A daring venture, perhaps too daring

When poetry underwent its heralded Modernist revolution in the beginning of the twentieth century, no poet was more famous for spearheading the movement than T.S. Eliot. One of the main influences in Eliot’s works, however, was the early metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. By re-exploring the territories Donne helped discover centuries earlier, Eliot and his contemporaries blazed new trails into the world of metaphysical poetry and helped create, revive or influence several literary movements, whose influences are still felt today, like Modernism and Romanticism. The complex and metaphysical roots in Eliot’s poetry, seen in “The Hollow Men” and “Preludes,” can be traced back to the works of John Donne, whose poems include “Holy Sonnet 4” and “Holy Sonnet 6,” because of similarities in subject matter, stylistic elements and tone.

Perhaps most similar between the Jacobean Age and Modern Age metaphysical poetry is the subject matter that each poet discussed. In T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” he explores the idea of death and Man’s chronic fear that surrounds it. He comments on the afterlife in lines 39 to 51, saying,

39 This is the dead land 40 This is the cactus land… 45 It is like this In death’s other kingdom Waking alone In the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness 50 Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone.

Eliot is commenting on the nature of the afterlife by relating it to the wasteland that is the landscape of human thought. His disillusionment and lack of hope in humanity stem from both a failed marriage and the horrific images haunting him from the [to his thinking] futile World War I, but the imagery he provides resonates from classics like Dante’s Inferno. Regardless of his intentions, the effect of these stanzas reveal death as only mimic to the emptiness that already permeates our “fading star” of human intellectual experience.

Similarly, John Donne writes a bleak picture of Death in his “Holy Sonnet 6.” Rather than depicting a hollow and hopeless afterworld to symbolize our hollow and hopeless minds, Donne instead personifies Death in an attempt at belittling it and showing its true weakness. As Donne puts it in lines 1 and 2 of his poem, “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Donne continues, going on to depreciate Death to the status of an unwilling and helpless tool of murderers and “desperate men.” Like Eliot, Donne is exploring death and its affects in a unique light. Both succeed in challenging the common Western understandings of death by relating it to something understandable and distinctly human: Eliot calls it a wasteland, Donne a weak and helpless slave of murderers. Donne and his contemporaries are doubtless an influence on Eliot’s unconventional thinking in this regard.