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

The Eliot who returned to America in 1932 was a visitor, not a native, and yet it would also be incorrect to say that he was ever truly ‘British’, with those who met him often commenting that his manners seemed exaggerated, and slightly too realistic to be natural. Edmund Wilson, after attending a reading in New York in 1933, remarked to John Dos Passos that Eliot “gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or, rather, self-invented character […] but he has done such a perfect job with himself that you end up by admiring him.” (Cited in Ackroyd, 199) As these personal issues coalesced into a sense of general anxiety and doubt, Eliot was a man in a state of flux, regretting past actions and trying to redress them by current ones that were only partially successful. His poetry was at a standstill after the outpouring of ‘Ash Wednesday’ in 1930, and his critical work of this period showed a marked bias toward themes of sin, judgement and expiation. Eliot’s concern with these themes is highly significant, because it is this shift in his critical thinking towards an increasingly moral outlook, along with the spiritually austere content of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ (a poem founded on a sense of Lenten renunciation) that points us towards the most significant change in his life around this time.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was baptized and received into the Church of England at Finstock Church, in the Cotswolds, on 29 June 1927. The next day, he was confirmed in the private chapel of the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Banks Strong. Significantly, given the immense influence that both events were to play in Eliot’s subsequent life, his wife was not present at either ceremony. When news of his adoption of High-Church Anglicanism was made public the following year, it surprised many around him, particularly those who had seen The Waste Land as both a refutation of past religious and cultural beliefs and an expression of the malaise that came to occupy the void vacated by God in the mind of the intelligentsia. Writing to her sister, Virginia Woolf felt that the newly Christian Eliot “may be called dead to us all from this day forward”, adding, “there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”