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

(SE 21) In case we are tempted to read that sentence as a manifesto for a program of impersonal art, however, we should be put on our guard by the one that follows, as Eliot deftly adds that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape these things.” (SE 21) ‘Impersonal’ art does not, in itself, mean the absence of personality, but rather its careful concealment. If emotions are not expressed, it does not mean that they are not present to a powerful degree. Stamped as they are with Eliot’s critical authority, the Norton lectures are, nonetheless, the work of someone in the throes of marital and spiritual crises. They vehemently repudiate previously held poetic models and influences, but if we look closely we will see that, in doing so, Eliot’s criticism enacts a process of renunciation also visible in his personal life at this time. Nowhere is this repudiation more evident than in his treatment of Romanticism in English poetry.

Eliot had strong personal reasons for wanting to spend a year in America. By 1932, his marriage to Vivienne, unhappy from its outset, was moving inexorably towards separation. As we shall see later when considering the treatment of love in Eliot’s work, his hasty marriage soon became a source of pain to him and his wife, as both parties realised that they could not give each other the degree of happiness they needed. An emotionally fraught situation was exacerbated by Vivienne’s mental and physical ill health, and those close to the couple could see no resolution to the Eliots’ unhappy state. Virginia Woolf, whose diary entries often display the same ability to see into the lives of others that animates her greatest fiction, recounts her feelings after a particularly uncomfortable visit from the Eliots in 1930: