엘리엇의 관점에서 본 형이상학적 시인들의 계보

The Genealogy of Metaphysical Poets from Eliot's Perspective

The 17th century English poetry is known as metaphysical poetry. In those poems, sensibility and intellect were divided against each other and metaphysical poets tried to unite thought and feeling in their poems. Eliot knew that the similar kinds of poetry flourished somewhere in Europe at certain periods. They were the 14th century poetry of Dante and his contemporaries and the 19th century French poetry of Laforgue and Corbiére. Eliot proposed the genealogy of metaphysical poets from his historical perspective ― especially from Dante through Donne to Laforgue. This paper purports to reveal the flow of metaphysical poets following Eliot’s arguments in his Clark Lectures and Turnbull Lectures. According to Eliot, the poetry of the three periods were all based on the contemporary philosophy and theology. Behind Dante there was Aquinas, and behind Donne there were Jesuitism and the other fragments of various philosophical systems up to that time. On the other hand, the 19th century French poetry was based on the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Eliot also explained that in the fourteenth century, there was no disintegration of intellect and feeling, with Dante as the distinguished ideal poet of that period. But in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries the poets underwent so-called a process of disintegration. Despite the chaos of the seventeenth century, Donne could accomplish somehow the unification of thought and feeling. However, the disintegration with Laforgue had reached a much more worsened stage than with Donne. Eliot showed the inevitable deterioration of metaphysical poetry through the historical process.