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

Writing to Stephen Spender in 1935, Eliot restated his theory of ‘taste’, but also hinted that the initial sense of ‘possession’ may not be easily set aside with the return of the intellectualising tendency:

Although speaking of need to balance surrender and control, Eliot cannot circumvent the fact that the need to give oneself up to a poetic influence is still a necessary element of the creative process. Once again, the language also alludes to the sense of being ‘possessed’ by another, and even if one does eventually regain control and reassert order in the process, the moment of surrender is not wholly forgotten. To borrow words from The Waste Land, there is still a moment of “awful daring” that cannot be retracted, even by “an age of prudence” at the heart of the poetic process when one is inspired by another voice. Once again, we find Eliot’s criticism uneasily acknowledging the presence of a less restrained, less cerebral aspect that is nonetheless vital to its success. Although he asserts the value of order, a troubling hint of surrendered control, and of the consequent instability of the self, remains at the core of his thought, evident in his confession to Spender that “the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.” (Olney 301)

We can see then that the theory of taste outlined in the Norton lecture breaks down if we attempt to apply it to Eliot’s response to Shelley.