The term 'metaphysical poets' came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the cons… - Helen Gardner

Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, one of the most popular books of devotion in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has a long discussion on three ways of loving God.

The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accomodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna".

What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates.