| Chapter 1: | Eliot and Shelley: Influence, Renunciation, and Accommodation |
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Certainly, the relative decline in Shelley’s reputation that occurred around the middle of the twentieth century cannot be unconnected to his coming under attack at this time from both Eliot and F. R. Leavis—men whose judgements could send a generation of students back to their books with either a jaundiced or favourable opinion of a writer’s work.14 A year before the Norton Lectures, Edmund Wilson had no doubt as to the scope of Eliot’s influence on English criticism:
If this was the state of affairs before Eliot’s term as Norton Professor, it can only be expected that his vehement and very public denunciation of Shelley would have further lowered the Romantic poet’s stock amongst the reading public. What we need to ask ourselves at this point is: ‘Why did Eliot feel the need for such an assault?’
Possible Reasons for Eliot’s Disavowal of Romanticism
Eliot’s choice of location for his attack on the Romantics is highly significant. It was at Harvard that much of his anti-Romantic thought was instilled, as his adolescent love of Romanticism had been faced, in 1909, with the thought of his tutor, Irving Babbitt. Babbitt was a very traditional scholar, more interested in standards and discipline than concepts like ‘growth’ and ‘success’.