Manganiello - T.S.eliot and Dante

T. S.
ELIOT AND DANTE

T. S. Eliot and Dante
DOMINIC MANGANIELLO
Associate Professor of English Literature
University of Ottawa, Canada
Palgrave Macmillan
© Dominic Manganiello 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989
All rights reserved. For infonnation, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989

ISBN 978-1-349-20261-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20259-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20259-1
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manganiello, Dominic.
T. S. Eliot and Dante.
Includes index.
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965-
Knowledge--Uterature. 2. Dante A1ighieri, 1265-1321-
InfIuence---Eliot. 3. English poetry-Italian influences.
I. Title.
PS3509. L43Z72 1989 821'.912 88-15871
ISBN 978-0-312-02104-7
alia dolce memoria di mio padre,
ai miei cari Angelina, Francesco Giuseppe, Lucia Carla, Miriam Elisa,
e Sofia Cristina
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Dante according to Eliot 1

(i) The Modem Element in Dante 1
(ii) Dante, the Touchstone Poet 5
(iii) Eliot's Dante and his Critics 11
2 Death by Water and Dante's Ulysses 17

(i) Prufrock's Love Song 18
(ii) Phlebas Redivivus1 25
(iii) Old Men Ought to be Explorers 31
(iv) Marina: Memory and the Art of Sea-Change 35
3 The Poetics of the Desert 40

(i) The Desert in the City 40
(ii) Voices Crying in the Wilderness 53
(iii) The Cactus Land 59
(iv) The Garden in the Desert 65
(v) The Word in the Desert 75
4 Eliot's Book of Memory 84

(i) Memory and Desire 84
(ii) MaUer and Memory, or the Soul's Progress 92
(iii) Memoria sui/Memoria Dei 98
(iv) Memory and the Word 115
vii
viii Contents
5 The Aesthetics and Politics of Order 124

(i) Style and Order 124
(ii) The Ethics and Politics of Order 132
(iii) Church and State: Murder in the Cathedral 137
6 Eliot's Dante and the Moderns 147

(i) Little Gidding: Eliot and Yeats's Ghost 147
(ii) Little Gidding Revisited: Heaney and Joyce's Ghost 155
(iii) 'The True Dantescan Voice' 162
Notes 166
Index 206
Acknowledgements
One who writes a book on T. S. Eliot and Dante cannot help but
record his indebtedness to a number of scholarly works that have dealt
with various aspects of the subject; namely, the seminal essay by
Mario Praz, and the unpublished doctoral dissertations by Audrey T.
Rodgers, James S. Torrens, Donald George Sheehan, and Kristin Rae
Woolever. Books by Philip R. Headings, Lyndall Gordon, A. D.
Moody, Edward Lobb, Eloise Hay, and Ronald Bush have also been
helpful. Other acknowledgements appear in the notes.
In a more personal way, I wish to express my thanks to David L.
Jeffrey, Camille R. La Bossiere, and George Thomson, my colleagues
at the University of Ottawa, for helpful discussion of my manuscript
and for valuable suggestions; to Ronald Bush for some practical
suggestions; to Mrs Valerie Eliot for kindly responding to a query,
and for allowing me to consult the Clark Lectures and the Turnbull
Lectures; to Seamus Heaney for an interesting conversation at his
station in Cambridge, Massachusetts; to John Spencer Hill, Joseph
Ronsley, Donald Theall, and the late Richard Ellmann for their kind
encouragement and support of this project at various stages; to Reed
Way Dasenbrock, Irene Makaryk, and Carla de Petris for the gift of
articles; to the staffs at Harvard's Houghton Library, at the Biblioteca
Marucelliana and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence; to
Dorothy Thomson and Frank Di Trolio of the University of Ottawa
Library; and to the School of Graduate Studies at the University of
Ottawa for a grant which made a research trip to Florence possible.
And, not least, there is the debt of gratitude to my wife, Angelina,
and to my children, Francesco Giuseppe, Lucia Carla, Miriam Elisa, and
Sofia Cristina. Only they know how much they have meant. With joy
I dedicate this book to them, and to the sweet memory of my father.
The author and publishers wish to thank the follOwing who have
kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:
ix
x Acknowledgements
Mrs Valerie Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd, for the extracts from early
drafts of 'Ode', 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service', 'Little Gidding',
'The Rock', 'Morning at the Window' and Murder in the Cathedral by
T. S. Eliot, © Valerie Eliot 1989; the extracts from The Clark Lectures
and the Turnbull Lectures © Valerie Eliot 1989; and the extracts from
uncollected writings © Valerie Eliot 1989;
Faber and Faber Ltd, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc., for the extracts
from The Elder Statesman, To Criticise the Critic, On Poetry and Poets and
Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley by T. S. Eliot;
Faber and Faber Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for the
extracts from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Murder in the Cathedral, The
Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, Selected Essays, Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, The Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods,
Essays Ancient and Modern, For Lancelot Andrewes by T. S. Eliot, and
the extracts from The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript by T. S.
Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot;
Faber and Faber Ltd, and Harvard University Press, for the extracts
from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism by T. S. Eliot;
Methuen and Co., for the extracts from The Sacred Wood by T. S.
Eliot.
1
Dante according to Eliot
(i) THE MODERN ELEMENT IN DANTE
Why did a reviewer in Florence for the seventh-centenary celebrations

of Dante's birth in 1965 feel compelled to say that the shade of T. S.
Eliot, who had died a few months earlier, haunted the proceedings11
Or why did Ezra Pound, who first championed Dante as the Muse
presiding over the modem revolution in poetry, belatedly concede,
'[Eliot's1 was the true Dantescan voice' of the modem world72
That the distinction of delivering the keynote address in Florence
had been accorded to Eliot came as no surprise to followers of his
career. When he was asked by an interviewer in 1949 what his
favourite period in Italian literature was, Eliot replied, 'Dante, and then
Dante, and then Dante. No one has had a greater influence on me
than Dante. There is always something to discover in the Divine
Comedy. As a young man I had other poetic loves, but I betrayed
these with the passing of years. I have always returned to Dante, to
his poetry.'J Reviewing his career in 1961, Eliot confessed, 'There is
one poet . . . who impressed me profoundly when I was twenty-
two . . . one poet who remains the comfort and amazement of my
age.'4 This long-standing admiration for Dante did not go unnoticed.s
On awarding him the 1948 Nobel Prize for Uterature, the Swedish
Academy described Eliot as 'one of Dante's latest born successors'.6
And when the Dante gold medal was conferred on Eliot in 1959, the
Italian ambassador commended him for restoring Dante to our contem-
porary consciousness and to the European tradition. 7 For in his literary
and social criticism as well as in his verse, Eliot had paid Dante perhaps
1
2 T.S. Eliot and Dante
the finest tribute by a major writer of this century. In view of all these
facts, one bewildered commentator concluded in the year of Eliot's
death, 'it is astonishing to find . . . that no thorough study exists on
the relationship between these two poets'. It is just such a study that
I propose.8
That Eliot as a key figure among the modems had turned to Dante
in order to define or consolidate his literary practice can seem
paradoxical at first, if not altogether surprising. We usually associate
the modem mind with a literature based exclusively on the experience
of this life, and without regard for the religious or metaphysical
perspective afforded us by Dante's journey beyond the here and now.
This apparent contradiction, however, did not deter Eliot's forerunners
in the previous century from signalling Dante's modernity. Shelley, for
instance, claimed that Dante had displayed 'the most glorious
imagination of modem poetry', and explained, 'The poetry of Dante
may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time,
which unites the modem and ancient World: 9 Matthew Arnold,
perhaps by way of seconding Shelley's view, delivered an unpublished
lecture which was aptly entitled, 'The Modem Element in Dante' .10
Eliot had his own views as to where this modem element could be
located. 'Every revolution in poetry,' he pointed out echoing Words-
worth, 'is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return
to common speech' or what Dante called the lingua volgare. l l The
poetic revolution of his own time could best be characterised by its
'search for a proper modem colloquial idiom'.u
The example of Dante's need to demonstrate his up-to-dateness, 'to
create a language ... out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms', as
Shelley put it,13 inspired Eliot, who was also attempting to reconcile
the fragmented experience of the modem age with a redeeming
linguistic ideal. Dante had weeded out archaisms and stiltedness in
order to produce an idiom, a dolce stiZ nuovo, which, by combining the
vernacular and noble sentiment, made itself amenable to modem
adaptation. This colloquial idiom rings true to the resonances and
contingencies of human experience, while allowing the poet at the
same time the range to transcend it. 'Man is man', Eliot averred,
'because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can
invent them.'14 He admired the Divine Comedy for recognising these
realities and praised Dante's depiction of 'the complete scale of the
depths and heights of human emotion'. IS In his own work Eliot
concentrates on the divine as it appears in this world rather than in
the other worlds of the Comedy.16 But he still claims 'the supernatural
Dante according to Eliot 3
is the greatest reality here and now'.J7 Like Dante's, Eliot's crowning
achievement is at once linguistic and spiritual. 'Giving to the word a
new life and to language a new idiom'I8 means in this respect making
words such as God, original sin, penance, as well as hell, purgatory
and paradise, comprehensible to the modem mind. This task of
revitalising language, or purifying the dialect of the tribe,19 makes the
poet one of the modem stilnovisti.20
In his principal writings on Dante, Eliot underlines his master's
ability to combine stylistic with spiritual aims and to treat philosophy
in terms of vision. Dante's art shows that purgation and even
blessedness can be the stuff of great poetry:
Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his
philosophy, not as a theory (in the modem and not the Greek sense
of that word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of
something perceived. When most of our modem poets confine
themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually,
only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does
not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that
our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted. 21
Eliot offers here another touchstone for the modernity of Dante, his
visual imagination. Dante's precise and evocative language is the result
of the universal European method of allegory which makes for
'simplicity and intelligibility'. Dante is consequently 'easy to read'
because his language has 'a poetic lucidity - a poetic as distinguished
from an intellectual lucidity. The thought may be obscure, but the word
is lucid, or rather translucent.' Eliot defines allegory as 'clear visual
images' which 'are given much more intensity by having a meaning -
we do not need to know what the meaning is, but in our awareness
of the image we must be aware that the meaning is there toO'.22 We
should not, in other words, dispense with the image to concentrate on
the content it represents, but we should not forget that the concept
exists either, for to do so would be to diminish the intensity of the
image. The concrete image helps us to visualise an idea with indefinite
yet richly suggestive associations. Allegory, therefore, is not a romantic
or private device, since 'Speech varies, but our eyes are all the same.'23
Nor can Dante's method be reduced to a mechanical one-to-one
correspondence between word and referent; the imagery, on the
contrary, evokes polysemy. These myriad meanings prompted by the
visual imagination reverberate by means of what Eliot calls elsewhere
the 'auditory imagination', the feeling for rhythm that penetrates 'far
below the conscious levels of thought', and fuses 'the most ancient
and civilized mentality'.24 Possession of this individual rhythm indicates,
as Eliot remarked of the Divine Comedy, that 'genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood'j2S that is, it can stir us by its
movement and images before our minds can fully comprehend what it
is that we feel. Eliot corroborates the insight of Shelley that Dante's
poetic style acts as a linguistic bridge across time.
The imitation of Dante will consequently do the young writer less
harm than that of any other poet because he willieam from the Inferno
that 'the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of
words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile,
verbal beauty, and elegance'.26 Eliot accounts for this 'universal' style
by noting the close resemblance between Dante's Italian and medieval
Latin, which was then an international medium of communication, and
the mental or cultural unity of the Middle Ages.
Eliot subsumed under the criterion of universality the moc;lern trait
of impersonality. Dante did not record his personal experiences in La
Vita Nuova so that they could be aired as confessions in Rousseau's
sense, but because 'they seemed to him to have some philosophical
and impersonal value' P His preoccupation with plain speech, with
visual clarity and detail, his universality and impersonality justified
Eliot's daring belief in 'the importance of Dante as a master - I might
even say the master - for a poet writing today in any language'.28 As
for his own experience, Eliot observed, 1n my youth, I think that
Dante's astonishing economy and directness of language - his arrow
that goes unerringly to the centre of the target - provided for me a
wholesome corrective to the extravagances of the Elizabethan, Jacobean
and Caroline authors in whom I also delighted.'29 Polyphiloprogenitive,
superfetation (from 'Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'), and batrachian,
aphyllous, ophidian (from The Family Reunion), are some of the linguistic
extravagances that appear in his work. Eliot helped himself to the
arrow of precision and clarity (qualities which Arnold had also
maintained as ideals of style).3O left in Dante's quiver in order to take
aim at 'the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for
everything and exact ideas about nothing?!
In trying to elaborate on his debt to his Italian master, whose poetry
he deemed still, after forty years, 'the most persistent and deepest
influence upon my verse', Eliot adduced three lessons he had leamed..32
The first two he considered intertwined. Dante had taught him that
'the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master
of it' since he had 'transhumanised' Italian by developing and enriching

