| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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The severity of the assault is itself telling. To reach a point of accommodation with Shelley, to concede that poetry may be appreciated even if ideas are ‘wrong’ would not, at this point, satisfy Eliot’s perceived need to distance himself from his past attachments. The dangerous ideas found in Shelley cannot be safely contained within the ‘poetic assent’ Eliot had defined earlier; they are too volatile because they are too close to the ‘former’ beliefs, which he could not put behind him quite as easily as he felt his new faith demanded. Such beliefs may have been too closely held to have been discarded easily—if not in the present, then certainly in the past.
In his study of 1988 Eliot’s poetry, Martin Scofield notes that “the most striking and perhaps unexpected quality of Eliot’s early tastes in poetry is their romanticism.” (Scofield 24) In his opening Norton lecture, given on 4 November 1932, Eliot spoke candidly of his own poetic influences as illustrations of what he called “the development of taste in poetry.” Starting with his early adolescent reading of Fitzgerald’s Omar, he recalls the point, aged about fourteen, when he first became intoxicated by the poetic phrase. This first flush of enthusiasm saw him engage enthusiastically with as broad a range of poets and works as he could, taking “the usual adolescent course” with the second generation romantics (Byron, Shelley, and Keats) sitting alongside later authors like Rossetti and Swinburne. (UPUC 33) This was the first stage of poetic development, the rapid assimilation of as much poetry as possible, and Eliot notes that it persisted until his twenty-second year.
The second stage is that at which “the intensity of the poetic experience” (the adolescent stage) becomes “the intense experience of poetry.” This development often precipitates some action on the part of the reader, normally taking the form of poetic imitation. Imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, the greater the feeling of intensity obtained from reading a poet, the more one’s own verse will bear traces of the chosen style: