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

If the mature Eliot has attained ‘Taste’, why is there such a marked swing in his feelings toward Shelley’s verse from fervid imitation to contemptuous disdain? Clearly, the safe, cerebral ‘pleasure’ found in the final stage of his theory is missing here. Eliot, we must conclude, could not follow his own carefully delineated scheme when it came to Shelley’s poetry, and we must ask why this is the case. In the severity of their imagery, his remarks are an attempt to make a denial as forcibly as possible, so as to conceal the continued presence of deeper emotions that it would be unwise to show. The sense of ‘possession’ remains too strong for the intellectualising tendency. Eliot protested too much in his dismissal of Shelley, and the force of his denunciation can be seen as representative of the intensity of the relationship that it seeks, vainly, to bring to a close. In the essay ‘Imperfect Critics’, published in 1920, he had stated that “the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it” (SW 31), but in this attack on Shelley, analysis does not, for some reason, appear to be possible, and Eliot’s perceived need to ‘cure’ himself of Shelley’s influence comes from a deeper source than the wellsprings of purely aesthetic criticism. If we borrow the demonic imagery employed earlier, his lecture could be seen as an attempt at exorcism.

At certain times, writers can occupy oracular positions that transcend their respective fields. Although made in the confines of a lecture hall, given Eliot’s standing in the literary world, his attack on Shelley could not be expected to remain a purely personal matter. Whilst he makes it clear that such prejudices as he expresses in the lecture are more of a personal complaint than an attempt to formulate a fixed critical doctrine, his comments would inevitably become the opinions of the host of students and readers who hung on his every pronouncement at this time. Indeed, W. W. Robson is unconvinced that Eliot did not intend to use the Norton lecture to deliver a very public denunciation of Shelley, for all his attempts to qualify it as a personal opinion: