Arcadians, I have a (maybe tedious) request for help with basic research:

Yesterday, for uninteresting reasons, I googled “metaphysical conceit,” and something very odd popped up. On the Wikipedia entry for “metaphysical poets,” I found this sentence: “In a famous definition Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist critic, described the school's common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ and ‘attempting to erase one’s own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here’ as foreshadowing existentialism.”

I felt pretty stupid, because I really ought to know what Lukács said about metaphysical poetry, particularly if it is a “famous definition.” But (I am currently hanging my head in shame) I never heard of it. The quotation, claims Wikipedia, comes from B. Királyfalvi’s The Aesthetics of Georg Lukács, but it doesn’t give a page number. So I went to the library and checked out the book (which I hadn’t know about either and was glad to discover: it seems like a good survey of Lukács, though I haven’t read the whole thing yet). But I could not find the quote in it, or any mention of metaphysical poetry. So next, I tried googling the quote. Unsurprisingly, there are a dozen or so websites that use the exact same passage as Wikipedia (one of them, no doubt, is the original, but I couldn’t figure out which one). And “looking beyond the palpable” seems to have become a sort of catch phrase. But no one mentions where, exactly, Lukács says it. Finally , I tried using google books to look through some books by Lukács (History and Class Consciousness; Studies in European Realism; The Historical Novel): no dice.

That is the extent of my internet imagination. So my question is: does anyone out there know where these quotes come from? Did Lukács really write about metaphysical poetry (how cool would that be!)? Does he really connect Donne with existentialism? Am I really as bad a scholar as I suspect? Can I look beyond the palpable? Or is this merely a strange twist in the ongoing story of Wikipedia?

Thanks in advance to anyone who happens to know! I'll try to come up with a more interesting post next time as partial payment to everyone who has read this far...