its possibilities for posterity. In so doing Dante had also extended the
width of emotional range that man is capable of experiencing, from
depravity's despair to the beatific vision. The third lesson, 'that Dante
is, beyond all other poets of our continent, the most European', led
Eliot to the belief, recalling the De Monarchia, that only out of Europe
could a sense of world harmony proceed. Dante's socio-political
thought had brought Eliot to the threshold of the idea of a Christian
society. How Eliot translated these lessons into his own art and
criticism, as I will try to show in subsequent chapters, constitutes a
unique witness to Dante as a poet for modem times.
(ii) DANTE, THE TOUCHSTONE POET
What clearly emerges from Eliot's remarks is his use of Dante as the
gauge by which to measure the achievements of other writers. This
critical practice should not surprise us. John Ruskin had considered
Dante not only an extraordinary poet, but also 'the central man of all
the world . . . representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral
and intellectual faculties all at their highest'.33 Eliot, however, is careful
to separate the poetry from the man. He reveals that Goethe's
philosophy, for instance, is repugnant to him, while Dante's is not: 1
believe this is because Dante is the purer poet, not because I have
more sympathy with Dante the man than Goethe the man: 34 Eliot
moves uneasily in his distinction between philosophical belief and
poetic assent. He apparently means that in reading the Divine Comedy
'you suspend both belief and disbelief'. It is not necessary to share
Dante's faith in order to understand the poem and assent to its beauty.
Even at a distance the reader will not have to protect himself, as he
will with Goethe, from any intrusive assertion of the poet's personal
values. For Eliot the reason is simple. A coherent philosophy, such as
the Catholic, provides an objective system of reference for both the
poet and reader. Although he eventually concedes that Dante, like
Lucretius, made use of his poetic gifts to propagate a doctrine,3s Eliot
argues that Dante did so responsibly. The reader will find in Dante and
in Lucretius the 'esthetic sanction', or the 'partial justification' of their
views of life by the art they engender. These writers did not endeavour
primarily to persuade, but to convey 'what it feels like to hold certain
beliefs'.36 'For poetry,' Eliot concludes, 'is not the assertion that
something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to US:37
The same cannot be said of Blake, in whom Eliot detects the same
formlessness of structure and infelicitous marriage of poetry and
philosophy that he finds in Goethe: '[Blake] did not have the Mediter-
ranean gift of form which knows how to borrow, as Dante borrowed
his theory of the soul; he must needs create a philosophy as well as
poetry: This gift of form explains in part why 'Dante is a classic, and
Blake only a poet of genius'.38 Eliot reckons that the radically different
philosophies of Lucretius and Dante, because central to the history of
Western civilisation, still carry the force to influence mankind, whereas
the philosophy of Milton, like that of Blake, because an individual
fabrication, does not. 39 The fault lies, perhaps, with the age, rather
than with Milton or Blake, for failing to provide what such poets
needed.
Eliot repeats this apologia in his celebrated comparison of Shake-
speare and Dante. Carlyle had compared the two writers in a lecture
on 'The Hero as Poet' in 1840, but Eliot's remarks seem to have stirred
greater controversy than those of his Victorian forerunner. Shakespeare
is not a philosophical poet like Dante, Eliot maintains, but Dante is
not really a philosopher at all:
In truth neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking - that
was not their job. . . . When Dante says
la sua voluntade e nostra pace
it is great poetry, and there is a great philosophy behind it. When
Shakespeare says
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.
It is equally..great poetry, though the philosophy behind it is not as
great. But the essential is that each expresses, in perfect language,
some permanent human impulse. Emotionally, the latter is just as
strong, just as true, and just as informative - just as useful and
beneficial, as the former. 40
Dante weaves Thomist philosophy into the pattern of his personal

pilgrimage, presenting us 'with the emotional and sense equivalent for
a definite philosophical system constructed by a philosopher - even
though he may sometimes take liberties with the system'.41 Shake-
speare, for his part, was able to make great poetry out of 'an inferior
and muddled philosophy of life'.42
Eliot has been criticised for preferring Dante's poetry because it
represents 'a saner attitude towards life'43 than Shakespeare's. Such
criticism fails to take into account Eliot's own perspective on the
matter. He admitted he had 'a personal prejudice' for poetry written
with a dear pattern, whether it was based on the philosophy of
Aquinas, Epicurus, or the forest sages of India. 44 But this preference
did not imply a judgement of superiority: 'I prefer the culture which
produced Dante to the culture which produced Shakespeare; but I
would not say that Dante was the greater poet, or even that he had
the profounder mind: 45 In fact, he placed Shakespeare and Dante on
an equal footing: 'Dante and Shakespeare divide the modem world
between them; there is no third: 46
The suspicion that Eliot's praise of Dante rests too much on doctrinal
grounds also misses the mark. No one will deny Eliot's temperamental
and ideological affinity with his Italian master. He cannot hide the fact,
for example, that reading Dante has made a deep and lasting impres-
sion, has initiated a new life: 'The experience both of a moment and
of a lifetime'.47 But it must not be forgotten that Eliot used Dante, not
only Laforgue, as an ironic voice in the early poetry, especially
'Prufrock' and 'A Cooking Egg', before his conversion. In so far as
these early poems are evidence of a scepticism Eliot called 'the Boston
doubt',48 for him no less than for Emerson, 'Massachusetts is Italy
turned upside down'.49 In his essays, particularly that of 1920, Eliot
concerns himself with Dante the craftsman - a point he returns to in
his address to the Italian institute in 1950 - not Dante the prophet, or
'spiritual leader' or poetic 'hero'. With regard to this question the test
case, as Eliot himself realised, was the poetry of Shelley. Because he
considered the Godwinian philosophy Shelley espoused repellent, Eliot
found he could no longer enjoy the poetry.50 The personal prejudice
displayed here is evident, but Eliot was not alone in reacting to
Shelley's 'immaturity'. Joyce had a similar reaction when he remarked
to a friend that Prometheus Unbound seemed to him to be 'the
Schwiirmerei of a young Jew'.51 Eliot's natural antipathy to Shelley did
not blunt his critical perception. He praised Shelley's imitation of
Dante's tena rima in The Triumph of Life as better executed than his
own attempt in Little Gidding. 52 When Gabrielle Barfoot accuses Eliot
of not judging solely according to literary and artistic merits, he
overlooks the fact that critics do this constantly. Eliot himself accused
Pound, for instance, of the same critical bias: 'one can hardly read the
erudite notes and commentary to his edition of Guido Cavalcanti

without suspecting that he finds Guido much more sympathetic than
Dante, and on grounds that have little to do with their respective
merits as poets; namely, that Guido was very likely a heretic, if not a
sceptic'.5J As Eliot indicated, 'it is well to remind ourselves, in
discussing the subject of literary criticism, that we cannot escape
personal bias, and that there are other standards besides that of
'1iterary" merit, which cannot be excluded.' Even in the famous case
of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Eliot added, some witnesses defended the
book for the moral intentions of the author rather than for its literary
qualities. 54
If, for Eliot, Dante and Shakespeare were equally great, they were
not equally imitable: 1f you follow Dante without talent, you will at
worst be pedestrian and flat; if you follow Shakespeare . . . without
talent, you will make an utter fool of yourself.'s5 Eliot, of course, is
not entirely accurate in this assessment. Mario Praz has given instances
from nineteenth-century Italian writers whose imitation of Dante has
produced a forced and stilted language comparable to bad imitations
of Shakespeare.56 When he actually tried, in Little Gidding, to imitate
Dante's bare style Eliot commented on its 'extreme difficulty' and its
limitations. 57 This explains why he increasingly admired Shelley's poem
as one of the supreme tributes to Dante in English.
Little Gidding was not Eliot's first attempt at imitating Dante. In the
manuscript of The Waste Land Eliot's description, extending to 82 lines,
of the wreck of a New England fishing boat is based on Dante's
account of Ulysses' last voyage. In comparing Inferno XXVII with
Tennyson's 'Ulysses', Eliot praises 'the greatly superior degree of
simplification of Dante's version. Tennyson, like most poets, like most
even of those whom we call great poets, has to get his effect with a
certain amount of forcing.'58 He cites in particular Tennyson's line about
the sea which 'moans round with many voices' as being too poetical.
By contrast, Dante's simple 'as pleased Another' implies far greater
depth.59 Eliot's own version, ironically enough, seems equally forced
(see below, pp. 28-9). The reference to Another is oracular and too
poetical.60 In theory, Eliot was rightly guarded in dwelling on Dante's
simplicity; in practice, he found it difficult to be 'simple' like Dante.
Although Milton is not mentioned in the 1929 Dante essay, he
seems to hover in the background as the alternative grand style to
Shakespeare in English.61 But Eliot felt obliged, however tangentially,
to dissociate Dante and Milton as versifiers. Coleridge had done the
same in the nineteenth century. Emphasising 'the vividness, logical
connection, strength and energy' of Dante's style, Coleridge remarked,

