Instances of meeting: Shelley and Eliot: a study in affinity.

10 Eliot, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," The Egoist (July 1919): 39-40. I quote this passage at such length because the review itself has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted. Harold Bloom does quote this particular passage in The Breaking of the Vessels where he goes on to claim, having apparently revised his earlier opinion (see note 3), that "Eliot's true and always unnamed precursor" was "an uneasy composite of Tennyson and Whitman, with Whitman being the main figure." Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 19-20. Although these influences are obviously present in Eliot's work, I would, as this essay makes clear, take issue with Bloom's assertion of their primacy.

I

To suggest that T. S. Eliot is a modernist heir to Shelley, indeed that substantial affinities exist at all, is an almost heretical view and one that few readers will have ever seriously considered. Eliot's early essays contain remarks on Shelley so forthright in their condemnation that it can hardly be thought unreasonable to assume them to be a definitive judgment on the part of their author. Shelley's ideas are seen as "the ideas of adolescence," "repellant," ideas "bolted whole and never assimilated," and the man himself as "humourless, pedantic, self-centered, and sometimes almost a blackguard."(1) The formal qualities of his poetry are scorned as well. "What complicates the problem still further," Eliot claims, "is that in poetry so fluent as Shelley's there is a good deal which is just bad jingling," and in For Lancelot Andrewes Shelley is charged with a lack of integration, with keeping "his images on one side and his meanings on the other."(2) Given these remarks, Eliot would not only seem less than likely to be subject to Shelley's influence but, in fact, to be in the forefront of anti-Shelleyan critics.(3)

Yet alongside of these criticisms exist judgments that so contradict them as to require explanation. Although Eliot himself in 1950 credited a book by Leone Vivante with having brought him "to a new and more sympathetic appreciation" of Shelley, that appreciation actually began much earlier.(4) In 1920, in an essay on Swinburne, Eliot quotes the lyric "Music, when soft voices die," then enthusiastically opposes it to the impurity of that poet's technique and content:

I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed to be the master of Swinburne; and because his song, like that of Campion, has what Swinburne has not--a beauty of music and a beauty of content; and because it is clearly and simply expressed, with only two adjectives.(5)

And in "The Metaphysical Poets" Eliot credits Shelley, along with Keats, with passages where "there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility" (SE, 248). (If that seems faint praise, it should be remembered that this is more than he will grant to anyone else since the seventeenth century.) Even where Eliot criticizes Shelley most harshly, as in the Norton lectures, he always acknowledges Shelley's gifts and potential, usually singling out The Triumph of Life as evidence of a maturation transcending the earlier poetry.(6)

It is, however, in relation to Dante that we can see most clearly evidence of the dual nature of Eliot's attitude toward Shelley. Discussing our "prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry" in his 1929 essay "Dante," Eliot is in the process of criticizing Shelley for asserting "the proposition that our sweetest songs are those which sing of saddest thought" when he makes the surprising statement that Shelley was "the one English poet of the nineteenth century who could have even begun to follow those (Dante's) footsteps" (SE, 225). This is more than a claim for technical facility or habits of reference; it is a recognition, however grudging, of the uniqueness of Shelley's entire sensibility. Twenty-one years later in a lecture entitled "What Dante Means to Me," Eliot would carry that recognition even further, referring to Shelley as "the English poet, more than all others, upon whom the influence of Dante was remarkable," and to The Triumph of Life as containing "some of the greatest and most Dantesque lines in English."(7)