4
" O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and seal’d thee His; By all the Heav’n thou has in Him (Fair sister of the seraphim!) By all of Him we have in thee; Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die! "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
5
" Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse lucida, spessa, solida e polita, quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse. Per entro sè l’eterna margarita ne recepette, com’acqua recepe raggio di luce, permanendo unita. “Meseemed a cloud enveloped us, shining, dense, firm and polished, like diamond smitten by the sun. Within itself the eternal pearl received us, as water doth receive a ray of light, though still itself uncleft”. "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
8
" That the result is far less a triumph for the human spirit than the work of the group of Dante, that the result is suspect in its nature and dangerous, that it is a substitution of human feelings rather than an extension of them, is another matter. In Dante, as I have said again and again, you get a system of thought and feeling; every part of the system felt and thought in its place, and the whole system felt and thought; and you cannot say that it is primarily “intellectual” or primarily “emotional”, for the thought and the emotion are reverse sides of the same thing. In Donne you get a sequence of thoughts which are felt; in Crashaw you might say, by slightly straining an antithesis, that you have a sequence of feelings which are thought. In neither do you find a perfect balance. "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
12
" When we inspect the dreary index of his reading which Miss Ramsay most usefully gives us, we recoil.3 No man of Donne’s ability and attainments ever seems to have read more positive rubbish. But the lists themselves are interesting reading, and provide a pertinent comment on Miss Ramsay’s thesis. For we remark at once, how large a part of this reading is in authors contemporary, or nearly so. True, as a thorough theologian, he was familiar with the fathers of the church, and with the most important of the mediaeval philosophers; but so, as Miss Ramsay herself says, was Hooker, and Miss Ramsay does not go so far as to say that Hooker’s conception of the universe was mediaeval. "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
13
" Pour aimer, il fallait être marié et aimer en dehors du mariage. Pas plus qu’entre époux, entre jeunes gens libres l’amour n’était admis. Afin d’avoir droit aux hommages des chevaliers, il faut que la jeune fille se marie. Ce que nous laissent constamment entrevoir les poètes provençaux, c’est une dame noble, belle, puissante, entourée d’une cour de jeunes chevaliers, parmi lesquels il lui était permis, sinon dûment ordonné, d’en distinguer un et de se l’attacher. Le lien formé, ils se devaient mutuellement amour sous peine de déchéance; rien ne pouvait les’séparer que, momentanément, la mort. C’était la fidélité dans l’adultère. La dame provençale n’est nullement “angélisée”. On ne la craint pas, on la désire. La nouvelle école florentine . . . devait modifier profondément la conception de l’amour, et par conséquent les moeurs. L’amour des poètes devient pur, presque impersonnel; son objet n’est plus une femme, mais la beauté, la fémininité personifiée dans une créature idéale. Aucune idée de mariage ni de possession ne les hante. . . . L’amour a tous les caractères d’un culte, dont le sonnet et la canzone sont les hymnes. C’est une date dans l’histoire de l’évolution des sentiments humains; c’est un pas vers la vérité et un progrès social immense. "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
14
" He is maintaining substantially the same theory as that of Purgatorio XVIII: “Then, even as fire moves upward by reason of its form, whose nature it is to ascend, there where it endures longest in its material; so the enamoured mind falls to desire, which is a spiritual movement, and never rests until the object of its love makes it rejoice”. "
― T.S. Eliot , The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933