10 this I think Dante superior to Milton; and his style is accordingly
more imitable than Milton's, and does to this day exercise a greater
influence on the literature of this country:62 Since Dante's diction was
'pure Language', it also was preferable to Milton's.63 Eliot originally
claimed Milton's verse, which lacked clear visual imagery, had done
irreparable damage to the English language,64 but later revised this
harsh judgement.6s 'The remoteness of Milton's verse from ordinary
speech', however, his maximal rather than minimal alteration of ordinary
language, his elevated and sublime style as compared to Dante's bare
style, meant that 'even a small poet can learn something from the
study of Dante', whereas 'we must perhaps wait for a great poet before
we can And one who can profit from the study of Milton'.66
Eliot separated Dante from other writers both in terms of style and
thought. It is in this context that he takes Paul Valery to task for
confusing poetry and mysticism:
Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valery's 'modem poet'

who attempts 'to produce in us a state'. A state, in itself, is nothing
whatsoever. . . . The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable
because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic
is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he
sees, and the absorption into the divine is the only necessary, if
paradoxical, limit of this contemplation.67
Milton suffers in this respect too. European culture, of which Dante is

the supreme representative, is a higher form than Anglo-Saxon
mythology which was 'further impoverished by the divorce from
Rome'.68 The shortcomings of Milton's cosmology are therefore
painfully evident: 'Milton's celestial and infernal regions are large but
insufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation; and
one remarks about the Puritan mythology its thinness: 69 Eliot registers
a similar complaint about Baudelaire, who had been called 'a fragmen-
tary Dante': 'in the adjustment of the natural to the supernatural,
Baudelaire is a bungler compared to Dante?O The romantic ideal of
love proposed by Baudelaire in Journaux intimes and Man coeur mis a
nu falls short of Dante's ideal of can/as.
What seems to lie behind Eliot's criticism is Baudelaire's inability to
achieve a disinterestedness towards his material that Shakespeare and
Dante had achieved. The result is that the symbolist poet could not
transcend suffering and despair, could not separate 'the man who
10 T.5. Eliot and Dante
suffers and the mind which creates?l by acknowledging the positive

state of beatitude as Dante had: 'The contemplation of the horrid or
sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect
of the impulse towards the spirit. of beauty.'n Baudelaire, like Dante,
had proceeded towards an expansion of reality?3 but, on account of
his restricted vision, of the gap he finds between human and divine
love, his 'notion of beatitude certainly tended to be wishy-washy. . . .
The complement, and the corrective to the Journaux in times, so far as
they deal with the relations of man and woman, is the Vita Nuova,
and the Divine Comedy.'74 In Eliot's view, Richard Crashaw exhibited a
similar partial treatment of love. 7s Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, even the
metaphysicals and the symbolists - Eliot's principal early models -
were proving to be unexpectedly deficient when set beside Dante.
The metaphysicals especially failed to bridge the gap between
thought and emotion which had formed a unity in the Middle Ages.
This dissociation of sensibility sets the two centuries apart, and marks
a broad philosophical difference between Dante and Donne:
In Donne . . . learning is just information suffused with emotion,

or combined with emotion not essentially relevant to it. In the
poetry of Dante . . . there is always the assumption of an ideal
unity in experience, the faith in an ultimate rationalisation and
harmonisation of experience, the subsumption of the lower under
the higher, an ordering of the world more or less Aristotelian. 76
This goal of a unified sensibility with an underlying principle of order,

both linguistic and cultural, will occupy Eliot from The Waste Land to
Four Quartets. Dante served as a prime model in this quest 'to bring
order to the experience of unbelief by bringing order to its language'. 77
Eliot finds a similar disjunction separating Dante from later English
writers. In Dante there is fully present 'an amplitude, a catholicity', to
which neither the eighteenth nor the nineteenth century can lay claim.
The writings of the Augustans and the Romantics show evidence of a
limited range of sensibility, particularly in the scale of religiOUS feeling.
This restriction of sensibility produces in tum a kind of 'provinciality'
which points to 'the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a
cornmon belief and a cornmon culture',78 Eliot diagnosed the repercus-
sions of this trend in his own time:
The trouble of the modem age is not merely the inability to believe
certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed,
but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief
in which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious
feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to
express it become meaningless. 79
There was no question of returning to the Middle Ages Eliot made

clear. But he considered his most formidable challenge to be the
recapturing of a catholic and classic sensibility in modem poetry. To
help him meet this challenge, Eliot turned to the Divine Comedy which,
if anywhere, he claimed, 'we find the classic in a modem European
language'.80
(iii) ELIOT'S DANTE AND HIS CRITICS
The preceding remarks doubtless tell us as much, if not more, about

Eliot than they do about Dante. In his 1929 essay Eliot stated that his
intention was simply to introduce Dante and his work by means of
personal impressions and observations to the English reader, whom he
alerted mischievously: 1 mean to restrict my comments to the unprov-
able and the irrefutable.'81 Eliot was, however, only partially accurate
in ~hese prefa~ory remarks. He has ruffled Dante scholars, who poin~
to the limitations of his criticism, while others testify that his contri-
bution to Dante studies surpasses that of Coleridge, Longfellow, and
Norton. 82
Eliot was aware that his comments could provoke such divergent
responses. While declining 'to go into questions of disputed interpre-
tations of Dante's allegory',83 he nevertheless formulates a definite
critical position which, in its emphasis, anticipates that of Charles
Singleton.84 Eliot's goal in the 1920 essay is threefold: to disprove
Valery's contention that philosophic poetry is not possible in every
age, especially the modem; to defend Dante against the charges made
by Walter Savage Landor, who, while praising isolated passages of the
Divine Comedy, attacked its lack of structure, its allegory and moral
purpose; and finally, to obviate the comments of Hauvette and
Sidgwick, who concentrated on Dante solely as a great moral teacher,
by demonstrating the utility of Dante's craft. Eliot's task is to steer a
middle course between these conflicting views by trying to reconcile
the philosophic and formal aspects of the poem. It is a strategy he
repeats in the 1929 essay. Those critics who ignore the philosophic
framework as irrelevant to an enjoyment of the poetry, he believes,

tend to focus on the Inferno rather than on the whole of the Divine
Comedy.85 In order to avoid this extreme of criticism, Eliot advises the
reader to 'at least glance at the Readings of W. W. Vernon in order to
see how far into medieval philosophy, theology, science, and literature
a thorough study of Dante must go'.86
We have already glanced briefly at Eliot's argument against Valery.
In The Pentameron, Landor called Dante the 'great master of the
disgusting', and made Petrarch condemn in the Divine Comedy 'the
loose and shallow foundation of so vast a structure; its unconnected-
ness; its want of manners, of passion, of action, consistently and
uninterruptedly at work toward a distinct and worthy purpose'.
Petrarch also recoiled from Dante's 'splenetic temper' and the 'sterile
theology' of the Paradiso. 87 Eliot retorted by demonstrating that
Dante's 'disgust' is only one pole of his work to be completed and
explained by the pursuit of beauty88 in 'the last and greatest canto'89
of the Paradiso. As for Landor's remaining charges, Eliot made the
following rebuttal: ' The structure of emotions, for which the allegory
is the necessary scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the
most intellectual and the most spiritual.'90 Eliot countered the charge
of Dante's so-called splenetic temper made by Landor and others by
maintaining that because Dante introduced at least one fictional
character, Ulysses, among the historical characters, 'the Inferno is
relieved from any question of pettiness or arbitrariness in Dante's
selection of the damned'.91 Eliot clinched his argument against all three
with a terse affirmation: 'the philosophy is essential to the structure
and . . . the structure is essential to the poetic beauty of the parts'.92
Eliot, even if unwittingly, was disputing at the same time the claims
of some major Italian critics. In the nineteenth century Francesco de
Sanctis, for example, had also insisted on a close reading of Dante's
text without the benefit of commentaries, and had been convinced that
the reader could undertake this task with an open and even doubting
mind. De Sanctis, unlike Eliot however, rejected allegorical readings
and dissociated Dante's poetic achievement from his intellectual doctrine.
This point was taken up by the philosopher of aesthetics, Benedetto
Croce, in the next century. Croce had published his influential yet
controversial The Poetry of Dante the year after Eliot's Sacred Wood
essay. If Eliot had not known of his disagreement with Croce, he was
made aware of it by Egidio Guidubaldi, who had written an article on
the subject. Eliot uttered a 'very well, very interesting' at the end of
each paragraph of Guidubaldi's arlicle. 93 Guidubaldi isolates specific
areas of divergence. Eliot's insistence on allegory and his criterion of

visual imagination opposes Croce's criterion of lyrical imagination.
Finally, Eliot's admiration for the poem increases as he moves from the
Inferno to the Paradiso while Croce's wanes. The basic difference in
approach lies in Eliot's emphasis on the integrated structure of the
Divine Comedy, where Croce's instead is on its fragmented structure.94
Eliot's plea for the unity of the Divine Comedy reminds us of the
convergence of influences on his views, starting with George Santay-
ana's Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. Eliot aligns these
poets toO. 95 He once stated that poetry employs the logic of
imagination, not the logic of concepts,96 as evidenced in the work of
Lucretius, who endeavoured to find 'the concrete poetic equivalent' for
a philosophical system in an ordered vision. 97 Although poetry and
philosophy are 'better performed inside two skulls than one' in order
to avoid schizophrenia, the two arts cannot be divorced altogether, for
to do so would bring a 'serious impeachment, not only against Dante,
but against most of Dante's contemporaries'.98 This last consideration,
as Eliot himself acknowledged in the Clark Lectures, derives from
Santayana: We have both, I imagine, a prejudice in favour of the clear
and distinct: we mean a philosophy which is expressed, not one which
is inexpressible.'99
Santayana was one critic in the unbroken line of Dante scholarship
at Harvard University which passed from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
to James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton and Charles Grandgent,
a line of scholarship whose influence on Eliot cannot be overestimated.
Longfellow had paid little attention to the question of allegory, but
Lowell rectified this oversight. He stressed not only the philosophy of
the Divine Comedy, but also, as Eliot himself was later to do, the
universal value of Dante's own personal experience. lOO Norton, to
whom Eliot paid tribute in his opening lecture at Harvard,lol scoffed
at the 'mystic' Rossetti's view of Beatrice as merely an allegorical
figure; instead, he was convinced that she was an actual woman. lOl
Eliot claimed that Rossetti's Blessed Damozel impeded his appreciation
of Beatrice for many years since he, too, was firmly convinced that the
Vita Nuova was inspired by Dante's personal life. lOJ
Eliot's affinity with Grandgent's thought has proved to be even
closer. Mario Praz, in his seminal essay,l04 traces Eliot's theory of
impersonality to his reading of the Harvard professor's Dante. Grandgent
had contrasted the attitude of spiritual introspection in the Middle
Ages with the 'exhibition of the ego' in modem confessions, 105 a
discussion relevant to Eliot's own conviction that 'The great poet, in
writing himself, writes his time: 106 Witness the dry humour of Eliot's
stricture against those who read the Vita Nuova and Rousseau's
Confessions in the same light: Now Dante, I believe, had experiences
which seemed to him of some importance; not of importance because
he, Dante Alighieri, was an important person who kept press-cutting
bureaux busy, but important in themselves: 107 That Eliot borrows
another point made by Grandgent has been overlooked. The latter
described allegory as 'something more than an artistic device: it
represented a habit of mind, a belief in mystic correspondences' .108
Eliot paraphrases this to suggest that allegory was 'really a mental
habit, which raised to the point of genius can make a great poet as
well as a great mystic or saint' .109
Eliot, as Praz notes, said he owed something as well to his table
talk with Pound. In The Spirit of Romance, Pound declares that 'all
critical statements are based on a direct study of the texts themselves
and not upon commentators' .110 Eliot, who makes it clear he is no
Dante scholar, offers the same advice to his readers: 'Read in this way
it [the Vita Nuoval can be more useful than a dozen commentaries [on
the Comedy].'111 That Eliot also borrows from Pound his understanding
of Dantesque allegory as clarity and precision of images is evident in
the following passage: 'Dante's precision both in the Vita Nuova and
in the Commedia comes from the attempt to reproduce exactly the
thing which has been clearly seen:112 Similarly, Eliot says of Dante's
elaborate use of imagery, 'such figures are not merely antiquated
rhetorical devices, but serious and practical means of making the
spiritual visible'.113 Pound's contention that 'Dante conceived the real
Hell, Purgatory and Paradise as states, not places' is repeated by Eliot:
'Hell is not a place but a state: 114
Pound also anticipates Eliot in setting Dante beside Milton and
Shakespeare. Paradise Lost is nothing more than 'a conventional
melodrama' for Pound, who comments: 1ater critics have decided that
the Devil is intended for the hero, which interpretation leaves the
whole without significance'. Eliot continues this line of criticism by
insisting, 'about none of Dante's characters is there that ambiguity
which affects Milton's Lucifer', whom he describes disparagingly as the
'curly-haired Byronic hero'.11S Any attempt to compare Dante and
Milton is pathos according to Pound, 'and it is, incidentally, unfair to
Milton, because it makes one forget all his laudable qualities'. Among
the English poets, only Shakespeare bears sustained comparison with
the Italian:
Here we are with the masters; of neither can we say, 'He is the
greater'. Of each we must say, 'He is unexcelled' . . . Dante would
seem to have the greater imaginative 'vision' . . . Shakespeare
would seem to have greater power in depicting various humanity,
and to be more observant of its foibles. . . . If the language of
Shakespeare is more beautifully suggestive, that of Dante is more
beautifully definite; both men are masters of the whole art.116
Eliot, of course, makes virtually the same claim:
Dante is . . . the most universal of poets in the modem languages.

That does not mean that he is 'the greatest', or that he is the most
comprehensive - there is greater variety and detail in Shake-
speare. . . . Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion:
Dante the greatest altitude and the greatest depth.n7
Other similarities have escaped notice. Eliot, for instance, reiterates

two of Pound's observations: the figurative language of Dante makes
'us see more definitely' any given scene, whereas 'the figure of Shake-
speare is expansive rather than intensive';118 and the Divine Comedy is
not an epic.n 9 Pound, moreover, does not select the Inferno for special
treatment; he concentrates equally on the philosophical passages of the
Purgaforio, and especially on Piccarda's speech in the Paradiso. 120
Pound was not the only English writer to have singled out Piccarda's
speech. Matthew Arnold had chosen as his sixth touchstone Dante's
'Simple, but perfect line', 1n la sua voluntade e nostra pace'. To attain
supreme poetical success, Arnold stated, 'more is required than the
powerful application of ideas to life; it must be an application under
the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty'.
The accent of 'high seriousness, born of absolute sincerity' gives
Dante's verse its peculiar power. 121 Eliot refers to a simile in canto xv
of the Inferno, which Arnold had isolated for high praise,122 but he
must also have been aware of Arnold's discussion of the passage which
was his own touchstone for understanding Dante's poetry and philosophy.
The esteem in which Eliot held Dante, then, was virtually unbounded.
The Clark Lectures of 1926, coming between the essays of 1920 and
1929, mark a crucial transition in Eliot's appreciation of Dante. Endowed
with 'the gift of magnificent sentences, the gift of exposition . . .
[and] the gift of incarnation', for Eliot in these lectures Dante stands as
'the great exemplar' of every type of the 'metaphysical' poetry he was
trying to achieve as a modernisU23 The nature of Dante's influence
on Eliot can sometimes be elusive, as Leonard Unger observes,124 but

it cannot be underestimated on account of its apparent elusiveness.
Eliot himself stated, 'Certainly I have borrowed lines from him, in the
attempt to reproduce, or rather to arouse in the reader's mind the
memory, of some Dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship
between the medieval inferno and modem life: 125 Statements such as
these have prompted commentators to divide Eliot's major poems into
the great sections that make up the Divine Comedy, The Waste Land
being Eliot's Inferno, Ash-Wednesday his Purgatorio, and Four Quartets
his Paradiso. l26 Although Eliot's (Euvre was not as fully articulated as
was Dante's, the possibility of viewing his own poetic enterprise as a
version of the Divine Comedy on a smaller scale probably occurred to
Eliot in 1929.u7 Eliot's indebtedness to Dante, therefore, manifests
itself in a variety of literary strategies, including imitation, parody,
citation, and allusion, but at the same time transcends the literary. In
his address to the Italian institute in 1950, Eliot declined 'to speak now
of any debt which one may owe to the thought of Dante, to his view
of life, or to the philosophy and theology which gives shape and
content to the Divine Comedy. That is another, though by no means
unrelated question: 128 It is also this central, though previously neglected,
question that I try to investigate in the following chapters. Various
aspects of Eliot's recourse to Dante's craft and thought may appear in
a new light: his recurring fascination with Ulysses in Inferno XXVI and
especially Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI, the exodus motif as it
informs The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Ash-Wednesday, the
metaphor of Dante's book of memory as it applies to Eliot's work, the
notion of order in its ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions fostered
by, among others, Charles Maurras's study of the medieval poet, and
finally, how Eliot's Dante ultimately differs radically from that of his
contemporaries. The evidence reveals that Eliot is throughout in awe
at the power of the master, and searches Dante's volume as Dante had
searched Virgil's: with 'grande amore' ('great love'; Inf. I. 82).
2
Death by Water and Dante's
Ulysses
In What Dante Means to Me', Eliot wrote that the Divine Comedy
serves as 'a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore,
to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which
people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them;
and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond the frontiers
of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to his
fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities
with which they are already acquainted'.1 Eliot fixes the image of the
modem poet as both a Dante and a Ulysses forever exploring
uncharted regions of mind and language; he jeopardises his homeward
journey and his capacity to recount his adventures only if his attempt
to 'transhumanize' is not firmly rooted in ordinary human experience,
in the already familiar. This claim for the poet is as bold as the one
Dante makes at the end of the Paradiso, when he refers to himself as a
new Jason returning to earth from the other world with a vision of
God he has just translated in his poem. In pairing Dante with Ulysses,
Eliot subtly reminds the reader that their odysseys, though opposed in
nature, are linked in the Comedy to indicate alternative fates. Eliot
dramatises the fear of going and not coming back in his own work
through the metaphors of the drowning man or shipwreck. In tracing
the graph of these recurring metaphors, I am not implying that the
Divine Comedy is the only major source (Shakespeare's The Tempest is
another), or that Eliot unfolds a pattern as predetermined as Dante's.
17
The connection with the Ulysses narrative in Inferno XXVI, on the other
hand, existed in Eliot's mind as a conscious analogy since 'Prufrock',
and as a definitive model by the time he wrote his own version of
Ulysses' last voyage in the original 'Death by Water'. The evidence
suggests, moreover, that Inferno XXVI forms a constant point of reference
up to The Dry Salvages.
(i) PRUFROCK'S LOVE SONG
Eliot's intriguing remarks, then, provide us with an unusual point of

entry into the world of Prufrock, who distinguishes himself from the
Dantesque poet, as Eliot describes him, precisely by his inarticulateness
and inertia. That is to say, Prufrock represents the anti type of both
Dante and Ulysses. Eliot expands this dedoublement of poetic figures
to subsume a third who resembles Prufrock more closely: Guido da
Montefeltro. Anticipating his use of the 'mythical' method in The
Waste Land, Eliot manipulates in effect a discontinuous, ironic parallel
between the protagonist of his poem and the three figures from the
Divine Comedy.
This significant relation to Dante is signalled at the very outset in
the poem's epigraph, from canto XXVII of the Inferno:
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tomasse al
mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse; rna per do che gia
mai di questo fondo non tomo vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, senza
tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
(If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the
world, this flame should shake no more, but since none ever did
return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of
infamy I answer thee.)2
Guido, the speaker, overcomes his initial reluctance to reveal his

identity when he takes Dante for one of the damned like himself,
consigned to hell for eternity. This mistaken first impression - Dante
is actually one of the living - leads to another: his story will never be
told on earth. Secure in this assumption, Guido attempts painfully and
laboriously to project his voice through the roaring flame in which he
is wrapped. The tortuous sentences he finally pronounces betray a
Death by Water and Dante's Ulysses 19
hidden pride for having once achieved earthly renown and an active
desire to vindicate his reputation: 'All wiles and covert ways I knew;
and used the art of them so well, that to the ends of the earth the
sound went forth' (ll. 76-8). Despite his resounding cunning, Guido is
twice deceived: first by Pope Boniface VIII, whose promise of salvation
lands him in hell instead, and now by Dante, who publishes his story
through the medium of poetry.
Prufrock shares both Guido's fear of being exposed and the need to
tell his story. The only person in whom he can confide 'senza tema
d'infamia', however, is himself. Eliot interiorises the encounter between
Guido and his interlocutor by having Prufrock engage in a 'dialogue
of the mind with itself'.3 We are thereby given a tour of a symbolic
landscape limned in the narrator's mind out of factual observation
tinctured with subjective feelings. The chief function of Dante the
pilgrim is to see and report;4 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is
also an observation (as the title of the volume in which the poem
appears makes clear), and Eliot, like Dante, maintains an ironic distance
between author and character by putting himself in the position of
observer and active protagonist who proposes to transform his 'observ-
ation into a state of mind'.s
Prufrock's hell, then, is not a place gradated by degrees of vice
according to a theological paradigm as in the Divine Comedy, but is
rather a state of mind which constitutes its own place. This mental hell
'can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced by the
projection of sensory images'6 such as the opening metaphor of the
evening sky as etherised patient, by which Eliot captures Prufrock's
torpidity or acedia, a metaphor possibly suggested by Dante's compar-
ison of the dead souls mired in the Inferno to the hospitalised sick in
the malaria-infested regions of Italy? Prufrock's suffering, based on
feelings of social and sexual inadequacy, turns out to be not. only
psychological in nature but also spiritual, as the cancelled epigraph to
the poem from Purgatorio XXVI shows. This was the cry, sovegna vos
('be mindful in due time of my pain') which resonates throughout
Eliot's poetry.8 Prufrock's cry, however, is not one which joyfully
anticipates the day of deliverance like Arnaut's and Eliot was right to
associate his hopeless plight with Guido instead.
Although no visible tongue of flame obstructs Prufrock's speech, he
experiences a split between words and their meaning (1t is impossible
to say just what I mean') that leaves him just as tongue-tied as Guido.
Eliot translates Guido's wiliness into Prufrock's linguistic vision of
'Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent'. To
walk through the streets of the modem citta dolente is to be reminded

of the treachery of a language that recoils upon itself, the full
implications of which surface only at the end of the poem.
One might see in Guido the prototype of the modem Hamletic
antihero lost through devious weakness rather than through hubris, 9
but Prufrock disclaims any such comparison to himself:
But though 1 have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though 1 have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
1 am no prophet - and here's no great matter;
1 have seen the moment of my greatness flicker
Nol 1 am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince, no doubt, an easy toot
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous,
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Having missed his opportunity for greatness, Prufrock resigns himself

to playing the role of fool on life's stage. This self-directed irony
recalls Dante's response to Virgil when asked to undertake the arduous
journey at the beginning of the Comedy:l0
'Ma io perche venirvt1 0 chi 'I concede?

