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

Publication: ELH

Publication Date: 22-DEC-94

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press

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)

It is tempting to assume from these comments that as the influence of Dante deepened in Eliot's style and spirit his appreciation of another English poet so influenced simply deepened as well. Although this is, of course, possible, there are compelling reasons to conclude that the relationship was far more complex. In the first place, not only do we know that Shelley figured as an important enthusiasm of Eliot's adolescence, but from a letter Eliot wrote to his mother in 1919, we know as well that he obtained his copy of Shelley's poems by stealing two dollars from money his father had given him for winning a Latin prize ("and no one ever knew it"), implying that even at this early date Shelley's work may have constituted for Eliot a disturbing source of both guilt and pleasure.(8) Furthermore, in "The Music of Poetry" it is Shelley Eliot chooses as an example of that process by which a poet educates, through imposing himself upon, his successors:

It is not from rules, or by cold-blooded imitation of style, that we learn to write: we learn by imitation indeed, but by a deeper imitation than is achieved by analysis of style. When we imitated Shelley, it was not so much from a desire to write as he did, as from an invasion of the adolescent self by Shelley, which made Shelley's way, for the time, the only way in which to write.(9)

This "invasion" is the experience that forms the basis of Eliot's subsequent contradictory response to Shelley, and if the reader should doubt its centrality to the development of Eliot's own character as a poet, he has only to turn to a review Eliot wrote in The Egoist of three contemporary (though hardly similar) poets, Herbert Read, Tristan Tzara, and Conrad Aiken. What Eliot found lacking in all three was evidence of precisely this experience of influence:

It is not true that the development of a writer is a function of his development as a man, but it is possible to say that there is a close analogy between the sort of experience which develops a man and the sort of experience which develops a writer. Experience in living may leave the literary embryo still dormant, and the progress of literary development may to a considerable extent take place in a soul left immature in living. But similar types of experience form the nourishment of both. There is a kind of stimulus for a writer which is more important than the stimulus of admiring another writer. Admiration leads most often to imitation, we can seldom remain long unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak we do not imitate him, and though we are quite as likely to be accused of it, we are quite unpreturbed by the charge. This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend: it is something more than encouragement to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.

The usefulness of such a passion is various. For one thing it secures us against forced admiration, from attending to writers simply because they are great. We are never at ease with people who, to us, are merely great. We are not ourselves great enough for that: probably not one man in each generation is great enough to be intimate with Shakespeare. Admiration for the great is only a sort of discipline to keep us in order, a necessary snobbism to make us mind our places. We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love. Indirectly, there are other acquisitions: our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its endings; we are broadened. We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become the bearers of a tradition.(10)

In his role as a modernist poet, however--"a tradition" which Octavio Paz reminds us is, by definition, "against itself"--and under the influence (both social and literary) of T. E. Hulme's "classicism" and Charles Maurras's Action Francaise, Eliot, publicly at least, felt an obligation to disavow that previous enthusiasm, which he associated so strongly with adolescence, in order to deromanticize and redirect the concerns of English culture.(11) In 1921 he wrote to Richard Aldington about his "general programme of literary criticism," explaining that

any innuendos I make at the expense of Milton, Keats, Shelley and the nineteenth century in general are part of a plan to help us rectify, so far as I can, the immense skew in public opinion toward our pantheon of literature.(12)

The question, of course, remains open as to what extent Eliot's condemnations of Shelley were programmatic and to what extent they were a rebellion against this powerful image of his own adolescence, but in neither case can they be separated from (and may conversely even be seen as a propelling force toward) Eliot's reactionary political affiliations.

A second reason not to regard Eliot's later appreciation of Shelley as a simple outgrowth of Dantean influence is given to us in "What Dante Means to Me" when we are told that the passage in The Triumph of Life where Rousseau makes his appearance "made...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.