T. S. Eliot-Dante

T. S.
Eliot's Virgil: Dante

Author(s): Eloise Hay
Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Jan., 1983), pp. 50-65
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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? 1983 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
T. S. ELIOT'S VIRGIL: DANTE
Eloise Hay, University of California at Santa Barbara
This speaks to me of that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry;

to write poetry ... so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but
that which we are meant to see through the poetry. ... To get beyond
poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music.}
A persistent theme in Eliot's poetry?from Prufrock's "Let us go then,

you and I," to The Elder Statesman's "Take me to my father"?is the
passage from one state of being to another. For this theme or move
ment, Eliot employed a wealth of different images: doorways, stair
ways, pathways, and waterways, as well as subways, to mention the
most memorable. Less obvious, perhaps, are the images that come in
the form of human figures who conduct the consciousness "Between
un-being and being," as he said in "Burnt Norton." Tiresias, Marina,
and Agatha come to mind, but among these figures, one stands out as
a key to all the rest: Dante. Much has been said of the recurring pres
ence of the Italian master in Eliot's collected works, and we might
dwell a bit longer on Dante as the key to one of Eliot's main rhetorical
devices?his metaphors of mediation.
His homage to Dante will remain one of the most eloquent tributes
paid by one major poet to another. Speaking to the Italian Institute in
1950, Eliot said:
I do not think I can explain everything [about my debt to Dante]; but as I
still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deep
est influence upon my own verse, I should like to establish at least some
of the reasons for it.2
He confined himself to three points?three lessons he said he had

learned from Dante. First, Dante had taught him "that the great mas
ter of a language should be the great servant of it," should "pass on to
posterity one's own language, more highly developed, more refined,
!T. S. Eliot, "English Letter Writers" (unpublished lecture delivered at Yale Univer
sity in 1933), quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd ed. (1947;
rpt. New York & London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 90.
2T. S. Eliot, "What Dante Means to Me," To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (Lon
don: Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 125. The following passages cited from this essay are from
pp. 133-35. The passage from "What Is a Classic?" is taken from On Poetry and Poets, ist
American ed. (1957; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus 8c Giroux, 1979), p. 72.
5?
T. S. Eliot's Virgil: Dante 51
and more precise than it was before one wrote it." Secondly, Dante
had taught "the lesson of width of emotional range" thus showing him
that a true poet
should perceive vibrations beyond the range of ordinary men, and be
able to make men see and hear more at each end [of a spectrum or
gamut of emotions] than they could ever see without his help. . . . every
thing in the way of emotion, between depravity's despair and the beatific
vision, that man is capable of experiencing.
To this inner scope, Dante added an equally vast range of temporal

and geographic vision, the third lesson that Eliot learned from him. It
was the lesson that "Europe is a whole," and despite "its progressive
mutilation and disfigurement, [it is] the organism out of which any
greater world harmony must develop." These words from "What Is a
Classic?" are echoed in Eliot's third point in praise of Dante as "be
yond all other poets of our continent, the most European. . . . [who
yet] did not become the 'least provincial' by ceasing to be local."
I should like to venture that Eliot learned one further lesson?
equally important?from Dante, taking as my card of admission his
remark just quoted: "I do not think I can explain everything. . . ."
This fourth lesson is what we may call Dante's metaphors of media
tion, especially his Virgil-figure?the figure of a mediator between
two worlds which, without such a mediator, would be irreconcilable.
There is more to the Virgil-metaphor than the figure "peregrine
between two worlds," of course. Before considering this crucial aspect
of the metaphor, we should note that the three chief lessons attrib
uted to Dante themselves already point to the metaphor. Dante was
able to become the servant and then the master of his language be
cause he first became the disciple of Virgil, as Eliot makes clear in
"What Is a Classic?" and the later essay, "Virgil and the Christian
World." From Virgil, too, Dante learned "the lesson of width of emo
tional range. . . . everything in the way of emotion, between deprav
ity's despair and the beatific vision." Virgil could not bring him "the
beatific vision," but neither could Beatrice bring Dante the full "range
of sensibility" that he found in Virgil, "the soul naturally Christian"
(anima naturaliter Christiana), as Eliot says. And as to the vision of Eu
rope brought by Dante, Eliot had long made clear that Virgil was its
architect and Dante his apprentice. "We are all, so far as we inherit the
civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire," Eliot wrote
in 1953, pointing to Virgil's vision. "What Virgil proposed to his con
temporaries was the highest ideal . . . for any merely temporal em
pire. ... It was something greater, but something which exists be
cause Virgil imagined it." In the Georgics and the Aeneid, Virgil linked
52 Hay
in one continuous bond o? pie tas the family with the village, the village
with the region, and the region with the world.3 Behind Eliot's debt to
Dante, there is always Virgil. And Virgil's special virtue is mediation?
linguistically between yesterday's use of language and tomorrow's;
emotionally between "depravity's despair and the beatific vision"; and
culturally between the Roman origins of world community and later
approximations of his ideal. Showing us this much, Eliot prepares for
still a farther reach of the Virgil-figure, as mediator between the irrec
oncilable worlds of finitude and infinity.
Though Eliot did not speak of his debt to Dante in just this way, he
must have known that readers would see his own poetic development
as a record of escape from one world, much like Dante's "dark wood,"
into two other worlds?a waste land resembling Dante's Hell and a
borderland resembling Dante's Purgatory. In Eliot's essays and poems
before 1930, he glimpsed the sunlit mountain Dante saw in Canto
One of the Commedia, but he wrote of it as inaccessible until?in "The
Hollow Men" and "Ash-Wednesday"?a certain "Lady" appeared to
him. Before this time, although the poems record no hope of a be
atific vision, they do enact a process by which the poet surrenders
himself to a guide. And notably this guide has exactly the same pow
ers which Eliot ascribes to Virgil in the essay just cited: "He looks both
ways; he makes a peculiar liaison between the old world and the new"
(p. 138).
"The old world and the new"?and the liaison, or lack of liaison,
between them?form the most recurrent pattern in Eliot's poetry and
criticism. His first great critical essay, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," was published at a time (1919) when artists were clamoring
for a new world and also for demolition of the old. The Futurist man
ifesto of 1910, for instance, demanded: "That all forms of imitation
should be held in contempt and that all forms of originality should be
glorified. . . . That a clean-sweep should be made of all stale and
threadbare subject-matter in order to express the vortex of modern
life?a life of steel, fever, pride, and headlong speed."4 Eliot's fellow
poet Ezra Pound agreed, and borrowed the Futurists' "vortex" for his
own manifesto, published in Blast in 1914. Eliot himself praised the
new arts resonating to "steel. . . and headlong speed" in his review of
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (1921). But in "Tradition and the Indi
3T. S. Eliot, "Virgil and the Christian World," On Poetry and Poets, pp. 146, 141-42.
This essay was first published in America in the Sewanee Review, 61 (1953).
4 "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910)," signed by Umberto Bocciono, Carlo
Carra, Luigi Rossolo, Giacomo Baila, and Gino Severini, given in Futurisme, comp.
Giovanni Lista (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1973), p. 165. I have translated from the
French.
vidual Talent" he responded writh an alternative to the Futurists' met

