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

Eliot took Babbitt’s course on French literary criticism that year, and would have heard first-hand many of the arguments that Babbitt later collected in his 1919 work Rousseau and Romanticism, a book that attacked Rousseau’s influence, blaming him for having opened the gates to a flood of confessional literature and holding him responsible for the subsequent decline in traditional moral literary values.¹⁵ Babbitt also claimed, in terms that will sound familiar when read alongside his pupil’s own lecture, that Shelley was very much a poet of adolescence. “The person who is as much taken by Shelley at forty as he was at twenty,” he asserted, “has, one may surmise, failed to grow up.” (Cited in Bornstein 101)

There was, however, another highly important factor behind Eliot’s assault on his past influences, and a detailed examination of it requires a return to the subject of his religious conversion, and the immense changes it wrought in his life and art.

It has been noted, both by textual critics and also those, like Eloise Knapp Hay, who are more concerned with Eliot’s spiritual progress, that Eliot’s Christian faith was based on a ‘negative way’.¹⁶ Rather than perceive God to be at the summit of human sensory experience, a perfect being in the Aristotelian mould, Eliot saw the route to God as a ‘via negativa’ in which one advanced along the religious road by discarding earthly experiences and pleasures. Like the souls met by Dante, he held that failure to abjure past attachments would entail an eternity in Purgatory, not punished by the torments of Hell, but forever denied the blessing of Divine Presence. It is necessary, therefore, that the Christian soul must continually move on in its new life, putting behind it what, in the words of ‘The Dry Salvages’, was held to be “the most reliable” and is accordingly “the fittest for renunciation.”