바로크적 전통과 T. S. 엘리엇의 시론

The Baroque Tradition and T. S. Eliot’s Poetics

Baroque may be the better term to describe the metaphysical poets. It provides a wider perspective in reconsidering the 17th century English poetry as an integral part of European literature. It is also useful in reappraising the Modernistic revival of the metaphysical poets initiated by T. S. Eliot. As its etymological meaning suggests, Baroque poetry seems irregular and grotesque, and does not show any affinity, similarity, and harmony as a whole. So, deriding its outward incongruities, the Neo- classicists adopted the pejorative term of “the metaphysical poets.” However, some innovative critics in the modern era insisted that Baroque poetry had an organic whole unifying the different, distinct, and diverse parts. Eliot’s reappraisal of the metaphysical poets and his tenet of the unified sensibility was the case. Bizarre and inappropriate combinations, and violent distortions prevalent in Baroque poetry was the inevitable result of the artistic labor to express the dark and unfamiliar reality facing the poets, just as the Hebrew prophets struggling to prophesize the alterity of God used unconventional and shocking phrases. Refusing easy clichés, they attempted to make flowing and transient reality felt through the physical sense and ended up with these incongruous and twisted expressions. The unity in Baroque art and poetry was made by the same endeavor to impose a human significance onto the jarring and incompatible aspects of the chaotic world, though the unity in variety of Baroque differs from the unity in sameness of the medieval era, Renaissance, and Neoclassicism.