aphor of the "clean-sweep." His own figure of chemical catalysis in
sisted that there must be a middle term between the dead past and the
unborn future. And since original talent, or genius, was in his view
incapable of providing this middle term by itself, what was needed to
prevent the poet from either slavish imitation or a stillborn creation,
was an agent Eliot named "tradition." As defined in this essay, tradi
tion has unusual qualities. It not only bears the past onward but
ushers in the new. On closer inspection, it appears the twin of Dante's
Virgil-figure, re-enacting the past, discovering the future, and crown
ing the present with self-mastery.
Like Virgil, "tradition" embodies "the historical sense ... a percep
tion, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."5 Guid
ing the poet as Virgil guided Dante, tradition "compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it
the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous exis
tence and composes a simultaneous order." As with Virgil's effect on
Dante, tradition makes possible "the introduction of the new (the
really new) work of art" among the "existing monuments [forming]
an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduc
tion of the new." One thinks here of the way Virgil introduces Dante
to the virtuous pagan poets?Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan;
whereupon Dante says: "They turned to me and welcoming signs dis
played: At which salute I saw my master smile."6 The old order is
indeed affected "by the introduction of the new," as Virgil's smile inti
mates. By the terms of his commission, Virgil knows that Dante is
destined for a new world and that his own lower world will be "altered
by the present [poet] as much as the present is directed by the past,"7
that is, by himself, or by tradition in Eliot's essay. The poet truly aware
of the role tradition plays will share something of Virgil's power of
prophecy, even though he can never know himself quite the way a still
later poet will know him: "The difference between the present and
the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a
way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show."
In this seminal essay, Eliot speaks of the poet-disciple precisely in
5 T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (1950; rpt.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 4. The next two citations are from pp. 4
and 5.
6 Dante, Inferno, IV, trans. Laurence Binyon, in The Portable Dante, ed. Paolo Milano
(New York: Viking, 1947), p. 23.
7 Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," p. 5. The following citations are from
pp. 6, 7, 10, and 11.
54 Hay
terms of a pilgrim seeking purgation and transformation. "What hap
pens [to the new poet] is a continual surrender of himself as he is at
the moment to something w7hich is more valuable. The progress of an
artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of person
ality." By the end of the essay, Eliot has accounted not only for the
vitality of tradition as intermediary between the alien worlds of the
dead past and the new work to be born but also for the process of creat
ing a poem?or poetry itself?as such a mediator, between two other
alien worlds: the alien self, or personality of the poet, and the new
creation of a poem. Here again the Virgil-metaphor comes into play.
The "dark wood," or Hell, from which the process of creation saves
the poet is now "the man who suffers." Poetry comes as "an escape
from emotion ... an escape from personality." And to complete the
metaphor, the process of writing a truly new poem brings the poet out
of the suffering, fugitive self into a realm of permanence?within
view of the sunlit mountain which Eliot in this essay calls not the
earthly paradise but something very similar: "the frontier of meta
physics or mysticism." He introduces his last paragraph with a quota
tion from Aristotle's De Anima (408B: 29-30), in effect asserting that
poetry mediates between "the man who suffers" and a "mind" within
him where "something more divine" is present. Aristotle's assertion,
like Eliot's, appears after Aristotle has considered the sources of emo
tion and suffering in the soul, at which point he says, as Eliot quotes:
"But the mind is something more divine and does not suffer change"
(translation mine). Like Virgil, poetry brings the poet to the threshold
of the divine world but can proceed no farther. And Eliot shifts the
metaphor to include his own essay as another Virgil-figure: "This es
say proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism." He
has used the figure three times in the space of a nine-page discussion,
to convey first the function of tradition, second the function of poetry,
and third, the function his own essay performs in guiding the reader
to a frontier totally unforeseen when the essay began.
I must forego the temptation to track Dante's metaphor in all the
major essays, since my purpose in this discussion is to show the cen
trality of the Virgil-figure in Eliot's poetry. I shall, however, suggest
two other interesting points at which the figure appears in his essays.
Then, after considering the poems, we should return to one late essay,
since I believe that Eliot quite deliberately reverted to the point of his
conclusion in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," echoing that con
clusion but reinforcing its analogy to Virgil's parting with Dante,
when he prepares to take leave of his art in the essay, "Poetry and
Drama." The two much earlier uses of the metaphor in his prose that
call for mention here are in the famous "Hamlet and His Problems"
of 1919 and in the equally famous 1933 response to I. A. Richards, in
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.
In the first of these essays Eliot's remarks on "the objective correla
tive" reveal the operation once more of the Virgil-metaphor, or some
thing very like it. The objective correlative too is a mediator between
the man who suffers and (in this case) the full moment of creation, the
moment of self-mastery to which Virgil brought Dante. Writing about
Hamlet, of course, Eliot is concerned with the failure of the poet to
achieve the transmutation, also with the failure of Hamlet himself:
"In the character Hamlet it is ... an emotion which can find no outlet
in action; in the dramatist it is ... an emotion which he cannot ex
press in art."8 Were there an objective correlative for these emotions?
a Virgil to show the way to the sunlit mountain?both Hamlet and
Shakespeare in their separate enterprises would have discovered "a
situation, a chain of events . . . the formula" by means of which their
originating emotions could arrive at full realization.
The other essay, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, suggests
the Virgil-figure in its theological context more than in the aesthetic
and psychological contexts of the Hamlet essay, or rather in all three
contexts (as indeed Dante did). Here Eliot returns to I. A. Richards'
innocent compliment about The Waste Land?that it effected "a com
plete severence between poetry and all beliefs"?a compliment which
Eliot had already rejected, appropriately, in his 1929 essay on Dante.
Richards' further statement, that "poetry is capable of saving us"?
without the help of "beliefs"?delivered poor Richards unwittingly
into Dante's stronghold. For Dante too had seen poetry as salvific; but
only as a mediator, and as only one mediator in a series or "chain of
events." Dante called himself as poet uscriba dei," the scribe of God,
seeing his poem as one scripture that is efficacious in "saving us." He
had this on the authority of experience, as Virgil's poetry had been
one of his chief inspirations. It both offered him the highest extant
model for poetry and "led" him to explore the underworld and Pur
gatory of the human soul in its quest for fulfillment. For Richards, the
Aeneid would be sufficient for salvation, as any great poem would be.
For Eliot, however (following Dante), the soul must find further medi
ators beyond poetry. In Canto One of The Divine Comedy, Virgil ap
pears to Dante in the first place only because three other mediators
have sent him. The Virgin Mary has appealed to St. Lucy (patron of
the blind), who has delegated Beatrice (personifying Revelation) to
8T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," Selected Essays, pp. 125-26.
56 Hay
send Virgil (poet of natural vision) to Dante. At this juncture Beatrice
could not come herself, knowing that Dante must initially confront
the inferno and purgatory of disordered passions and unconscious
powers, in human nature and in himself, so that he can learn their
causes and cure.
Knowing his ground well, Eliot could afford a moment of merri
ment over Richards' idea that poetry is capable of saving us. It must
be a very ?lite "us," he suggests in a footnote. (Presumably a Sweeney
or Bleistein would require other mediators, especially if Eliot were
serving as the scriba dei.) He goes on then to note that Richards' "theo
logical ideas" are really analogues for aesthetic experience and psy
chological experience. Only Dante's Virgil-metaphor could clarify
Eliot's counter-proposal of an aesthetic, psychological, and theological
model for poetry which allows a place for each part of the model,
particularly in relation to the threshold where aesthetics and psychol
ogy must retire. As so often, Eliot uses the word "frontier" for the
boundary between poetry and mysticism:
The extreme of theorising about the nature of poetry . . . belongs to the
study of aesthetics and is no concern of the poet or of a critic with my
limited qualifications. Whether the self-consciousness involved in aes
thetics and psychology does not risk violating the frontier of consciousness,
is a question which I need not raise here; it is perhaps only my private
eccentricity to believe that such researches are perilous if not guided by
sound theology.9
It was of course the "sound theology" of Dante that provided Eliot's

metaphors of mediation, recognizable in the words I have italicized. I
have said "poor Richards," for well he might have been misled by The
Waste Landl I shall return to the poem, but one should here remember
that Eliot's acceptance of Dante's model seems all the more impressive
in view of the rigid distinctions he had made before 1927, separating
poetry from religion, himself like Virgil retreating from the frontier
(as at the end of "Tradition and the Individual Talent").
Dante rescued Eliot at the turning point when Eliot realized that he
could no longer confine his criticism to "the problem of the integrity
of poetry," as he noted in the 1928 preface to The Sacred Wood. After
that book, he said, he had "passed on to another problem . . . that of
the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of
other times."10 But I hope I have made clear that even before this
9T S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd ed. (1964; rpt. London:
Faber & Faber, 1980), pp. 149-50. Italics mine.
10"Preface to the 1928 Edition," The Sacred Wood, 2nd ed. (1928; rpt. London: Meth
uen, 1964), p. viii.
turning point, the metaphors of mediation were latent in his criticism.

He had been studying Dante, after all, since 1910.
Turning now to Eliot's poetic development, with respect to the Virgil
figure, we might recall his letter to Stephen Spender in 1935:
You don't really criticize any author to whom you have never surren
dered yourself. . . . Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have
to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is
having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both sur
render and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as
the self before it was given.11
The "author" here, and the process of surrender and recovery, again
exactly reflect the character of Dante's Virgil and the process by which
Dante won self-mastery after submission to him. If we take Dante as
the author par excellence to whom Eliot submitted himself for "forty
years" (a good Biblical number), we see that the submission was nei
ther immediate nor complete until about 1926?a crucial year, for it
seems to have represented "the bewildering minute" when Eliot gave
himself up after a long struggle.
I have elsewhere (in T. S. Eliot's Negative Way, published in 1982)
described his mockery of Dante's vision in such poems as "Mr. Eliot's
Sunday Morning Service" and in unpublished poems like "The Love
Song of Saint Sebastian" and the deleted passage in "A Cooking Egg."
In all of these poems the rire impur, or "laugh of genius" (as Verlaine
and D. H. Lawrence called such obscene and blasphemous uses of the
sacred), betokens first a sort of youthful streetfighting, and later a
more intense rearguard action, against the influence of Dante's po
etry. To some extent these irreverent poems show the twentieth
century poet's reaction against a Dante cult that had grown to be a
madness in Europe and America. The cult, signaled in the English
speaking world by Henry Francis Cary's first complete translation of
The Divine Comedy (1804-15), began as part of the Romantic revival of
pre-Enlightenment culture. When Eliot went East to school from St.
Louis in 1904, "The cult of Dante had woven itself into the fabric of
Boston life,"12 as Van Wyck Brooks remarked. Emerson had started to
translate the Commedia; Longfellow had completed the task; and even
Emily Dickinson had credited Dante as one of her chief models. But
soon after her death in 1886, the cult was vulgarized and sentimen
talized to absurdity. Along with Tiffany lamps, in Boston one could
11 Quoted by Stephen Spender, "Remembering Eliot," T. S. Eliot: The Man and His
Work, ed. Allen T?te (New York: Delacorte, 1966), pp. 55-56.
12 Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York: E. P. Dut
ton, 1940), p. 435 n.
58 Hay
buy Tiffany-designed volumes of Dante?and postcards displaying
Beatrician "stunners."
Eliot's teachers at Harvard, Charles Grandgent and George San
tayana, either editing or commenting in solidly scholastic as well as
scholarly analyses, rescued Dante from the sentimentalists, but it was
only twenty years after reading them that Eliot?in his 1929 essay on
Dante?acknowledged that these teachers had influenced him as
powerfully as the Pre-Raphaelites' paintings and poetry and their
Swinburnian afterglow. If, as Mario Praz says,13 Eliot responded much
more to Pound's version of the Dante cult than to the Harvard Dan
teans at first, it was because he cared less about rescuing Dante than
about finding a new poetry. In this pursuit, Dante was at first even a
threat, as Eliot tells us in the 1929 essay on Dante: the last thirty-eight
cantos of the Comedy seemed to teach that poetry should tend toward
cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness; and these words stood for a
great deal of what one hated in the nineteenth century. It took me many
years to recognize that the states of improvement and beatitude which
Dante describes are still further from what the modern world can con
ceive as cheerfulness, than are his states of damnation. And little things
put one off: Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, first by my rapture and next by my
revolt, held up my appreciation of Beatrice by many years.11
Praz notes (p. 366 n.) that Eliot's early poem "La Figlia Che Piange"
follows the pattern of Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" to an ex
traordinary extent. One suspects that Eliot here deliberately rewrote
Rossetti's poem, making the Dante figure abandon the Beatrice fig
ure, "As the mind deserts the body it has used." If they had stayed
together, Eliot also says in the poem, he would have "lost a gesture
and a pose"?the pose of cynicism, or anyway of revolt against the
Dante cult.
But Eliot cherishes this pose vis-?-vis Dante. Not long afterwards, in
"A Cooking Egg," he sneers at the literary pantheon that serves as his
refuge from the tediously cultivated Pipit. One of his saviors will be
Dante's Piccarda de Donati, whose absurd office is to guide him to
Madame Blavatsky. In the Berg Collection's manuscript she was to
conduct him to the Communion Table, which he approached with a
13Mario Praz, "T S. Eliot and Dante," The Flaming Heart (1958; rpt. Gloucester,
Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966), p. 349.
14"Dante," Selected Essays, p. 223. In the Preface to the 1929 edition of this essay in
book form (London: Faber 8c Faber, 1929), Eliot also very succinctly described the
stages through which his appreciation of Dante had passed: "I began myself with pas
sages of the Inferno which I could understand, passed on to the Purgatorio in the same
way, and only after years of experience began to appreciate the Paradiso, from which I
reverted to the other parts of the poem and slowly recognized the unity of the whole"
(p. 12).
T S. Eliot's Virgil: Dante 59
queasy stomach. Most of this "impure laugh" was deleted before pub
lication of the poem, but it is worth mentioning as evidence of the
resistance to certain aspects of Dante that haunts the early poems.
Curiously?in view of the metaphors of mediation in Eliot's essays of
the same period?the poems, written before "the turning point" I
have mentioned in 1925 ? 26, eschew any such mediation. There is in
them no Virgil-figure. The poet sees himself as isolated, also as isolating
others (the ladies especially). And the absence of the Virgil-metaphor
seems to leave a space of which Eliot is aware, for he fills it with inter
mediaries manques. "Let us go then, you and I. . . ." The "you" is
unavailing and persists only to accompany Prufrock when "human
voices wake us, and we drown." In The Waste Land the failed inter
mediary is Tiresias, "the most important personage in the poem, unit
ing all the rest," as Eliot says in his Notes. He is blind, "throbbing
between two lives," and like Virgil he has "foresuffered all" that both
male and female undergo in Hell and Purgatory. He is with "the
young man carbuncular," "finding the stairs unlit," but can communicate
nothing. The stairway, explicitly Dante's purgatorial stair in the titles
Eliot gave to his 1919 poems and first version of "Ash-Wednesday," is
from Dante's Purgatory, XXVI, where Arnaut Daniel's last words to
Dante are:
"I pray you by that Goodness which doth deign
To guide you to the summit of this stair
Bethink you in due season of my pain."
Then he shrank back in the refining fire.
[Laurence Binyon's translation]
The connecting stairway, like the Tiresias figure, appears thus iron
ically in most of Eliot's poems before "Ash-Wednesday," for example,
in "Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night,"
"The Boston Evening Transcript," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Burbank
with a Baedeker," and several of the unpublished poems. As we shall
see, only when a true Virgil-figure appears, in "Ash-Wednesday," does
this secondary image from Dante assume its full Dantean strength:
"strength beyond hope and despair / Climbing the third stair."
Before that, all Eliot's borrowings from Dante in the poems are either
from the Inferno and Purgatory in an ironical context?requiring us to
see the absence of any relevance beyond the twenty-sixth canto of the
latter?or they are like the Piccarda de Donati reference, mordantly
humorous allusions to the Paradise.
In this connection we recall that Eliot confessed this very failure to
find Dante wholly useful in the first stages of his poetic development.
In the 1950 Dante essay, he asserted that the poets who first taught
6o Hay
him his own poetic possibilities?Laforgue and Baudelaire?were
"smaller" poets, less "exalted" and "remote" than Dante. Laforgue,
"like an admired elder brother," presented a "temperament akin to
[his] own." Baudelaire showed him "the possibility of fusion between
the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the
juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic."15 Insofar as they
were mediators between Eliot and Dante (both also having responded
to the Dante cult), they adumbrated the Virgil-figure in his poetic
development. They pointed beyond themselves to a farther stage of
development in the same line. But the word "juxtaposition" is a key
term in Eliot's reference to Baudelaire's influence. It reveals that
Baudelaire was a Tiresias figure, an intermediary manqu?. From him
Eliot learned the famous technique that Marshall McLuhan has called
the hallmark of Eliot's technique?"juxtaposition without copula,"
that is, without a middle term or mediating power.
Before 1926, the "turning point," Eliot was intensely concerned in
his essays with this mediating power, as we have seen. It surfaced in his
essays on the metaphysical poets in 1921, exactly at the time he was
presenting Tiresias in The Waste Land as a master juxtaposer without
copula. In fact Eliot knew that his poetry was contradicting his prose
in this central way: "In one's prose reflexions one may be legitimately
occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can deal only
with actuality," he said in After Strange Gods.]6 The ideal with which he
was preoccupied in "The Metaphysical Poets" was the ideal of a uni
fied sensibility, available to the poet whose mind can mediate in the
various ways he had already considered in "Tradition and the Indi
vidual Talent." In this 1921 essay, however, Eliot calls attention to a
power missing in English poetry since the early seventeenth century,
and it is this very power to mediate between two irreconcilable conditions:
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly
amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is
chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza,
and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with
the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the
poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.17
But no such poet any longer writes! "In the seventeenth century a dis
sociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered." The
best "we" can do, he implies, is to show the loss?through juxtapositions
without copulas.
15 "What Dante Means to Me," p. 126.
16 After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), p. 30.
17 "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays, p. 247.
This was in 1921. In 1926 an extraordinary change occurred in Eliot's

thought, visible above all in the unpublished Clark Lectures he gave at
Cambridge University on this same subject, the metaphysical poets. The
time was surely one of those "bewildering minutes" he spoke of to
Spender later, when "you give yourself up, and then recover yourself,"
through really criticizing another author. This time the author was
Dante, approached for the first time as a true Virgil-figure, as not just
one link but as the link between disparate and otherwise irreconcilable
worlds. Between 1921 and 1926, Eliot arrived at the belief that only Dante
had achieved that union of sensibilities which he had ascribed to Donne
and his circle five years before. Donne overcame the "dissociation of sen
sibility" but only by displacing or altogether losing certain sensibilities,
while becoming "imprisoned" in others, Eliot says in the third Clark Lec
ture. In Dante's time there existed no "disjunction" between body and
soul; it existed only between lower and higher loves. "The separation
between soul and body [as in Donne's "Ecstasy"] is a modern conception."
In Donne, "the modern man is imprisoned in the embrace of his own
feelings." By contrast, "the inner life of Dante was not only more exten
sive, but had heights of feeling unknown to the later poet." Thus Donne's
sensibility was a dissociated fragment, wrongly associated with divine
love, for Donne associated human marriage with divine union, and
"whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery, or debauchery, it is
all one?you are seeking in the wrong place."18 Again by contrast with
Donne, Dante was able first to distinguish and then to convey in poetry
everything "in the way of emotion, between depravity's despair and the
beatific vision" as Eliot phrases it in his 1950 Dante essay. Dante knew the
ecstasies of human love but did not confuse them with love of God.
If I am right in seeing figures of meditation appear in Eliot's poems in
the same year, 1925-26, when he first "gave himself up" to Dante (as his
letter to Spender phrases it), then "The Hollow Men" in 1925 records the
transition. Here for the first time in a poem Eliot articulates the whole
"spectrum or gamut" between "despair and beatitude," and draws upon
Dante's image of Beatrice's eyes as a figure of mediation between three
"kingdoms" that represent the whole. For Dante, Beatrice alone could
reflect in person the divine nature of Christ?the perfect mediator be
tween God and man?because Beatrice had seen the beatific vision and
Dante had seen her with his own eyes. He had to see with his natural eyes
18 "On the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century," Lecture III, pp. 20, 13.
This carbon copy of a typescript in Houghton Library, Harvard University, is from the
original typescript of the Clark Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge Uni
versity, in 1926. I am grateful to Mrs. Valerie Eliot and to the Harvard University Li
brary for permission to quote from this unpublished manuscript.
62 Hay
the eyes that saw (as Virgil had not seen). In "The Hollow Men" the poet
fears such eyes?"Eyes I dare not meet in dreams." "In death's dream
kingdom / These do not appear." They appear neither in sleep (because
even the unconscious mind does not dare to meet them) nor in Hell
("death's other kingdom"?with a small "k") precisely because they are
eyes that have seen God:
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom*
Remember us?if at all?not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
* [now capitalized as divine]
(The capital in "Kingdom" indicates Paradise, as the lower case "king

dom" elsewhere in the poem indicates sleep, Purgatory, or Hell.) The
hollow men are blind, like Tiresias in The Waste Land, because they
suffer without assurance of mediation, longing for death like the Sibyl
in her cage. Pearls that were eyes are a safe substitute for living eyes
when death by water is at least better than life. The hollow men know
that eyes like Beatrice's are "the hope only of empty men":
We grope together
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom*
The hope only
Of empty men.
*[i.e., of Purgatory, accessible in human dreams]
Men who have reached absolute emptiness may encounter these me

diating eyes as hope. Eliot's theology here differs from Dante's in that
Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven meet "where three dreams cross" as in
"Ash-Wednesday" or "Between three districts" as in "Little Gidding"?
the three dreams or districts corresponding to "the higher dream" of
Dante. Thus Eliot's hollow men have an access that Dante in Hell did
not have. They may encounter the "eyes" that Dante saw only at the
end of the Purgatory. But they will not know at first whether the "eyes"
are delusory (as they would be in Hell) or illusory (as they would be in
Purgatory). In "The Hollow Men" the eyes can at least be an illusory
mediation between the two "kingdoms" and the Kingdom, which also
means between poetry and "something more divine." Eliot cannot
usurp Dante's encounter and call it his own. But in this poem Dante
has become Eliot's Virgil?the poet who can take him to that frontier
beyond which he must proceed alone.
In "Ash-Wednesday" and in "Marina," Eliot seems to have indeed
encountered that mediatrix of his own and to have been led into her
presence by Dante (in the first poem) and by Shakespeare, acting as
another Virgil-figure, introducing Marina in the second. In "Ash
Wednesday" the Lady by the fountain with three leopards reminds
one of Dante's Matilda (as Mario Praz has noted). Eliot associates the
Lady with contemplation, silence, and the power Matilda has to re
lieve the soul of overburdening guilt. Like her, Marina too is associ
ated with rebirth and the cleansing power of water. Both women are
visions of a new innocence, recovered after the loss of original innocence.
For the first time, in "Ash-Wednesday" Eliot draws upon the Para
diso without irony, in direct quotation?the prayer of self-renunciation
which is also the poem's prayer of self-mastery: "Our peace in His
will," from Canto V of the Paradiso. In his Note on that section of the
Commedia about the same year, Eliot said he had come to realize that
this line was no metaphor but "literally true." Dante has proved himself
more than a poet. Finally, after twenty years, Eliot has "grown up" to
him, as he said in the 1929 essay. The next step is for him to disengage
himself, to dismiss Dante, "as Dante dismissed Virgil." And this he
proceeds to do in Four Quartets.
In a talk at Eliot's memorial service at Harvard in 1965, Douglas
Bush called The Waste Land Eliot's Inferno, "Ash-Wednesday" his Pur
gatorio, and Four Quartets his Paradiso.19 Though I cannot here discuss
the extent to which this statement is true, I must consider a point not
hitherto made, I believe: that Eliot bids farewell to Dante both in
"East Coker" and "Little Gidding." As I have hoped to show in his
uses of the Virgil-metaphor, it was inevitable that he should disengage
himself from his guide. In "East Coker, II" he notes that adhering to
any pattern, such as Dante's scheme or vision, can be deceptive; and
he hints explicitly that Dante's pattern (as he had said before) can
mislead us into being unduly optimistic. Here, as he puts it,
There is it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
19Douglas Bush, "T. S. Eliot," Engaged and Disengaged (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1966), p. 98.
64 Hay
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood. . . .
There is no secure foothold. In the pattern of Four Quartets Dante's

poem appears as having upheld a pattern which might be mislead
ingly affirmative. We can never count on escaping from (Cthe dark wood."
Perhaps responding to this dominant theme in Four Quartets, very
soon after the complete poem was published, C. S. Lewis attacked
Eliot as one of the "Pale Men" from the North, blowing a merciless
cold wind over the Christian vision.20 As his subtitle indicated, Lewis
approached Dante like one writing an "Apology for Christianity, Rea
son, and Romanticism." With his friend Charles Williams, who based
his concept of "romantic theology" on reading Dante, Lewis consid
ered Dante a great romantic poet, not the classicist whom Eliot ranged
with Virgil (especially in the Clark Lectures and "What Is a Classic?")
against romanticism. Eliot plainly believed that he had learned from
Dante both the value of allowing full exploration of despair in poetry
and the value of the "third moment ... of having something to say"
oneself after "surrendering" to another author, as he wrote to Spender.
What he had to say often appeared to others besides Lewis to be the
antithesis of Dante, however.
In "Little Gidding" the vision of divine love given in the last two
sections is indeed "a new and shocking valuation," but perhaps the
only vision true to a firewarden's experience of it during a London air
raid:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
Behind "the hands that wove / The intolerable shirt of flame" there is
no doubt Dante's inscription over the gate of Hell: "Me did divine
Authority uprear; / Me supreme Wisdom and primal Love sustain"
(Inferno, 111:5-6 [Binyon, p. 14]). But for Eliot, well beyond "the
middle of the way" in life, there appeared no way out of the dark
wood. He still retained "the prejudice" which he said in 1929 had at
first interfered with his readings of the Paradiso?his belief "that po
etry not only must be found through suffering but can find its material
20 C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and
Romanticism, 3rd ed. (1943; rpt. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1958),
pp. 10-12.
T S. Eliot's Virgil: Dante 65
only in suffering."21 The sufferings of the young poet, reflected in

poems of horror and disgust, have given way to freely accepted, peni
tential suffering, however. Like Dante in the Paradiso, having dis
missed his Virgil-figure and accepted the Lady of "Ash-Wednesday,"
Eliot has direct access to the perfect Mediator: "The hint half guessed,
the gift half understood, is Incarnation." The "impossible union / Of
spheres of existence is actual." No mediation of poetry is further
needed to reconcile opposing worlds. "And the fire and the rose are
one."22
Nine years after completing Four Quartets, when Eliot evidently per
ceived that he would write no other major poem, he employed the
Virgil-metaphor one last time. Appropriately enough, he did so in
concluding his last major critical essay, "Poetry and Drama." The clos
ing of this lecture is so clearly an echo of the conclusion to his first
major essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that one feels cer
tain he expected his readers to measure the distance he had come
between the two works of 1919 and 1951. In the first he had suggested
that tradition, poetry, and the essay itself had brought him to a closed
barrier, the "frontier of metaphysics or mysticism." In the last essay,
preparing his farewell to all art in prose or poetry, his allusion to Vir
gil and Dante calls attention to an open passageway beyond poetry,
made accessible by the mediation of art:
For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon
ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in
reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation;
and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where
that guide can avail us no farther.23
21 "Dante," Selected Essays, p. 223.

22Four Quartets: "The Dry Salvages," V; "Little Gidding," V, in 7^ 5. Eliot: Collected
Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8c World, 1970), pp. 199, 209.
23 "Poetry and Drama," On Poetry and Poets, p. 94.

T. S. Eliot-Dante

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T. S.

Eliot's Virgil: Dante

T. S. ELIOT'S VIRGIL: DANTE

Eloise Hay, University of California at Santa Barbara

This speaks to me of that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry;

A persistent theme in Eliot's poetry?from Prufrock's "Let us go then,

He confined himself to three points?three lessons he said he had

To this inner scope, Dante added an equally vast range of temporal

vidual Talent" he responded writh an alternative to the Futurists' met

It was of course the "sound theology" of Dante that provided Eliot's

turning point, the metaphors of mediation were latent in his criticism.

This was in 1921. In 1926 an extraordinary change occurred in Eliot's

(The capital in "Kingdom" indicates Paradise, as the lower case "king

Men who have reached absolute emptiness may encounter these me

There is no secure foothold. In the pattern of Four Quartets Dante's

only in suffering."21 The sufferings of the young poet, reflected in

21 "Dante," Selected Essays, p. 223.

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