Donne and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically metaphysical; the elaboration of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. (35-39)

This line has been taken from Eliot's one of the major essays "The Metaphysical Poets". Eliot actually writes this essay to answer to the objection raised by Johnson about the metaphysical poets.

               Dr. Samuel Johnson used the term 'metaphysical'in his " The Life of Cowley". He used the term 'metaphysical' as  a pejorative one. He said that "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together" by these poets. And among his objections the very 1st one is the use of conceit. The Metaphysical Poets "employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically metaphysical." This conceit is "the elaboration of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it." Helen Gardner observed that "a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness."

                 However, Eliot here used the example of Cowley who compares the world to a chess board in his poem "To Destiny". Though Cowley also uses the conceit, Donne in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" makes "the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compass."

                 This use of conceit is made frequent and popular in the modern eta by Eliot. He himself used it in "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" where he compares evening with "e