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Article: Shelley and the waste land.(Percy Bysshe Shelley)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Notes on Contemporary Literature
- Article date:
- September 1, 2009
- Author:
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Shelley's poetry had an intoxicating effect on Eliot during his adolescence and teenage years and profoundly influenced many of his early poems (see Christopher Ricks' extensive notes to Eliot's Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, NY, 1996). But his early enthusiasm later turned to a more considered condemnation. Shelley's intense display of emotion, as in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"--"I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" (Shelley, Selected Poetry and Prose, NY, 1958, 230)--clashed with Eliot's theory of poetic impersonality. He used his poetic touchstones--Dante, the Metaphysicals, the Caroline poets and Baudelaire--to attack Shelley's vague ...