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

Informed by this concept of a ‘negative’ route to faith, we see Eliot, in the years that follow his entry into the Anglican Church, actively moving away from what had previously been strongly held positions in both life and literature. Nowhere is this more striking than in his separation from Vivienne. Whilst there is little room for doubt that the marriage was in crisis from its outset, and that its demise is not wholly attributable to Eliot’s new-found faith, it is, however, symbolic that Eliot, on his return to England from Harvard in 1933, did not return to their flat at 68 Clarence Gardens, and chose instead to live in rooms at the presbytery of St. Stephen’s Church while he tried to reclaim his possessions without seeing his estranged wife. In the act of leaving a marriage that had been so unhappy, Eliot could be seen as renouncing one of Romanticism’s key tenets: the sensual path that promised spiritual fulfilment in human love (which will be examined in greater depth in subsequent chapters). Giving the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926, he had concluded that “whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one—you are seeking in the wrong place.” (Varieties 115) Now he was putting his own thought into practice. Like the characters in The Waste Land that lament the failure of desire, and the reduction of romantic passion to the dry routine of sexual activity, he had realised that it was not possible to fill the spiritual void with earthly love. From this realization, it was only a short, if immensely painful, step to the separation that would end the unhappy union of a couple who had, perhaps, never understood one another. As Peter Ackroyd remarks, the Eliots’ married life had been “full of pain and perplexity; it is not too much to say that [Vivienne’s] emotional needs had been fastened on a man whom she never properly understood, and that he in turn was baffled and then enraged by her insistent and neurotic demands upon him.” (Ackroyd 284)

It is in part, then, this renunciation of earthly love, fuelled by the break-up of a painful marriage, that gives Eliot’s renunciation of the Romantic heritage its particular strength. In poetic terms, his rift with the Romantic poets had begun earlier in his career, with his recourse to the doctrines of style and order that he found in the poetry of the seventeenth century and his parallel adoption of the ‘ironic’ Romanticism found in French Symbolism, most notably in the work of Jules Laforgue.