In the 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, T. S. Eliot redrew the map of metaphysical poetry in the Western literature by including not just the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century England but Lucretius, Dante, and Baudelaire among many others. In the Lectures, published posthumously in 1993 under the title of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Eliot also revaluated the metaphysical poems of Dante and Donne in terms of their socio-cultural, philosophical, and religious background. Especially, Christian mysticism was, Eliot insisted, one of the most important factors in understanding these great poets’ works accurately. According to Eliot’s somewhat idiosyncratic genealogy of Christian mysticism, it could be basically divided into two streams: ontological-classical and psychological- romantic. A fundamental tenet of ontological-classical mysticism is that God is transcendental and the vision of God can “only be attained by a process in which the analytic intellect took apart.” By contrast, God, for psychological-romantic mystics, is immanent and a human being has an innate capability to perceive and recognize God-head intuitively and to be united with it, whether momentarily or not.Ontological-classical mysticism, whose origin Eliot attributed to Aristotle’s metaphysics, was developed by such theologians as Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas, and culminated in Dante’s poetry aesthetically. Notably, for Eliot, Dante was not merely a religious poet faithful to his own mysticism but, far more importantly, the paradigmatic figure of what Eliot famously called “united sensibility.” Inextricably combined with Eliot’s enthusiastic support of both Dante’s mysticism and his poetic achievement is his radical revision of the aesthetics of united sensibility; in addition to union of thought and feeling, order, system, and harmony, as championed by classicism, toward which he increasingly inclined, become essential parts of united sensibility. In contrast to Dante, Donne, once eulogized as a representative poet of united sensibility by Eliot himself, was degraded into a precursor of “dissociation of sensibility.” Behind this dissociation, Eliot claimed. lay Donne’s embracement of psychological-romantic mysticism, originated from Plotinus and fully developed by Eckhardt, Ignatius, Theresa and St. John of the Cross. By reading closely Donne’s “The Extasie” and examining its dualistic view of soul and body, Eliot exemplified how the poet’s disintegrated sensibility is merged with his psychological mysticism.

• 이홍섭(인제대학교) | Hong-Seop Lee