Cognitive-Affective Formalism: T.S. Eliot and the Embodiment of Early Modern Verse

This dissertation develops cognitive-affective formalism, a new analytical approach to versification, by re-examining T. S. Eliot’s critical engagements with early modern verse, particularly Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic blank verse and metaphysical poetry. Integrating contemporary theories from cognitive neuroscience and philosophy with phonetic and prosodic analysis, this study argues for considering how versification shapes readers’ embodied experiences. I define cognitive-affective formalism as a transhistorical mode of analysis rooted in the phenomenology of embodied reading, which posits that versification actively reshapes the processes underlying readers’ emotional conception (how readers form emotions). By “reading Eliot reading,” I attend to and reconstruct an understanding of his embodied experience of early modern verse. Through analyses of the early modern texts he cites in his criticism, I develop Eliot’s concepts of “closeness of texture” in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic blank verse and the “incarnation” of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry into analytical frameworks. Through formal analyses of Eliot’s readings of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and others, I demonstrate how early modern versification creates unique cognitive-affective affordances for readers. Synthesizing insights from modernist studies, early modern poetry and poetics, and cognitive science, this project offers new insights into the cognitive-affective affordances of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse and a fresh perspective on Eliot’s critical engagements with early modern literature and a set of analytical tools for understanding how versification shapes readers’ embodied experiences of thinking and feeling across historical contexts.