10 non Enea, io non Paulo sono:
me degno a cia ne io ne alm 'I crede.
Per che, se del venire io m'abbandono,
temo che la venuta non sia folIe:
se' savio; intendi me' ch' i' non ragiono:
E quel e quei che disvuol cia che volle
e per novi pensier cangia proposta,
SI che dal cominciar tutto si tolle,
tal mi fec'io in quella oscura costa:
perche pensando consumai la impresa,
che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta.
('But I, why g07 or who permits it? I am not

Aeneas, am not Paul; neither myself nor others
deem me worthy of it.
Wherefore, if I resign myself to go, I fear my
going may prove foolish; thou art wise, and understandest
better than I speak.'
And as one who unwills what he willed, and
with new thoughts changes his purpose, so that
he wholly quits the thing commenced,
such I made myself on that dim coast: for with
thinking I wasted the enterprise, that had
been so quick in its commencement.)
(Inf II. 31-42)
Eliot links the motives of Dante the pilgrim and Guido both to identify
and to counterpoint Prufrock's predicament with theirs. Guido still
pines for a worldly fame which, ironically, can never be gratified in his
otherworldly destination. By contrast, Prufrock shies away from the
spotlight, preferring to remain behind the scenes. He in fact never
discloses his name, and we know it only because of the poem's title.
Significantly, Guido, too, never identifies himself by name, but by a
description of his temperament. Like Dante - who is named once only
and then not until Purgatorio xxx - Prufrock seeks anonymity, and he
declares his unworthiness to undertake a journey he fears will prove
foolish. There is doubtless a great difference between travelling through
the Inferno and making a visit to a room where women talk of
Michelangelo. For Prufrock, however, his journey has cosmic repercus-
sions, too, leading to some overwhelming question which he believes
will disturb the universe. l l Faced with such a prospect, he displays
Dante's infirmity of purpose (,As one who unwills what he willed'):
There will be time, there will be time,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions.
The similarity ends here however. Dante's procrastination is momen-

tary, whereas Prufrock's is chronic. Epic and biblical heroes will serve
Dante as models; Prufrock, who pales in comparison even to Hamletic
Guido, sees himself as a caricature of both. He is the modem unheroic
hero. Although Dante will eventually learn on earth 'how hard the
way up and down another man's stairs' (Par. XVII. 58-60) is, he still
climbs the stairs of purgatory and returns to Eden. For Prufrock, who
feels it is 'Time to turn back and descend the stair' away from the
drawing room, no such return is possible.
Despite l'esprit de l'escalier, Prufrock envisages another kind of return.
This time he casts himself as a figura l.azJlri 'come back from the dead,
/ Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'. In promising to bring
news from the world of the dead, Prufrock follows Dante, who is
frequently entreated by the damned to say or to do something for
them on his return to earth,12 and apparently contradicts Hamlet's
belief in 'The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller
returns' (m.i. 70-80). Although he fears being reported as one of the
damned to his fellow citizens, Prufrock now claims, ironically, that he
is the reporter. The mock-descent into hell represents a discontinuity
in his life that allows Prufrock, like Dante, an Archimedean point from
which to view his own experience as though it were concluded, and
he had in fact survived his death.
Prufrock's desired resurrection, whether actual or metaphorical, proves
to be another illusion, for he is out of touch w!th the agent who
performed such a miracle for Lazarus. His journey ends on a beach
when the transformation of the mermaids' song (which he hears in his
imagination) into human voices prompts him metaphorically to drown.
We can contrast this peripeteia with how Dante begins his journey,
'as he, who with panting breath has escaped from the deep sea to the
shore' ('E come quei, che con lena affannata / uscito fuor del pelago
alia riva'; Inf. I. 22-3). Dante refers to 'the pass that no one ever left
alive' ('passo che non lascio giammai persona viva'; In/. I. 27) as
'perilous' (,acqua perigliosa'). When he reaches the mountain of purga-
tory he emerges once again on a desert shore 'whose waters were
never navigated by a man capable of returning' (Purg. I. 132). And yet,
in spite of his testimony to the contrary, Dante is a drowning man
who somehow swims to shore.
By providing us in Prufrock's drOwning with an antitype of Dante's
experience, Eliot sets up in the mind of the reader what he later
described as 'a parallel, by means of contrast'.B This is a method
employed in the Divine Comedy, where the survival of Dante has its
counterpoint in the drowning of Ulysses. Dante begins his journey, in
fact, at the point where Ulysses ended his: in a shipwreck within sight
of the mountain of Purgatory.14
At the same time, Dante draws a parallel between Guido and
Ulysses, whose fates are both sealed in tongues of flame. In Inferno
XXVI Ulysses narrates how he met his tragic death when he exhorted
his retired sailors to embark foolishly on a reckless voyage; Guido
depicts his approaching old age and attempted conversion in terms of
that navigational figure:
Quando mi vidi giunto in quella parte

di mia etade, ove ciascun dovrebbe
calar Ie vele e raccoglier Ie sarte,
cia che pria mi piaceva allor m'increbbe,

e pentuto e confesso mi rendei;
ahi miser lasso! e giovato sarebbe.
(When I saw myself come to that period of my

age at which every one should lower sails and
gather in his ropes,
that which before had pleased me, grieved me

then; and with repentance and confession I
became a monk; ah woe alas! and it would
have availed me.)
(Inf. XXVII. 79-84)
His plunge into a 'new life' turns out to be another false manoeuvre
which ends in spiritual death. Like Ulysses, Guido ventures recklessly
into the unknown instead of retiring. Dante manages to elude disaster
because the perilous waters have been finally crossed by the angel's
bark 6lled with pilgrims singing a song of Exodus (Purg. II. 13-48).
The miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, a figure of genuine conversion,
suggests that it is indeed possible to return home from such an
exploration, provided that one can experience a baptism unto death,
and subsequent resurrection. Dante's journey, in other words, counter-
points Guido's false conversion and Ulysses' 'mad flight' ('folIe vollo';
In/. XXVI. 124).
Prufrock is Ulyssean to the extent that his longing for experience
eventually drowns him.IS His assertion 1 have known them all', with
its catalogue of trivialised objects - cups, marmalade, tea - is, like
Guido's 'io seppi tuUo', self-deceptive. I6 He has known only 'lonely
men in shirt-sleeves' like himself, and the 'evenings, mornings, after-
noons', that is, the tedium vitae, or the horror of ennui which Eliot
defined as the true form of acediaP Prufrock's quiescence makes him
an obvious foil to Ulysses, but it also paradoxically makes him his

counterpart. As James Truscott explains, 'Ulysses and Guido speak of
their past not only because they are removed from it temporally and
spatially, but also because it is eternally impossible for them to act
again' .18 Prufrock shares the condition of the damned - but in time
and space.
In his quest for knowledge Ulysses sails beyond the pillars of
Hercules to the end of the known world; Prufrock walks to the beach.
In resorting to bathos to epitomise Prufrock's mock-epic journey, Eliot
does not rule out the destiny that unites the two characters. Prufrock
seeks carnal knowledge primarily; all he has known up to now have
been merely erotic daydreams:
And I have known the arms already, known them all -

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Prufrock reifies persons into objects - eyes, arms, hair - of unfulfilled

desire, and wonders whether it would have been worthwhile 'To have
squeezed the universe into a ball'. This dream of sensual love, evoked
by the allusion to Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' and reinforced by
Prufrock's linguistic wandering ('Is it perfume from a dress / that makes
me so digress?'), recalls Dante's dream of the siren who boasts that her
charms have lured Ulysses away from his destination in mid-sea (Purg.
XIX. 19-23). Now in hell, Ulysses, Guido's companion in rhetorical
duplicity, remains ironically spellbound by his own song, the way he
was spellbound by the song of the sirens. 19 Enamoured of his own
voice, Ulysses becomes a Narcissus figure listening to his echo.
Something similar happens to Prufrock. He prefers to endure a brutish,
submarine existence (1 should have been a pair of ragged claws /
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas')20 rather than to resurface in
the real world of love where human voices beckon to him. Because
the mermaids will not sing to him as they did to Ulysses, Prufrock
remains captivated instead by the autoerotic force of his own 'love
song', and consequently drowns like Narcissus. That Prufrock reveals
his hopeless condition even as he tries to conceal it indicates that
language can also lead to metaphOrical shipwreck. In acknowledging
no guide other than the self, Prufrock catches himself in his own act
and becomes in the process another Ulysses, a false counsellor inciting
his soul to doom.
Prufrock tries to avert spiritual suicide by resorting to histrionics (1
have wept and fasted, wept and prayed'), which correspond to Guido's
false life of penance, and by projecting a vision of himself as a
decapitated John the Baptist with a head grown slightly bald. Although
the religious impulse displaces the sexual, it is no less violent for that.
His fantasy of sensual martyrdom links Prufrock to Mr Apollinax,
whose head grins like that of John the Baptist in Laforgue's 'Salome',
and whose empty laughter reverberates 'where worried bodies of
drowned men drift down in the green silence'.u Prufrock can save
himself from self-destructive irony only by passing through the
looking-glass into a world of love such as Dante's. As Eliot later
remarked of Laforgue, he needs 'a Vita Nuova to justify, dignify, and
integrate his sentiments towards the jeune fille in a system of the
universe'.22
Prufrock is only one of Eliot's characters who has dared too little,
or has left passions unexplored. Phlebas and Gerontion are others.
Each one, reflecting on past action or inaction, experiences a remorse
so bitter that it overwhelms him to the point of drOwning. Rather than
discarding these emotional inhibitions, which surface in childhood and
persist into old age, Eliot transforms them gradually, holding out the
hope of surviving death by water. Ulyssean Prufrock, for instance, has
no Beatrice, as Dante does, to steer him away from siren temptresses
and back on course towards a higher love (Purg. XXXI. 43-5). For Eliot
that guide will eventually emerge from the sea as Marina.
(ii) PHLEBAS REDMVUS?
Before invoking that guide, Eliot reconsiders the implications of death

by water. The figure of Phlebas the Phoenician sailor, who appears
twice in his poetry, fascinates him especially. In the first poem, 'Dans
Ie Restaurant', the death of Phlebas results from an early sexual
disappointment, which experience is juxtaposed with Dante's growing
love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. Before Phlebas surfaces next in
The Waste Land to share the fate of Dante's Ulysses, Eliot has
Gerontion repeat that archetypal reckless journey - in imagination
only. In contradistinction to the heroic drive of his Greek prototype,
Gerontion succumbs to a mental paralysis similar to Prufrock's. Although
death by water is conclusive both for him and for Phlebas in the first
instance, it marks, in the second, a transition to a possible new life.
'Dans Ie Restaurant' revolves around the lubricious memory of an
old waiter. The story he tells about his first sexual experience at seven
years old is analogous to Dante's first sight of Beatrice. In his remarks
on La Vita Nuova Eliot implied that he himself had had such an
experience:
the type of sexual experience which Dante describes as occurring

to him at the age of nine years is by no means impossible or
unique. My only doubt (in which I found myself confirmed by a
distinguished psychologist) is whether it could have taken place so
late in life as the age of nine years. The psychologist agreed with
me that it is more likely to occur at about five or six years of
age. . . . But I cannot find it incredible that what happened to
others should have happened to Dante with much greater intensity.2J
Although the age of their sexual awakening might be virtually the

