the Phelps edition until 1933.

Note that current scholarly consensus finds that it is unlikely that Seneca himself is the author of Hercules Oetaeus . Instead, it is attributed to an unknown imitator of Seneca. See, for example, the metrical analysis in C. W. Marshall, ‘The Works of Seneca the Younger and their Dates’, in G. Damscen and A. Heil (eds), Brill’s Companion to Seneca : Philosopher and Dramatist (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2014), 40. However, for the purposes of this article, I follow both Eliot and the Elizabethans in attributing the work to Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Early Novel’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot , vol. 3, 692. Originally published as an anonymous review in TLS , 1434 (1929), 589.

Franck L. Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la renaissance (Paris, 1926), 128. The translation is my own.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Hercules Furens’, in Seneca’s Tragedies , vol. 1, tr. Frank Justus Miller (London, 1917), 98–9.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies , 2 vols, tr. Jasper Heywood, Alexander Neville, John Studley and Thomas Nuce, ed. Charles Whibley and Thomas Newton (London, 1927).

Braden, ‘Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance’, 279.

James Ker and Jessica Winston, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies , ed. James Ker and Jessica Winston (Cambridge, 2012), 15.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hercules Furens , tr. Jasper Heywood, in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies , ed. Thomas Newton (London, 1581), 3. Editions of Seneca His Tenne Tragedies do not include scene or line numbers. As such, for this and all subsequent citations from Seneca His Tenne Tragedies , I give the page number to facilitate finding the quotation.

Eliot, The Use of Poetry , 147.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus , in Tragoediae , ed. Rudolf Peiper and Gustav Richter (Leipzig, 1921), 1,518–27.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus , in Seneca’s Tragedies , vol. 2, tr. Frank Justus Miller (London, 1917), 306–7.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus , tr. John Studley, in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies , ed. Thomas Newton (London, 1581), 211.

Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus , tr. John Studley, 189.

Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus , tr. John Studley, 204.

Kit Toda, ‘Eliot’s Cunning Passages: A Note’, Essays i n   Criticism , 64 (2014), 94–7.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 30 November 1924’, The Letters of T.   S. Eliot , vol. 2, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London, 2011), 546.

T. S. Eliot, ‘A Neglected Aspect of Chapman’, in The New York Review of Books (pubd online November 2013) < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/neglected-aspect-chapman/ > accessed 5 June 2019.

T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry , ed. Ronald Schuchard (London, 1993), 152.

T. S. Eliot, ‘John Marston’, Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn, (London, 1952), 232.

Despite being described as a ‘psychiatrist’, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly never asks medical questions and the other characters clearly expect him to behave as a psychoanalyst. Edward, for example, remarks ‘What else can I tell you? / You didn’t want to hear about my early history’. The Cocktail Party , in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.   S. Eliot (London, 2004), 403–4.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Letter to J. M. Cohen, 22 May 1925’, in The Letters of T.   S. Eliot , vol. 2, 657.

Matthews, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Chapman’, 29.

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays , 3 rd enl. edn (London, 1952), 109.

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A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot made several of his most famous and important statements about poetry – including, by implication, his own poetry. It is in this essay that Eliot puts forward his well-known idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, among other theories. You can read ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

By 1921, T. S. Eliot has established himself as one of the leading new poets writing in English: his two collections of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1920), had heralded the arrival in London literary society of someone who had, in his friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound’s words, ‘modernised himself on his own ’.

Eliot had read widely, in medieval Italian religious poetry (Dante’s Divine Comedy ), Renaissance verse drama (Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, and their contemporaries), and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets (such as Baudelaire and Laforgue).

But Eliot had also studied the canon of great English poetry, and his essay on the metaphysical poets shows that he identified his own approach to poetry with these poets from the seventeenth century. This is somewhat strange, when we analyse it more closely (as we will do in a moment), but first, here’s a brief rundown of what Eliot argues in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’.

Eliot’s article on the metaphysical poets is actually a review of a new anthology, Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century . Eliot uses his review of Grierson’s anthology, however, as an opportunity to consider the value and significance of the metaphysical poets in the development of English poetry.

