Porphyro's Rose: Keats and T.S. Eliot's ?The Metaphysical Poets?

Abstract

A, Llthough T.S. Eliot's juvenilia display influence of Victorian aestheticism, his studies at Harvard, especially influence of Irving Babbitt's lectures there, helped foster his repudiation of Romantic forbears of turn-of-the-century poetics.1 In 1919, he had stated acerbically that the generation after 1830 preferred to form itself upon decadence, though decadence of genius: Wordsworth; and upon an immaturity, though an immaturity of genius: Keats and Shelley; and of English literature was retarded.2 George Bornstein notes that Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth became sort of anti-Trinity for Eliot, but by end of 1930s Eliot had reached general truce with Romanticism.3 A generation later, he implied that his struggle to find his own poetic voice had provided him an ability to view with greater clarity authors whom he had earlier disdained. As he remarked in 1955, final stage of development of taste and critical judgement in literature .. . is that at which we begin to enquire into reasons for our failure to enjoy what has been found delightful by men [; in doing so] one is seeking for light, not only about that author, but about oneself.4 Eliot's equivocal relationship to Romanticism reflects broader evolution of Modernist-Symbolist movement from early nineteenth-century roots, especially in its valuing of polyvalent symbol and organic nature of poetic form, key stone of Coleridge's critical legacy. In Eliot's case, he inherited from Romanticism a negative theology perfectly suited to genealogical recuperation of literary history as rebellion and restoration. Eliot's denials defend him against negative capabilities of his ancestors and plant his own negative authority in place of former laureates.5