The Metaphysical Poets : Quotations
The Metaphysical Poets is a notable literary work by T. S. Eliot. A complete discussion of this literary work is given, which will help you enhance your literary skills and prepare for the exam. Read the Main texts, Key info, Summary, Themes, Characters, Literary devices, Quotations, Notes, and various study materials of The Metaphysical Poets.
Quotations
Quotes
“A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”
(Explanation: Donne’s ideas were not just thoughts; he felt them deeply. His thinking changed his emotions and imagination.)
“They do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
(Explanation: Later poets could not feel their ideas naturally. Their thoughts were slow and lifeless compared to real emotions.)
“The poets of the seventeenth century… possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
(Explanation: Seventeenth-century poets could deeply feel and express all experiences like love, pain, or knowledge with balance and power.)
“They think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
(Explanation: Modern poets only think intellectually; they cannot feel their thoughts instantly and emotionally like the older poets could.)
“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.”
(Explanation: A great poet unites many different experiences—happy or sad—into one deep artistic feeling.)
“In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”
(Explanation: After the 17th century, poets lost the power to unite thought and feeling, and that loss never healed.)
“Fidelity to thought and feeling.”
(Explanation: A true poet must be honest to both ideas and emotions—neither should be fake or separate.)
“The effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle.”
(Explanation: Poetry gains strength through sharp contrasts of ideas that still connect to the same truth.)
“Telescoping of images and multiplied associations.”
(Explanation: Metaphysical poets joined many images and meanings quickly by creating rich and surprising effects.)
“Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.”
(Explanation: Modern poets must be complex because modern life and thought are also complex.)
“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” (by Dr. Samuel Johnson)
(Explanation: The metaphysical poets joined very different or opposite ideas in one poem.)