John Donne And Thomas Stearns Eliot: From Metaphysical Poetry Of Classicism To Symbolism Poetry Of Modernism

John Donne is the representative of the English classical metaphysical poetry in the 17 th century.Thomas Stearns Eliot is the representative of the symbolic poetry in the late 20 th century of British modernism.This paper uses the methods of literature study,text study and comparative study to analyze Donne's and Eliot's poems from three aspects: theme,artistic techniques and significance,to compare their similarities and differences in ideology and art,and to explore their great significance to the development of English poetry and even world poetry.The themes shared by Donne and Eliot include love,death and belief.The theme of love revolves around the opposition and harmony between soul and flesh.Donne believes that the body is the carrier of love,and love rises to the height of the soul through the experience and cognition of the body,so he affirms the love of the senses.Eliot believes that the body is dirty,which is due to his extreme dissatisfaction with the desire and ruthlessness life of modern westerners,therefore he hates the love of the senses.Although Donne doubts the loyalty of women,he still longs for true love.The woman,who is loyal to love and has virtue,soul,beauty as well as truth,is ideal in his heart.She can not only share the joy of being with her true love,but also have spiritual communication with her lover,so as to achieve the harmonious unity of soul and flesh.Eliot's ideal love is as same as Donne's.The theme of death is to question the meaning of life.The existence form of life is another form of death,including death is like living and living is like dying.Donne believes that the body is rotten and the soul is immortal,which is still alive despite death.Eliot believes that the existence of the body with soul missing,this is life just as death.Faced with death,they understand that human beings are bred by the earth and come from dust.At the end of life,they should return to the origin.Everything goes back to the very beginning.The theme of faith is the journey for pursuing redemption.The pilgrimage road is full of thorns.Donne chooses to repent for human beings' original sin.Eliot hopes that modern westerners can realize the lack of faith,thus they can regain their faith.Donne is thirsty for washing away sin,receiving God's mercy and grace,staying in heaven forever,so that the spirit can be reborned.In the face of the serious crisis of civilization and belief in modern Western society,Eliot believes that only religious belief can save them and rebirth their spirit.The artistic techniques used by Donne and Eliot in their poems include metaphor,allusion and irony.The use of metaphor reflects the abnormality in poetry.Donne uses peculiar metaphor while Eliot uses metaphor.They change readers' old perception of everything in the world with wonderful and brand-new feelings,and save readers from indifference and numbness through novelty.The purpose of using allusion is to achieve implicit and thought-provoking.There are a lot of allusions in the poems of Donne and Eliot,which enrich the connotation of the poems and make the poems meaningful by using the implicature of allusions.Irony embodies the contradiction between Donne and Eliot.Donne and Eliot have made great contributions to the development of English poetry as well as the world poetry.They broke through the traditional poetry style of their times and brought a fresh atmosphere to the English poetic circles.Both Donne's theory of “Fantastic Metaphor” and Eliot's theory of “Impersonality” and “Objective Counterpart” are valuable treasures in the history of English poetry.Donne and Eliot are two brilliant stars in the history of English poetry,even the world poetry.