| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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The bulk of Shelley’s output is, for Eliot, contaminated by “views I positively dislike,” or thoughts “so puerile that I cannot enjoy the poems in which they occur.” (UPUC 91) This inability (or is it unwillingness?) to deal with Shelley’s thought sits strangely alongside Eliot’s 1929 essay on Dante, in which he had explored the possibility that a reader could enjoy the aesthetic qualities of a poem, even if they did not share the scheme of thought behind it. In approaching the theologically and philosophically complex Divine Comedy, he advocated a reader giving ‘poetic assent’ in place of the more demanding ‘philosophical belief’, claiming that “if you can read poetry as poetry, you will […] suspend both belief and disbelief.” (SE 258)
Eliot’s policy of ‘poetic assent’, as outlined above, leaves us able to enjoy poetry for its inherent aesthetic qualities, even if we find the intellectual background does not agree with us. Barely four years later, however, Eliot writes of passages in Shelley that could, surely, be negotiated by a reader prepared to exercise this policy and notes that he finds it impossible “to skip these passages and satisfy myself with the poetry in which no proposition pushes itself forward to claim assent.” (UPUC 91) It would seem that he cannot follow the advice of Matthew Arnold, and keep “the Shelley who delights” distinct from “the Shelley who, to speak plainly, disgusts.” (Arnold 245)
If Eliot’s problem is with the ideas found in Shelley’s poetry, why can he not apply his own policy to his reading? Clearly, there is more at work in Eliot’s response to Shelley than can safely be contained within a prescribed ‘theory’ of ‘poetic assent’. Faced with this contradiction in Eliot’s criticism, we must conclude that there were some elements of Shelley’s thought that he could not countenance, even when those unsettling elements were contained within the vessel of poetry. Instead, Eliot finds poems “contaminated” by thoughts, and is “affronted by the ideas which Shelley bolted whole and never assimilated.” (UPUC 92) Although ostensibly contained within the form of an academic lecture, then, Eliot’s diatribe against Shelley is also a reaction against what has been (and may still be) a feeling of intense affinity, which Eliot wishes to renounce in the same way that he renounces other ‘wrong’ elements of his life at this crucial point.