Newborn/Posthumous-Immortality in Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s Poetics

Abstract

One of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, “Whispers of Immortality,” reminds us of the meaning of “Immortality,” echoing William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” By praising the bony remains, the former hungers for metaphysical poets as poetic “tradition,” while by stirring childhood’s memory, the latter recollects human beings’ pure trace of the glorious realm of Heaven. The essay attempts to scrutinize the distinction between newborn-immortality of Romantic era and posthumous-immortality of modern era. By trying to overcome their contemporary mortality, two great poets pursue the path up to immortality in their works. Eliot profits metaphysical poets’ ruins in speaking of tradition which gets readjusted while Wordsworth insinuates that immortality appears near us in our childhood; for Wordsworth the immortality of infancy is mingled with a trace of having been in Heaven. In “Whispers of Immortality,” Eliot ironically experience the whispers of immortality in ruins of mortal human being: Webster and Donne’s metaphysics. The essays also highlights how the dead ruins become immortal and why the immortality can be replaced with his poetic key term “tradition.”