Although the metaphysical poets were a distinctly English ‘movement’ or ‘school’ (Eliot uses both words, while acknowledging that they are modern descriptions grouping together a quite disparate number of poets), Eliot also draws some interesting parallels between the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired.

Eliot begins by reminding us that it’s difficult to define metaphysical poetry, since there is a considerable difference in style and technique between those poets who are often labelled ‘metaphysical’. We have explored the issue of defining metaphysical poetry in a separate post, but the key frame of reference, for us as for Eliot, was Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century.

Eliot quotes Johnson’s line about metaphysical poetry that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Eliot’s response to Johnson’s censure, however, is to point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry. Indeed, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes :

His fate was destined to a barren strand, A petty fortress and a dubious hand; He left a name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Eliot argues that, whilst such lines as these are different in degree from what the metaphysical poets did in their own work, the principle is in fact the same. Johnson is ‘guilty’ of that which he chastised Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and other metaphysical poets for doing in their work.

Eliot then goes on to consider the style of numerous metaphysical poets. He points out that, whilst someone like George Herbert wrote in simple and elegant language, his syntax, or sentence structure, was often more complex and demanding. Key to Herbert’s method is ‘a fidelity to thought and feeling’, and it is the union of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry which will form the predominant theme of the remainder of Eliot’s essay.

Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry: reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was an Elizabethan (Donne wrote many of his greatest love poems in the 1590s, when he was in his early twenties), Eliot compares Donne’s ‘analytic’ mode with many of his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and George Chapman, who wrote verse drama for the Elizabethan stage.

These playwrights were all influenced by the French writer Montaigne, who had effectively invented the modern essay form in his prose writings. (We can arguably see the influence of Montaigne, with his essays arguing and considering the various aspects of a topic, on the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, where we often find a character arguing with themselves about a course of action: Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ is perhaps the most famous example.)

The key thing, for Eliot, is that in such dramatic speeches – the one he cites is from George Chapman’s drama – there is a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’, i.e. reason and feeling are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience.

This is where we come to his thesis concerning the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which occurred in the seventeenth century.

‘Dissociation of sensibility’

The idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous critical theories. The key statement made by Eliot in relation to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is arguably the following: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Or, as he had just said, prior to this, of the nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Browning: ‘they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’

In other words, whereas poets like Donne, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt their thoughts with the immediacy we usually associate with smelling a sweet flower, later poets were unable to feel their thought in the same way. The change – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, i.e. the moment at which thought and feeling became separated – occurred, for Eliot, in the mid-seventeenth century, after the heyday of metaphysical poetry when Donne, Herbert, and (to an extent) Marvell were writing.

This watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented, for Eliot, by two major poets of the later seventeenth century: John Milton and John Dryden. Both poets did something consummately, but what they did was different. Dryden’s style was far more rational and neoclassical; Milton’s was more focused on sensation and feeling.

It is worth noting, although Eliot doesn’t make this point, that the Romantics – whose work rejected the cold, orderly rationalism of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and, before him, John Dryden – embraced Milton, and especially his Paradise Lost . Wordsworth references Milton in several of his sonnets, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in Milton.

Eliot concludes ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ by drawing some comparisons between the metaphysical mode and nineteenth-century French Symbolists, to demonstrate further that the ‘metaphysical’ was not some entirely distinct variety of poetry but that it shares some core affinities with other schools of poetry.

He then returns to Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets’ techniques and metre, and argues that, whilst we should take Johnson’s critique seriously, we should nevertheless value the metaphysical poets and look beyond poets like Cowley and Cleveland (who are Johnson’s chief focus).

In conclusion, Eliot’s essay was important in raising the profile of the metaphysical poets among his own readers: people who looked to Eliot for discerning critical judgement and viewed him as a touchstone of literary taste were inclined to go and reread the metaphysicals.

This led to a tendency among critics of Eliot’s work to identify him as a latter-day metaphysical poet, a view which, as the poet-critic William Empson pointed out, isn’t borne out by reading Eliot’s work. Prufrock, the speakers of The Waste Land , and the Hollow Men don’t really speak to us in the same way as Donne or Marvell do: there aren’t really any elaborate and extended poetic conceits (central to the metaphysical method) in Eliot’s work.

So, this connection between Eliot’s own work and the work of Donne, Herbert, and others has been overplayed. (Empson was well-placed to point this out: his own poetry clearly bears the influence of Donne in particular, and Empson is rightly called a modern metaphysical poet for this reason.)

However, Eliot himself encourages such a parallel at one point in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, when he writes that poets writing in modern European civilisation must be difficult because the civilisation is itself complex and various, and so the poet, to do justice to this complexity and variety, must become ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’. Certainly this statement is equally applicable to Andrew Marvell and T. S. Eliot.

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 1 )

There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those influences was French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, from whom Eliot had learned that poetry could be produced out of common emotions and yet uncommon uses of language and tone. A close second would undoubtedly be the worldrenowned Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri, whose influences on Eliot’s work and poetic vision would grow greater with each passing year.

A third influence would necessarily come from among poets writing in Eliot’s own native tongue, English. There, however, he chose not from among his own most immediate precursors, such as Tennyson or Browning, or even his own near contemporaries, such as W. B. Yeats or Arthur Symons, and certainly not from among American poets, but rather from among poets and minor dramatists of the early 17th century, the group of English writers working in a style and tradition that has subsequently been identified as metaphysical poetry.

The word metaphysical is far more likely to be found in philosophical than literary contexts. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophical inquiry and discourse that deals with issues that are, quite literally, beyond the physical (meta- being a Greek prefix for “beyond”). Those issues are, by and large, focused on philosophical questions that are speculative in nature—discussions of things that cannot be weighed or measured or even proved to exist yet that have acquired great importance among human cultures. Metaphysics, then, concerns itself with the idea of the divine, of divinity, and of the makeup of what is called reality.

That said, it may be fair to suspect that poetry that is metaphysical concerns itself with those kinds of issues and concerns as well. The difficulty is that it both does and does not do that. Thus, the question of what metaphysical poetry does in fact do is what occupies Eliot’s attention in his essay to the point that he formulates out of his considerations a key critical concept that he calls the dissociation of sensibilities.

Eliot’s essay on the English metaphysical poets was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement as a review of a just-published selection of their poetry by the scholar Herbert J. C. Grierson titled Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler . In a fashion similar to the way in which Eliot launched into his famous criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “Hamlet and His Problems” by using an opportunity to review several new works of criticism on the play as a springboard to impart his own ideas, Eliot commends Grierson’s efforts but devotes the majority of his commentary otherwise to expressing his views on the unique contribution that metaphysical poetry makes to English poetry writing in general and on its continuing value as a literary movement or school. Indeed, as if to underscore his opposition to his own observation that metaphysical poetry has long been a term of either abuse or dismissive derision, Eliot begins by asserting that it is both “extremely difficult” to define the exact sort of poetry that the term denominates and equally hard to identify its practitioners.

After pointing out how such matters could as well be categorized under other schools and movements, he quickly settles on a group of poets that he regards as metaphysical poets. These include John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Henry Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Bishop King, all of them poets, as well as the dramatists Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur.

As to their most characteristic stylistic trait, one that makes them all worthy of the title metaphysical, Eliot singles out what is generally termed the metaphysical conceit or concept, which he defines as “the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.”

Eliot knows whereof he speaks. He himself was a poet who could famously compare the evening sky to a patient lying etherized upon an operating room table without skipping a beat, so Eliot’s admiration for this capacity of the mind—or wit, as the metaphysicals themselves would have termed it—to discover the unlikeliest of comparisons and then make them poetically viable should come as no surprise to the reader.

Eliot would never deny that, while it is this feature of metaphysical poetry, the far-fetched conceit, that had enabled its practitioners to keep one foot in the world of the pursuits of the flesh, the other in the trials of the spirit, such a poetic technique is not everyone’s cup of tea. The 18th-century English critic Samuel Johnson, for example, found their excesses deplorable and later famously disparaged metaphysical poetic practices in his accusation that in this sort of poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Eliot will not attempt to dispute Johnson’s judgment, though it is clear that he does not agree with it. (Nor should that be any surprise either. Eliot’s own poetic tastes and techniques had already found fertile ground in the vagaries of the French symbolists, who would let no mere disparity bar an otherwise apt poetic comparison.)

