An Intertextual Interpretation Of John Donne's And T.S.Eliot's Poems

T.S.Eliot(Thomas Stearns Eliot)has studied John Donne's poetry a lot.He thinks highly of John Donne's poetry in his paper On Metaphysical Poets.In his opinion,the images used by John Donne are very odd and innovative.Besides,he thinks that the themes of John Donne's poetry are full of profound meanings,which vividly reflect people's situation and emotions.Lastly,T.S.Eliot also admires John Donne's image creation which are very precise and clarify the poetry well.Thus,he not only encourages other poets to learn John Donne's creation in many ways but also he learned a lot from John Donne's writing.In view of this phenomenon,some scholars have studied their literary relationship.Their researches mainly focus on T.S.Eliot's discoveries of the value of John Donne's poetry and John Donne's influences on T.S.Eliot's creation.On the basis of previous researches,this thesis is to interpret the relationship between John Donne's and T.S.Eliot's poems from the new perspective of intertextuality.This thesis consists of three parts,including introduction,the main body and conclusion.The main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction.To begin with,this part introduces the literary relationship between John Donne and T.S.Eliot.Next,it summarizes the research status on John Donne and T.S.Eliot respectively,and their literary relationships at home and abroad.In the end,it explains the research purposes,problems and significance.What's more,it comes to innovation and shortcomings of this thesis.The second part is the main body,which consists of four chapters:The first chapter is introduction.It illustrates the main contents of intertextuality theory which includes the development process,representatives and main viewpoints.The interpretation of intertextual relationship between John Donne's and T.S.Eliot's poems is based on the intertextuality theory.Besides,it shows the theoretical basis and literary value of the thesis.The second chapter analyzes the intertextual relationship between John Donne's and T.S.Eliot's poems based on the theme of religion.Religion plays an important role in John Donne's and T.S.Eliot's lives.It not only influences their whole life but alsoaffects their poetic creation.They created a lot of poems related to the theme of religion which focused on the theme of skepticism,confession and salvation.In order to explore the intertextual relationship on these poetic themes,the second chapter studies the intertextuality between their poems based on the theme of religion from the following three parts: the theme of skepticism,the theme of confession and the theme of salvation.The third chapter explores their poems based on the theme of social state which consists of the theme of social changes and social conflicts.Although John Donne and T.S.Eliot lived in different periods,both of them cared about the society and wrote many poems to reflect the social state.The influence of the war,the revolution and other social factors brought social changes and social conflicts which can be found in their poetry.Thus,it's essential to analyze this theme to explore the intertextuality between their poems.The fourth chapter analyzes the intertextuality of image construction in their poems from the perspective of intertextuality.Image creation is the most prominent feature of John Donne's poetry.And it is also the part that John Donne has the most profound influence on other poets' creation.T.S.Eliot was also deeply influenced by John Donne's image creation,especially in the the three aspects of conceit,juxtaposition and superposition.Therefore,as for the part of image creation,it analyzes the intertextual relationship of their poems from the following three aspects: the conceit,juxtaposition and superposition.The last part is conclusion.It makes a brief summary to the whole thesis.This thesis breaks through the traditional criticism's view of text self-sufficiency which interpret the relationship between John Donne's and T.S.Eliot's poems on themes and image creation by using the intertextuality theory.At the same time,it explores the social and religious factors as intertexts that have an effect on creating the themes of their poems,which tries to provide a new perspective for other researchers to study the relationship between their poems.