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

He rounded on some of the most influential poets in the English canon, and took great pains to distance himself from their works, defining his poetic and critical credo through its rejection of what had preceded it. The targets of the majority of his attacks were the Romantic and nineteenth-century poets, and the campaign to discredit them was waged on both aesthetic and moral grounds, with telling one-liners set alongside critical broadsides. Wordsworth, after a promising start, drones “the still sad music of infirmity to the verge of the grave.” (UPUC 69)¹⁰ Arnold’s poetry possessed “little technical interest”, though his critical writing had some merit if you could gloss over the fact that in his philosophy and theology he was something of “an undergraduate”, and his religion rather “a Philistine.” (UPUC 105) Coleridge was an interesting study in the exercise of the imagination, and some of his work rose “almost to the height of great poetry”, in a good example of Eliot criticising with faint praise. (UPUC 67) The most violent attack in these Norton lectures, however, goes far beyond the sniping quoted above. In its scope and severity, it seems to spill beyond the bounds of academic criticism to become a far more vitriolic assault. It is directed against a poet whom Eliot admits was a great and formative influence on his own early work, but who now stands in contempt of everything the Eliot of the Norton lectures values most: Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In the lecture ‘Shelley and Keats’, given on 17 February 1933, Eliot speaks of Shelley in a fashion that reveals an intense dislike: