From the outset, Eliot incorporates his attitudes towards age into his critical approach, as he seeks to position himself and his work away from adolescence and youth. Even as a young man himself, the description of another author as ‘young’ is sufficient to attract Eliot’s criticism. He dismisses as ‘adolescent’ the poetry of Shelley and others, and he criticises poetic reminiscences of childhood as weak and indulgent. He creates an associated critical framework around concepts of ‘maturity’ and ‘immaturity’, with ‘maturity’ reserved for the most successful and acclaimed works by the likes of Dante, Shakespeare, Virgil—and, by implication, by the young Eliot himself. Only as he ages, and recognises the honesty and universal truths in the late poems of W.B. Yeats, does he acknowledge that maturity is a lifetime’s pursuit.