| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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The tone of this tirade is more personal abuse than literary criticism, and its intensity, as Eliot later admits, does not stem wholly from the biographical or philosophical standpoints expressed above. Eliot concedes that Wordsworth may well have been an unpleasant character, but notes that he can “enjoy his poetry as I cannot enjoy Shelley’s,” although he can only fumble “(abating my prejudices as best I can) for reasons why Shelley’s abuse of poetry does me more violence than Wordsworth’s.” (UPUC 89) The assault on Shelley sounds like one fuelled more by prejudice than rational argument, and as such we cannot fail to query its origin and ask why Eliot, normally the most urbane of critics even when disparaging or dismissing a subject, was driven to such extremes of abuse.
To muddy the waters from the outset, Eliot explains that his complaint against Shelley is not in essence one of poetic technique, although Shelley is prone to combine fluency with “bad jingling”, but is rather a grievance with the thought that animates Shelley’s verse. Eliot is repelled by the “adolescent” ideas that he finds in Shelley’s work and, tellingly, is unable or unwilling to isolate these ideas from the poetry within which they are couched. In Eliot’s eyes, Shelley possessed more than most “the unusual faculty of passionate apprehension of abstract ideas” (UPUC 89), and unfortunately, allowed them to inform too much of his poetry. For Eliot, Shelley’s philosophy is muddled, veering between rationalism and Platonism, and whereas a maturing intellect could have resolved differing elements into a more cohesive world view, his “views remained pretty fixed, though his poetic gift matured.” In this “apprehension” of ideas, and their expression within his work, he exemplifies for Eliot the giddy mental rush of adolescent reading. Only in his final unfinished poem, ‘The Triumph of Life’, does Eliot detect “evidence not only of better writing” but also of “greater wisdom.” (UPUC 90)