same, what separates the waiter from Dante is his inability to sublimate
his sensuality into a means of salvation.
Dante recollects the stages of his love for Beatrice, from his initial
physical attraction to his admiration of her personal qualities, as a
series of transformations which ultimately lead to a 'new life' of grace.
As he gradually moves away from his own sexual frustration and self-
pity towards a higher love, 'all sins leave his memory'. This process is
repeated in Purgatorio when Dante cleanses his memory in the river
Lethe.
For the old waiter, however, no such transformation of the memory
occurs; he still feels remorse for the incident. The client, who has been
listening all along in disgust, now remarks that the waiter has his
vulture, too, and sarcastically admonishes him to pick his skull clean
with a fork, and to go take a bath. His command is enacted with grim
irony when (in an image that is transferred to The Waste Land) an
undersea current engulfs him.24
Phlebas fails to recuperate from his painful cleansing because he is
still morbidly immersed in the fluctus concupiscentiae, in the frustrated
desires of his 'vie anb~rieure'. In this respect he and Prufrock share a
double identity and a similar fate. Eliot agreed with Gide that the poet,
like Prometheus, must have his eagle,25 but he later developed the
metaphor to suggest sensual purification as well as sensual torment. In
Ash- Wednesday, for instance, three white leopards replace the vulture
in feeding on the hollow round of his skull. The poet there has his
eagle too, which awakens him from his buried life and transports him,
like Dante, towards a 'new life'. Phlebas meets his watery death, like
Prufrock, in a world of disillusion which is instead the ironic reversal

of the Vita Nuova.
Gerontion, like the French waiter, is an old man who, under the
spell of a dry rather than a rainy season, also reminisces about his
former life. Not having fought in history's great battles, he arrives at
a vacuous self-definition by a series of disclaimers against martial
prowess. Like Prufrock, he has seen his moments of greatness flicker.
A stationary Ulysses, he has no song of the sirens to tempt his ears,
no lotus to tempt his palate, no perfumes and sensual enticements of
Circe and Calypso to beset him on his imaginary journey homeward:
1 have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch'. Instead of
striving, Eliot's Ulysses lives 'In memory only, reconsidered passion'.
Gerontion's dry ruminations allow him ironically to peer into the
watery abyss, and his foresight to descend metaphorically into the
'blind world' of Dante's Inferno (IV. 13). His blindness is primarily
spiritual for, like the Pharisees, he 'would see a sign' but fails to fathom
the Word made flesh, the Light of the world whom he sees 'swaddled
in darkness'. Gerontion's own metaphorical darkness suggests a
mounting scepticism. He pursues the circular thoughts of his dry brain
just as Dante's non-committal trimmers pursue a wavering banner
endlessly in circles. The repetitive 'think now' alerts the reader to the
fact that Gerontion is coiled in self-reflection; like Prufrock, he is a self-
counsellor spellbound by his own rhetoric, and a victim of his private
optic. In a draft of The Waste Land Eliot uses an image that links
Gerontion's mental confusion with Prufrock's pointless swimming:
Like a blind man swimming deep below the surface

Knowing neither up nor down, swims down and down
In the calm deep water where no stir nor surf is

Swims down and down:
And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown. 26
The image recurs in The Rock:
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward

And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but not whence it comesP
Gazing into a bottomless self leads to a kind of hell. His inability to

achieve Dante's divine vision represents that failure in foresight and
hindsight which renders Gerontion one of the Inferno's 'backward

devils' who, with heads reversed on their shoulders and with tears
flowing down their rumps, walk forever backwards (xx. 22-4). The
grotesque metaphor recalls Prufrock's desire to be metamorphosed into
a crab, and also underlines the misdirection of Gerontion's itinerarium
mentis away from the Word. He is therefore stalked by his vulture
which, in this instance, takes the form of 'Christ the tiger'.
His sense of guilt and his acedia, however, fail to deter Gerontion
from taking a 'mad £light' of fancy which terminates when he is whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Hom,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy comer.
In endeavouring with the gull to sail through the extremes of the two
hemispheres (Belle Isle and Cape Hom), Gerontion repeats in his
imagination the trek of 'the centrifugal wanderer' Ulysses28 below the
equator and beyond the circuit of the two Bears, and his going down
in fractured atoms. 29 His quest for identity ends in total dissolution of
the self. Instead of touching the Happy Isles (which is the hopeful
destination of Tennyson's Ulysses),30 Gerontion is swept to Belle Isle
as another victim of the Gulf, ending as he begins: an old man unable
to survive the shipwreck of his soul.
In the original 'Death by Water' Eliot reintroduces the figure of a
Ulyssean mariner who has 'much seen and much endured':31
The sailor, attentive to the chart or to the sheets,

A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide
The competent, determined sailor in this vignette represents a mirror

image of those erratic voyagers, Prufrock and Gerontion. By journey's
end, however, this typical sailor turns out to be no different from his
ill-fated predecessors. With characteristic trompe-l'oeil, Eliot models his
narrative of a New England fishing expedition on Ulysses' last voyage
in Inferno XXVI.
The inevitable doom is signalled when the crew, after a day of
sailing, encounters a series of contretemps: a spar splits, the garboard-
strake leaks, two dories and a drysail are lost. A mate declares the ship
to be as incapable of sailing to windward as 'a dead man in an iron

coffin' attempting to 'row from here to Hell' with a crowbar. (The
declaration ironically foreshadows their eventual destination.) When
the sailor, undaunted, takes the helm and passes 'the farthest northern
islands' as in Gerontion, silence reigns. The unnamed narrator, who at
first disdains the sensual dreams of money, brothels and gin indulged
in by his mates, now himself has a vision of sirens singing to charm
his senses and lure him off course. The whole scene has an eerie air of
deja vu. His premonition is borne out when the crew glimpses 'A line,
a white line, a long white line / A wall, a barrier' (recalling the
purgatorial mount in Dante) dead ahead, and the ship suddenly sinks,
drowning all noise: 'And if Another knows, I know I know not, / Who
only know that there is no more noise now:32
This modem sailor finds himself literally in the same boat as his
Greek prototype, repeating in substance Ulysses' final words:
T re volte il fe' girar con tutte I' acque,

alia quarta levar la poppa in suso,
e la prora ire in giu com'altrui piacque,
infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso.
(Three times it made her whirl round with all

the waters; at the fourth, made the poop rise
up and prow go down, as pleased Another, till
the sea was closed over us.)
(Inf. XXVI. 139-42)
Like Gerontion, Eliot's sailor, a master of those who do not know, is

unable to invoke God, whom he refers to oracularly as 'Another'. A
transcendent Other might be omniscient, but as a finite being, the
sailor can only affirm with Socrates that he knows nothing except his
own ignorance - a valedictory humility which undercuts Ulysses'
presumptuous quest for knowledge and places Eliot's voyagers in a
new perspective.
At first the journey of life seems nothing more than a memento mori,
a reminder by the poet who invites the reader to contemplate the fate
of Phlebas:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the proSt and loss.
A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
o you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
When we launch our ship of death, to employ the image of D. H.

Lawrence, 'we sail/darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port'.
Since there is nowhere to go, we enter the void. For some, shipwreck
is definitive; for others, like Dante, it can be the prelude to a new life,
'as pleased Another' (Purg. I. 133).
Eliot marks this transition in his own work by making the figure of
the drowned sailor in Dante coalesce with that of the shipwrecked
Ferdinand in The Tempest who sits on a bank.
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck

And on the king my father's death before him.
(190-1)
In Shakespeare the supposed drowning of Ferdinand's father, Alonso,

initiates an interior transformation, a death and rebirth of the self:
Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
(I.iL 399-404)
Eliot associates this rite of purification with the ancient fertility rite of
taking the effigy of the drowned god out of water as a symbol of
resurrection. Whether Phlebas undergoes such a sea-change is left
hauntingly ambiguous:
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not?
(121-0)
In the excised 'Dirge' Eliot presents a grotesque parody of Ariel's

song, a gruesome picture of a drowned body scratched by lobsters
and eaten by crabs; death by water is horrifyingly decisive.33 In the
passage cited above from 'A Game of Chess', the living dead can at
best hold only a memory of regeneration which in turn is linked to
another of navigational skill exercised in calm waters:
The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
(418-22)
The image evokes a sense of a possible happiness which accentuates

the suffering of the present moment. This glimmer of hope can be
sustained by a personal askesis, a regaining of self-control and inner
peace by rerouting Ulysses' ship in the direction of beatitude.
(iii) OLD MEN OUGHT TO BE EXPLORERS
This reorientation, if only dimly hinted at in The Waste Land, occurs

definitively in East Coker v and in The Dry Salvages. At first Eliot
ironically dismisses the venerability which attends old age:
Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
To seek experience at the expense of wisdom constitutes Ulysses'

folly. Eliot undercuts such presumption once more in his concluding
statement:
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
Fortified by this conviction, the poet, in a surprising reversal, takes on

the role of a new Ulysses who exhorts old men to leave the familiar
land and ancestral home behind them, and explore the new world of
'the vast waters', the terra incognita of human experience:
Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation
The stirring exhortation of Tennyson's Ulysses 'to seek a newer world'

resounds here. In rousing the Gerontions of the world to be still and
yet venture on, Eliot alters a basic metaphor in Dante's meditation on
the right use of old age in the Convivio.
Dante explains that in the final age of human life, which he calls
'senio' ('senility'), the noble soul 'returns to God as to that haven
whence she set forth when she carne to enter on the sea of this life'.34
In elaborating this metaphor of life's voyage (which Guido da Monte-
feltro also uses), Dante offers a striking parallel to Ulysses' last voyage:
And here we must know, as Tully says in his book On Old Age, 'a
natural death is, as it were, a haven for us and resting-place after a
long voyage'. And so just as a good mariner when he draws near
to the harbour lets down his sails, and enters it gently with slight
headway on; so we ought to let down the sails of our worldly
pursuits, and turn to God with all our understanding and heart, so
that we may come to that haven with all composure and with all
peace. . . . 0 vile wretches who run into this port with sails full
set, and in the harbour where ye ought to repose, wreck and destroy
yourselves by the force of the wind at the spot to which ye have
so long been journeyingPS
In Inferno XXVII, of course, Dante exposes Guido's retirement from

military life into the Franciscan order as a fraud. By his own admission
he had failed, like Ulysses, to lower the sails and coil up the rope.
Eliot offers a parallactic view of how old men should conduct
themselves within sight of the port of death. He seconds the attitude

of Tennyson's Ulysses: 'How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To
rust unburnished, not to shine in use!' Old men cannot rest from travel,
and he therefore urges them to enter this port with sails full set. But
he paradoxically agrees with Dante that to facilitate this entry the sails
of wor)dly pursuits must be let down. Eliot is not underwriting a
return trip beyond the pillars of Hercules. Nor is he advocating the
shirking of familial and societal responsibilities. Rather, he counte-
nances, like Dante, an interior voyage to a realm which occupies no
space, for 'Here and there do not matter'. Or, to put it in the words
of St Augustine, 'The depths to which we sink, and from which we
are raised, are not places in space.'36 From this vantage point, old age
becomes the time for a new beginning rather than the end, a time for
a sea-change of the soul when the old man dies and the new man is
born, an intimation of the journey homeward to the heavenly city. In
short, Eliot converts Ulysses' 'mad flight' into a journey of faith,
Dante's spiritual odyssey.
The Dry Salvages expands this perspective. The course of human life
is imaged as a 'drifting boat with a slow leakage' which, while not
steering towards a fixed destination, nevertheless fares forward. Eliot
presents a vignette of a typical fishing expedition which provides a
nuanced contrast to the one undertaken in the original 'Death by
Water':
We have to think of them forever bailing,

Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.
In the first instance, the New England fishermen pursued a definite

goal in making a remarkably good catch of fish, and then in calculating
the profit and the loss. Here, Eliot insists, we must think of their
continual efforts, not the haul they bring in. The whole of humanity
embarks with the fishermen on a single, perilous voyage over 'the drift
of the sea and the drifting wreckage'. As in the Bhagavad-Gita, the
pilgrim is encouraged to rise above the endless flux and consider the
past and future 'with an equal mind' from a perspective beyond time:
o voyagers, 0 seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and the judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination
Not fare well,

But fare forward. voyagers.
Our real destination, whether we arrive at port or suffer shipwreck at

sea, consists in the act of faring forward rather than in reaping 'the
fruits of action'. The counsel applies to the poetic enterprise as well:
'For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.'
In order to avoid a reckless journey into the void, symbolised by
the menace of the dry salvages, the poet asks Our Lady of Good
Voyage, Mary, Star of the Sea, to prepare a safe way for him and for
all seafarers:
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,

Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of

Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning:
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen of heaven.
Also pray for those who were in ships, and

Ended their voyage on the sand. in the sea's lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's
Perpetual angelus.
Eliot adopts the paradoxical phrase, 'Figlia del tuo figlio' ('Daughter of
thy Son'), from St Bernard's prayer to Mary at the opening of Paradiso
XXXIII, where she is addressed as the fixed point ('termine fisso') to
which all things return. The paradox befits the logic of eternity and
points to the inconceivable miracle of the Word made flesh, 'The point
of intersection of the timeless / With time', 'the impossible union / Of
spheres of existence'. The journey over the sea of this life is punctuated
by a series of annunciations: the calamitous annunciation of danger,

the last annunciation or death, and the one Annunciation signalled by
the 'sea bell's / Perpetual angelus'. In Eliot's view Mary's role is to
ensure the soul's return to safe harbour on its journey towards the still
point. (See below pp. 104 ff. for an exposition of the concept of the
still poi,nt with reference to Dante.) For Eliot the Ulysses figure is now
transformed into a 'centripetal wanderer' like Dante. The aimless
drifting of Ulyssean Prufrock can now be seen in retrospect as a figure
for the Dantesque poet's voyage to the Incarnation.J7
(iv) MARINA: MEMORY AND THE ART OF SEA-CHANGE
Eliot retraces the various stages of this voyage in Marina. Like

Gerontion, the shipwrecked Pericles relives his sensual life in memory
only. Images of ambition, pride, greed, and lust return to his conscious-
ness, all signifying death or shipwreck of the soul.
These images recall those which assail the poet in Ash-Wednesday:
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
The poet renounces, in effect, the trajectory of Ulysses' 'winged £light'

('Dei remi facemmo ali'; Inf XXVI. 125) and, with the help of the silent
Lady, redirects his ship towards that haven of tranquility described in
Paradiso III: 'His will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that
it createth and that nature maketh:
In Shakespeare's play, Pericles is led towards this divine sea by the
miraculous presence of Marina:
0, come hither
Thou that begt'st him that did thee beget;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus,
And found at sea again.
(v.i. 196-9)
On account of her birth in tempest, her supposed death and burial,

and her spiritual resurrection - once more at sea - Marina is the fitting
instrument of her fathers entry into a new, transfigured life. In Eliot

Marina re-emerges as a healing figure who transfonns Pericles' eidetic
memory, now
become unsubstantial, reduced by wind,

A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
The fog which was an omen of people drowning in 'Morning at the

Window' ('brown waves of fog toss up ... / Twisted faces from the
bottom of the street') vanishes along with Prufrock's mermaids. In their
place Pericles hears the haunting woodthrush singing through the fog,
a harbinger of a higher love. Instead of Mr ApoUinax's empty laughter
in the chambers of the sea, Pericles hears Whispers and small laughter
between leaves and hurrying feet / Under sleep, where all the waters
meet', an intuition of a newer, deeper life. Memories which previously
drowned the French waiter are now subdued by a wind (no longer the
'unfamiliar gust' that sinks the New England sailors) and dissolved by
grace. Pericles has suffered a sea-change and joins the ranks of the old
men in East Coker who move towards another intensity in the familiar
leaking, battered ship that is as unseaworthy as the one in 'Death by
Water':
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This fonn, this face, this life,
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
Through the refrain, 1 made this', Eliot underlines the mystery of

generation which links love and language, the barely conscious,
transcendent motive power that engenders human and artistic offspring.
As a consequence of his spiritual rebirth, Pericles accepts what Geron-
tion rejects: to resign his speech for that unspoken, for the Word that
is life. It is, as in St John of the Cross, a word known in silence, in a
stillness of waiting. 38 In aspiring towards a Word that is before and

beyond human words, a Word that opens the frontiers between heaven
and earth, Pericles becomes a figure of the poet and his journey a
metaphor for artistic exploration. Inspired by Marina, his muse or
anima, Eliot recasts himself as an explorer beyond the frontiers of
ordinary: consciousness committed to finding words for the inarticulate,
to rebuilding the frail ship of his poetry 'as pleased Another'.
This new departure, at once spiritual and aesthetic, aligns Eliot with
Dante, who also employed navigational metaphors in the Divine
Comedy to describe his journey to undiscovered regions. The first
instance occurs at the opening of the Purgatorio:
Per correr miglior acqua alza Ie vele

omai la navicella del mio ingegno,
che lascia retro a se mar SI crudele.
E cantero di quel secondo regno,

dove l'umano spirito si purga
e di salire al ciel diventa degno.
Ma qui la morta poesl risurga,

o sante Muse
(To course o'er better waters now hoists sail the

little bark of my wit, leaving behind her a sea
so cruel.
And I will sing of that second realm, where the

human spirit is purged and becomes worthy to
ascend to Heaven.
But here let dead poesy rise up again, 0 holy Muses)

(Purg. I. 1-7)
In the second, Dante cautions the reader to remain in his bark of

poetry if he wishes to follow him over untested waters into paradise,
and not stray in the open sea like Ulysses (Par. II. 1-7). The reason for
this warning is hinted at earlier:
Trasumanar significar per verba

non si poria; pero l'esemplo basti
a cui esperienza grazia serba.
(To pass beyond humanity may not be told in

words, wherefore let the example satisfy him
for whom grace reserveth the experience.)
(Par. I. 70-2)
Dante, too, is prepared to resign his speech for that unspoken, to

launch his ship, as Eliot paradoxically puts it, towards 'the frontiers of
consciousness beyond which words fail. though meanings sHll exist',39
towards that realm where his own dead poetry will rise.
Eliot accordingly models his poesie des departs on Dante rather than
on Baudelaire. In Mon Coeur mis a nUl the French poet imagines
'vessels lying in harbour as saying: Quand partons-nous vers Ie
bonheur? ... a dim recognition of the direction of beatitude'.40
Although Eliot's 'new ship' is hopeful of reaching the same destination,
he strips the romantic nostalgia evinced in his symboliste predecessor
by retaining a keen awareness of the possibility of shipwreck in his
own poetry of flight: What seas what shores what granite islands
towards my timbers'.41 When Ulysses urges his men to seek esperienzJl
in Inferno XXVI, he tacitly departs for the Happy Isles,42 but believes he
can attain immortal bliss unaided. Dante, however, needs a series of
mediators, notably Virgil. who leads him through hell, 'per dar lui
esperienza piena' (,to give him full experience'; Inf. XXVIII. 48), and
Anally Beatrice, who imparadises the itinerary of his mind ('imparadisa
la mia mente'; Par. XXVIII. 3). The voyage of Eliot's poet-mariner is
similarly made possible by a 'grace' beyond the reach of art and
mediated by Marina.
Shipwrecks and drowned bodies, then, form a recurrent pattern
which haunts Eliot's imagination.43 In Ulysses Dante rendered one
aspect of his preconversion self;44 the same is true of Eliot's Agures:
Prufrock. Gerontion, Phlebas. They incur a deAmtive death by water,
but ultimately suffer a sea-change like Shakespeare's Alonso and
Pericles. The transmutation these Agures undergo becomes in Eliot's
mind an analogue for the poetic process itself. Dante and Shakespeare
(and Eliot by implication) were occupied with 'the struggle - which
alone constitutes life for a poet - to transmute his personal and private
agonies into something rich and strange'.45 These agonies range from
childhood memories of thwarted sexual desire to the horror of the
marriage bed, from a vision of spiritual emptiness to one of spiritual
awakening, emotions expressed by the objective correlatives of
drowning or shipwreck. An image, a phrase, a word might, for example,

lie dormant in the poet's mind for years, and then suddenly 're-appear
transformed in some verse-context charged with great imaginative
pressure'.46 Eliot cites both Coleridge and Shakespeare to illustrate his
meaning:
The imagery of that fragment [Kubla Khan], certainly, whatever its

origins in Coleridge's reading. sank to the depths of Coleridge's
feeling, was saturated, transformed there - 'those are pearls that
were his eyes' - and brought up into daylight again . . . the re-
creation of word and image which happens fitfully in the poetry of
such a poet as Coleridge happens almost incessantly with Shake-
speare. Again and again, in his use of a word, he will give a new
meaning or extract a latent one; again and again the right imagery,
saturated while it lay in the depths of Shakespeare's memory, will
rise like Anadyomene from the sea. In Shakespeare's poetry this
reborn image or word will have its rational use and justification.47
Images sink to the depths of the memory, reach a saturation point,

and rise like Anadyomene from the sea transformed in the poet's mind
into something rich and strange. The drowned man, then, is at once
the work of art and the poet himself. In the act of creation, he suffers
a sea-change, survives a death of the self, and is 'transhumanized'. He
has returned from the depths to tell us all.
3
The Poetics of the Desert
(i) THE DESERT IN THE OTY
The long voyages over water in Marina and in the Four Quartets
should not make us forget that the preceding series of poems, from
The Waste Land to Ash-Wednesday, are situated over equally long
stretches of the desert. Although Eliot explained he derived this
dominant symbol from Jessie Weston's book on the grail romances,
Dante's work provides another major context. Conrad Aiken reported
that in fact his friend always carried with him a pocket edition of the
Divine Comedy when he was writing The Waste Land. 1 Eliot alerts the
reader to sources from the Divine Comedy in the notes to The Waste
Land, but Dante's significance for him is more deep-seated than these
notes suggest. The Waste Land appeared in 1922, just before Eliot was
thirty-five, the middle of life's journey, when Dante began the Divine
Comedy. Having lost the straight way, Dante finds himself in a dark
wood which is in fact a 'great desert' ('gran diserto'). This personal
errancy reflects an escalating world crisis symbolised by the Emperors'
neglect of the Roman Empire, a garden now transformed into a desert
(Purg. VI. 91-105). In this setting, at once personal and universal, Dante
encounters Virgil, who will eventually guide him out of the desert and
back to the garden of Eden located at the top of a mountain in a
40
The Poetics of the Desert 41
'divine forest', which exodus, as Charles Singleton has shown, provides

