Reputation and Influence

Abstract

WE MUST remember,” wrote T. S. Eliot in 1935, “that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them. People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced. A writer like D. H. Lawrence may be in his effect either beneficial or pernicious.”¹ Open-ended as this statement appears to be, Eliot in fact regarded Lawrence’s influence as pernicious rather than beneficial, and his reference to a writer’s influence being limited to “what people are capable of having done to them” unwittingly explains the ground of his dislike. He and Lawrence were too different for either to be in sympathy with the other, at least during the 1920’s, and, one imagines, if Lawrence had been alive, during the 1930’s as well.