THE ROSTRUM

"Good Catholics or good atheists make the best poets, in my opinion, but I do not think one ought to write poetry if one has 'a religion-of-one's-own'", T. S. Eliot '10, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, said yesterday in his fifth lecture on "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism," before a large audience in the New Lecture Hall. Mr. Eliot said this in summarizing his disagreement with those posts, particularly Shelley, and also the late D. H. Lawrence, who force beliefs and self-made dogmas to the forefront in their poetry, and keep poetry proper more or less in the background.

"A poet like Dante, who takes for himself the religious and philosophic beliefs of his contemporaries, can develop his own more poetical ideas of life and death, knowing that his readers will not be struggling, or disagreeing with his politics or religion, and so disposing with dogmas both he and his readers can concentrate on poetry," the lecturer continued. He showed that Shelley, instead of being an 'orthodox' atheist, postulated a religion of his own, which made for obscurity, immaturity, and didacticism in his poetry. As for his politics and philosophy, Shelley "never escaped from the teaching of Godwin, and I have no doubt Mrs. Shelley was also too much of a 'heavyweight!' Shelley was, in fact, a prig."

"If Shelley were living today he would do well to send his poems to the Criterion, for which they might be accepted, with much shortening and editing," the poet said. Mr. Eliot makes his home in London, where he is the editor of the Criterion, a literary quarterly, and has publishing interests.

"Shelley was usually thinkink what he thought he ought to think and felt what he thought he ought to feel," Mr. Eliot stated, in contradiction to those who affirm the Arielesque spontaneity of the poet. "Hence, the greatest passages in his poetry are the ones which contain none of his 'revolutionary' political and social beliefs. Revolution has produced an adolescent and incoherent poet in Shelley since he was too occupied with his ideas on free-love and so on.

"I don't care much for the Romantic poetry, but I do find great passages in Keats," the eminent American-born poet and critic state. Mr. Eliot, who combines the New Humanism with a regard for the importance of authoritative religion in his outlook, although he is very fond of the extreme modernists such as Joyee, said that he was sympathetic to only a few English poems of the Romantic Movement. Be prefers the short ones, and a few pieces of Wordsworth. Keats, he showed, was attaining a higher criterion for poetical values. Be indicated passages in Keat's letters, which more than anything else, show this romanticist to have outgrown the pulpit type of poetry. Mr. Eliot differed with Keats on the latter's pronouncement that Beauty is Truth and vice versa. "No one will deny that much truth is ugly," he said.

"None of our modern poets myself included will be appreciated much in the next generation," Mr. Eliot said. "It is a matter of changing tastes."