The difficulty is that it both does and does not do that. That said, it may be fair to suspect that poetry that is metaphysical concerns itself with those kinds of issues and concerns as well. Metaphysics, then, concerns itself with the idea of the divine, of divinity, and of the makeup of what is called reality.

Those issues are, by and large, focused on philosophical questions that are speculative in nature-discussions of things that cannot be weighed or measured or even proved to exist yet that have acquired great importance among human cultures. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophical inquiry and discourse that deals with issues that are, quite literally, beyond the physical (meta- being a Greek prefix for “beyond”). The word metaphysical is far more likely to be found in philosophical than literary contexts. Yeats or Arthur Symons, and certainly not from among American poets, but rather from among poets and minor dramatists of the early 17th century, the group of English writers working in a style and tradition that has subsequently been identified as metaphysical poetry. There, however, he chose not from among his own most immediate precursors, such as Tennyson or Browning, or even his own near contemporaries, such as W. A close second would undoubtedly be the worldrenowned Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri, whose influences on Eliot’s work and poetic vision would grow greater with each passing year.Ī third influence would necessarily come from among poets writing in Eliot’s own native tongue, English. Foremost among those influences was French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, from whom Eliot had learned that poetry could be produced out of common emotions and yet uncommon uses of language and tone. There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works.

Selected poems by ts eliot