Rather, Eliot finds that this kind of “telescoping of images and multiplied associations” is “one of the sources of the vitality” of the language to be found in metaphysical poetry, and then he goes as far as to propose that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry.” What that means, by and large, is that these poets make combining the disparate the heart of their writing. It is on that count that Eliot makes his own compelling case for the felicities of metaphysical poetry, so much so that he will eventually conclude by mourning its subsequent exile from the mainstream of English poetic practice. It is this matter of the vitality of language that the metaphysical poets achieved that most concerns Eliot, and it is that concern that will lead him, in the remainder of this short essay, not only to lament the loss of that vitality from subsequent English poetry but to formulate one of his own key critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility.

The “Dissociation of Sensibility”

Eliot argues that these poets used a language that was “as a rule pure and simple,” even if they then structured it into sentences that were “sometimes far from simple.” Nevertheless, for Eliot, this is “not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling,” one that brings about a variety of thought and feeling as well as of the music of language. On that score—that metaphysical poetry harmonized these two extremes of poetic expression, thought and feeling, grammar and musicality —Eliot then goes on to ponder whether, rather than something quaint, such poetry did not provide “something permanently valuable, which . . . ought not to have disappeared.”

For disappear it did, in Eliot’s view, as the influence of John Milton and John Dryden gained ascendancy, for in their separate hands, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.” By way of a sharp contrast, Eliot saw the metaphysical poets, who balanced thought and feeling, as “men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility,” becoming thereby poets who can “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” Subsequent English poetry has lost that immediacy, Eliot contends, so that by the time of Tennyson and Browning, Eliot’s Victorian precursors, a sentimental age had set in, in which feeling had been given primacy over, rather than balance with, thought. Rather than, like these “metaphysical” poets, trying to find “the verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling” and then turning them into poetry, these more recent poets address their interests and, in Eliot’s view, then “merely meditate on them poetically.” That is not at all the same thing, nor is the result anywhere near as powerful and moving as poetic statement.

While, then, the metaphysical poets of the 17th century “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” Eliot imagines that subsequently a “dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Nor will the common injunction, and typical anodyne for poor poetry, to “look into our hearts and write,” alone provide the necessary corrective. Instead, Eliot offers examples from the near-contemporary French symbolists as poets who have, like Donne and other earlier English poets of his ilk, “the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” To achieve as much, Eliot concludes, a poet must look “into a good deal more than the heart.” He continues: “One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The point of this essay is not a matter of whether Eliot’s assessment of the comparative value of the techniques of the English metaphysical poets and the state of contemporary English versification was right or wrong. By and large, Eliot is using these earlier poets, whom the Grierson book is more or less resurrecting, to stake out his own claim in an ageless literary debate regarding representation versus commentary. Should poets show, or should they tell? Clearly, there can be no easy resolution to such a debate.

Eliot would be the first to admit, as he would in subsequent essays, that a young poet, such as he was at the time he wrote the review at hand, will most likely condemn those literary practices that he regards to be detrimental to his own development as a poet. Whatever Eliot’s judgments in his review of Grierson’s book on the English metaphysical poets may ultimately reveal, they are reflections more of Eliot’s standards for poetry writing than of standards for poetry writing in general. That said, they should serve as a caution to any reader approaching an Eliot poem, particularly from this period, since he makes it clear that he falls on the side of representation as opposed to commentary and reflection in poetry writing.

In addition to its having enabled Eliot to stake out his own literary ground by offering, as it were, a literary manifesto for the times, replete with a memorable critical byword in the coinage dissociation of sensibility, as Eliot’s own prominence as a man of letters increased, this review should finally be credited with having done far more, over time, than Grierson’s scholarly effort could ever have achieved in bringing English metaphysical poetry and its 17th-century practitioners back to some measure of respectability and prominence. For that reason alone, this short essay, along with Tradition and the Individual Talent and Hamlet and His Problems , has found an enduring place not only in the Eliot canon but among the major critical documents in English of the 20th century.

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