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14 qr 1 NeobaroqueEliot Antidissociationism and the Allegorical Method Neobaroque Eliot? This chapter is written to claim for T. S. Eliot an unusual denominator, foreign-sounding not only within Eliot studies but also within studies of Anglo-American poetry and modernism. For decades, Eliot’s persona has been stable: everyone recognizes the U.S.-born, Englishconvert poet-critic who developed from youthful vanguardist to cultural conservative, declaring himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”1 Even as Eliot was first deified by the New Critics, then demonized by the next generation of poststructuralist and postmodernist critics reacting against New Criticism and the hegemony of high modernism, his attributes remained the same. In the 1990s, however, and partly responding to an accelerated publication of unpublished Eliot manuscripts , a third generation of Eliot critics entered the picture, expanding the frame of reference beyond the familiar and worn antagonisms deriving from Eliot’s once canonical status.2 New and “unofficial” Eliots are being recovered, such as Charles Pollard’s “New World Eliot,” claimed by the Afro-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott as a precursor who offers a viable method for creatively overcoming the fragmentation of tradition in a postcolonial setting.3 My own project joins this general trend. Specifically, the “neobaroque Eliot” whose portrait I draw here emerges as a response to the 1993 publication , long awaited and long overdue, of Eliot’s unpublished Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry.4 In 1926, Eliot delivered eight lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, titled “Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, with special reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley.”5 The earliest opportunity to turn the lectures into a book was missed; by 1933, when Eliot revised and consolidated them into three lectures titled “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry,” presented as the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University, he had abandoned the idea of ever publishing them.6 The monographic length of the Clark Lectures alone makes them stand out against much of the critical work Eliot 30 Neobaroque Eliot published during his lifetime, which typically took the form of short exploratory essays. In his introduction to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, editor Ronald Schuchard suggests that their publication “will have as much impact on our revaluation of [Eliot’s] critical mind as did the facsimile edition of The Waste Land (1971) on our comprehension of his poetic mind” (“Clark Introduction” 2). A bold claim, and one to whose fulfillment this chapter is dedicated. The Clark and Turnbull lectures elaborate one of Eliot’s most influential critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility.7 Eliot first presented this idea in a short essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” written as a preface for an anthology of early seventeenth-century verse, Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921).8 There, Eliot famously claimed, “In the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation . . . was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden” (64). For Eliot, the dissociation of sensibility was nothing less than a cultural catastrophe caused by the rise of modernity and the dominance of science and rationalism. It was a historical rupture that split the unified, holistic Western mind (what Eliot called “sensibility”) into separate, disconnected parts; conceptual, abstract thought was emancipated from, and elevated above, symbolic and supernatural modes of thought. Eliot dated it from the religious, political, and intellectual schisms of the seventeenth century that erupted into England’s Civil War and parallel conflicts on the continent.9 “The later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets . . . incorporated their erudition into their sensibility : their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne” (63). According to Eliot, the disastrous consequences of the dissociation appear in the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , who wrote either reflective (conceptual) or sentimental (emotional) poetry: “they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (65). A good polemicist, Eliot quipped that the eighteenth century “developed a petty intellect uncriticised by feeling, and an exuberant feeling uncriticised by thought. The nineteenth century paid for this debauch of Rousseau and the encyclopaedists” (Clark Lectures 221). The Twentieth-Century Critique of Dissociationism The Clark Lectures revised the concept...

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