Christian Romanticism: T. S. Eliot's Response to Percy Shelley
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Christian Romanticism: T. S. Eliot's Response to Percy Shelley By ...

Chapter 1:  Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation
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At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful consciousness and assumes complete possession for a time. […] The frequent result is an outburst of scribbling which we may call imitation, so long as we are aware of the meaning of the word ‘imitation’ which we employ. It is not deliberate choice of a poet to mimic, but writing under a kind of daemonic possession by one poet.(UPUC 34)

In view of Eliot’s religious position at the time, his use of the words “daemonic” and “possession” is particularly interesting. They are strong terms in which to speak of poetry, even for those given, as Eliot was not, to using hyperbole. Indeed, they carry religious significance, calling to mind people in the Bible possessed by evil spirits. Although the argument here speaks of poetic influence, then, the language ought to alert us to something being implied beyond the poetic sphere.

The second stage is the age of imitation, but again it is spoken of as though the individual is literally ‘taken over’ by the poetic influence. In a 1942 essay “The Music of Poetry”, Eliot was to re-state this concept with particular reference to Shelley:

It is not from rules, or by cold-blooded imitation of style, that we learn to write: we learn by imitation indeed, but by a deeper imitation than is achieved by analysis of style. When we imitated Shelley, it was not so much from a desire to write as he did, as from an invasion of the adolescent self by Shelley, which made Shelley’s way, for the time, the only way in which to write.(OPP 28)

Coming from a man who set such a high premium on the value of order in poetry in his critical writings and later verse, this remark is most revealing. Here, in the second stage of his poetic development, Eliot admits that he was “invaded” by Shelley. The image is a telling one indeed for, as Bornstein notes, in these lines “the man who did more to deprecate romantic poetry than any other figure in modern English letters confesses his adolescent love of it.” (Bornstein 96) The importance of the youthful experience, like the extent of its impact on the formative poetic mind, cannot be underestimated. It was clearly intense and extreme; much the same as the subsequent rebuttal delivered in front of a literature class at Harvard.11