| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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Some poets, as we know, never recover from the immortal wound of the poetry they first come to love, though they learn to mask their relationship to their own earlier selves.
– Harold Bloom2
The Harvard Lecturer
In October 1932, T. S. Eliot arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take up his duties as Norton Professor at Harvard University. For Eliot, who had left England on 17 September, this was more than simply a prestigious academic appointment. It was, rather, something of a triumphant homecoming. In early 1914, when he had left Harvard to continue his doctoral research on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley at Merton College, Oxford, he had been considered a highly promising philosopher who had written some minor poems. How things had changed. The man who returned to the United States in 1932 had produced some of the most debated, imitated, and innovative verse of his time, and addressed his class as a distinguished man of letters in his own right. Indeed, he was back at his former university to instruct a new generation of students not in philosophy, for his academic interest in that subject was now past, but in the art and nature of poetry.
Before examining the lectures themselves, it will be helpful to us to look briefly at the man who delivered them. Although in his criticism, he advocated a doctrine of impersonality, Eliot, as we shall see, was a figure whose life permeated his work. In his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he had written that poetry was “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” not “the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”