the pivotal and explicit structure of the whole work. 2 For Eliot as for
Dante, the physical landscape acts as an index to the intellectual or
moral level of life,3 and when he surveys its features in the postwar
era, he predicts the decline and fall of the West as Spengler had done
before him and Solzhenitsyn has done more recently. This cultural and
spiritual waste land extends far beyond its western borders. Eliot
follows Dante's map of the inhabited world, with the mouths of the
Ganges and Gibraltar forming its eastern and western limits, and with
the British Empire of 1922, on which the sun never sets, acting as the
counterpart to the Roman Empire of 1300.4 The whole of civilisation,
in other words, is in Dante's dark wood. The extreme sense of personal
stress which Eliot felt at a comparable stage in his life is captured later
in East Coker, where he portrays himself as being 'not only in the
middle of the way / But all the way, in a dark wood'.s From this
vantage point The Waste Land dramatises an exodus manque on both
a personal and universal level. Dante comes to Eliot as Virgil comes
to Dante, proposing at first a way to articulate the crisis in the 'paese
guasto',6 and finally, by Ash-Wednesday, a way to overcome it.
Eliot depicted the Dantesque poet as an explorer beyond the
frontiers of ordinary consciousness. In the Clark Lectures Eliot explained
that a poet like Dante adds to human experience 'by extending the
frontiers of this world' and by taking us to 'a new and wider and
loftier world? In a commentary written in 1939, Eliot further elucidated
this now familiar image:
I think, that poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms,

must be constantly exploring 'the frontiers of the spirit'. But these
frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered
once and for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like
the jungle which, unless continually kept under control, is always
ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area. Our
effort is as much to retain, under very different conditions, what
was known to men writing at remote times and in alien languages . . .
emotions themselves are constantly being lost; they can never be
merely preserved, but must be always re-discovered; and it is as
much this endless battle to regain civilisation in the midst of the
continuous outer and inner change of history, as the struggle to
conquer the absolutely new, that is the occupation of the poet. 8
Eliot's endless battle in The Waste Land is precisely to 'regain civilisation

in the midst of the continuous outer and inner change of history', to

conquer 'The jungle crouched, humped in silence' (I. 398), to recover
emotions 'known to men writing at remote times and in alien
languages'. Exploring the frontiers of the spirit becomes a metaphor
for acquiring an 'historical sense' as he called it in 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent'. Eliot's peculiar achievement lies in registering this
historical sense and yet in having a spiritual waste land encroach and
prevail over the cultivated area. Why is this s07
Dante's crossing of the frontiers of the spirit, his desert experience,
must have struck Eliot as being analogous to the American classical
philosophy he was steeped in as a dissertation student at Harvard. He
could link his modem waste land, for instance, to the mental space or
'wilderness' into which the philosopher, according to Eliot's mentor
Josiah Royce, withdraws:
The way of reflection is long. The forest of our common ignorance

is dark and tangled. Happy indeed are those who are content to
live and to work only in regions where the practical labors of
civilization have cleared the land, and where the task of life is to
till the fertile fields and to walk in established ways. The philosopher,
in the world of thought, is by destiny forever a frontiersman. To
others he must seem the mere wanderer. He knows best himself
how far he wanders, and how often he seems to be discovering
only new barrenness in the lonely wilderness. 9
Royce's frontiersman philosopher finds himself, like Dante, in a dark

wood of doubt and ignorance, since the thicket of his mind marks no
clear path. He wanders away from the 'city' where certitude reigns in
the form of the community's beliefs and standards. The danger which
threatens such a mental itinerary is a retreat into solipsism. This radical
separation between the 'wilderness' and the 'city' is only apparent,
however, because 'the philosopher, as frontiersman, tames the wilder-
ness of solipsistic thought by shOwing that it is not a wilderness at
all, but the city seen from another angle'. The philosopher, in other
words, remains in contact with the community because he justifies faith
by reason. The same God rules over the wilderness and the city .10
For Eliot as for Royce, the city and the desert converge, but in The
Waste Land both are barren. Scepticism and Bradleyan solipsism mould
the contours of its mental landscape, the consequences of which I will
explore later. The various pilgrim figures, like Royce's frontiersman,
move away from the cities across a sandy desert where the rocky
terrain will not yield water miraculously as it did in the Sinai for the
Israelites, who at first complained to Yahweh, Why did you bring us
out of Egypt? . . . Was it so I should die of thirst, my children too,
and my cattle1'll In The Waste Land the voices crying in the wilderness
lodge a similar complaint:
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock.
The red rock evokes both the dry, fiery desert of Inferno XIV and the
blood of violent death, images which Eliot recalls in the chorus of
Murder in the Cathedral:
A rain of blood has blinded my eyes
I wander in a land of barren boughs:

if I break them, they bleed;
I wander in a land of dry stones:
if I touch them they bleed. 12
Eliot borrows details in this passage from Inferno XII and XIII, in particular
the stones leading to Dante's river of blood and the bleeding boughs
of the Suicides.13 The blood of Becket is purification, not defilement, a
symbol of redemption akin to the water for which the waste land
pines. In the poem it is, ironically, the self-inflicted wounds of Eliot's
modem suicide, St Narcissus, that stain the red rock.
Eliot's verses from The Waste Land are often compared to those in
Isaiah 32:2 which speak of a saviour who 'shall be . . . as rivers of
water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land'.
In the book of Isaiah images of aridity and fertility, deserts and
gardens, are in continuous opposition. Later the text identifies the
source of water and a new Exodus, more marvellous than the old:
The poor and needy ask for water, and there is none,
their tongue is parched with thirst.
I, Yahweh, will answer them,
1, the God of Israel, will not abandon them.
I will make rivers well up on barren heights,

and fountains in the midst of valleys;
turn the wilderness into a lake,

and dry ground into waterspring.
(Isaiah 41: 17-18)
But in The Waste Land there is no sight of the promised land of

Canaan across the barren mountains. It is instead an 'arid plain', a
'brown land' punctuated with voices out of empty cisterns and
exhausted wells:
Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain . . .
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
No Moses figure appears in the waste land to strike the rock in order
to make water flow from it (Exodus 17:6-7). The features of the
landscape conform to Ezekiel's valley of 'dry bones' located in Babylon,
which holds no promise of resurrection since 'He who was living is
now dead' and the 'one walking beside you' in Emmaus is unknown.
The Grail stone does not symbolise Christ, nor is he secretly present
as the rock that followed the Israelites with water (I Corinthians 10:4).
The desert conditions evoke the spiritual aridity known as the dark
night of the soul. The Waste Land resembles, in effect, Richard of St
Victor's desert place, where all is 'arid and impassable . . . 6lled with
all terrible things . . . all is confused, all is disturbed; where nothing
is in its proper place, nothing proceeds in proper order'.14 The God of
the wilderness, despite the voice of 'dry sterile' thunder in the distance,
appears to be absent or silent for the inhabitants of the waste land.
The same can be said of the God of the city.
Eliot's characters traverse the same interior landscape as the young
Augustine, who, by wandering away from the God of the wilderness,
made a 'barren waste' of himself. IS Or, as Eliot lucidly put it in The
Rock,
You neglect and belittle the desert

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the comer,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.16
The desert resides in the heart of the individual as well as in the heart
of the metropolis. St Narcissus, for example, is 'struck mad by the
knowledge of his own beauty' and makes a mad flight into the desert
in order to devote himself to God, but instead falls into idolatry or
self-worship.17 Uke his legendary namesake, Narcissus mistakes his
reflected image for his real or substantial self:
By the river
His eyes were aware of the pointed comers of his eyes
And his hands aware of the tips of his fingers.
Eliot once claimed that the symbolist poet Valery succumbed to the
'attraction and the mystery of Narcissus, the aloofness and frigidity of
that spiritual celibate' .18 As a figure of the poet and the dangers of
self-absorption to which he is exposed, Narcissus is here anything but
aloof and sexually frigid. He treads on 'convulsive thighs and knees',
apparently a mock imitation of Dante's walking over the bodies of
pleasure-seekers in Inferno VI. He dances on 'hot sand', the place of
punishment for those perpetrating violence against God, nature or art
in Inferno XIV. 19 A victim of self-love, he is destroyed by successive
waves of physical passion: 'because his flesh was in love with burning
arrows', the pool of blood satisfies him. A self-made martyr, the
'sanctity' of Narcissus consists in confusing self-denial with self-
titillation, charity with lust.
His cult of narcissism is symptomatic of the disordered loves which
infect the desert of the heart. Eliot implicates the reader here as he
does elsewhere in the poem by allowing him a voyeuristic glimpse of
man's sexual fall in the garden of Eden through the window displaying
'The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced'. In
'Sweeney Among the Nightingales' this 'sylvan scene' itself changes
into a 'bloody wood' where the ravished Philomel sings of animal lust,
a gruesome variation on the dark wood. Sweeney's unbridled jungle
antics (performed with a 'cavernous waste shore' as backdrop in
'Sweeney Erect') undermine any civilisation built on love. Human love,
as Eliot remarked in 1929 with reference to Dante, 'is only explained
and made reasonable by the higher love, or else is simply the coupling
of animals'. 20
Sexual relations in The Waste Land are characterised by what Eliot
himself described ironically as 'the life-giving cheery automatism of the
modem world'.21 This modem 'cheeriness' is evident in the small talk
about abortion between two cockney women in a London pub, in the
affair between the typist who 'smooths her hair with automatic hand'
and the young man carbuncular, as well as in the following scenario:
'Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe:
'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a new start.
I made no comment. What should I resent?'
The whole person lies beyond the visual range of these couples. By
dehumanising love into anatomical details of knees, feet, and heart,
they live in a chilling modem inferno whose guiding principle reads,
'If it is terrible alone, it is sordid with one more'.22 In giving us a
contemporary version of Dante's La Pia, murdered by her husband in
a desert place, Eliot implies that mechanical sexuality, whether ancient
or modem, is no less brutal or sterile for that.
That erotic union fails to mend broken relationships forms the core
of the myth of the fall, evoked by Plato's concept in The Symposium

of an androgynous spherical man who, once fractured, continually
strives to be reunited with the other half. In The Waste Land this kind
of erotic experience is remembered as an ecstatic moment in the
hyacinth garden, a memory of something incomplete, unfinished,
unfulfilled. Eliot alludes to the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca,2J
who tell Dante, 'There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time
in wretchedness' (Inf. v. 121-3). As Eliot remarks of this scene, 'To
have lost all recollected delight would have been, for Francesca, either
loss of humanity or relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the
present thrill at the remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca
is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a
part of damnation to experience desire that we can no longer gratify'.24
Dante depicts the ordering of love by having the individual removed
'from the sea of perverted and placed . . . on the shore of right love'
(Par. XXVI, 62-3), another metaphor of exodus. Conversely, Eliot's
lovers never reach this shore and incur death by water. The grim irony
for them, as for Tristan and Isolde, is that the sea of their love, as well
as the land, is barren and empty.
Personal and social relationships in The Waste Land are marked by
the modern disease of acedia, which Irving Babbitt, another of Eliot's
mentors, defined as 'the sense of loneliness, forlornness, and solitude
that crushes the will to strive. Acedia is the state of being of an
individual who has become separated from involvement with the
common life and who either cannot or will not find a way back to
such involvement, though the separation is acutely painful'.2S Dante
had figured the punishment of acedia or sloth, a word which reverber-
ates in the Divine Comedy, by shOwing those Israelites who chose to
remain in the desert and lost their promised land: 'The people for
whom the sea opened, were dead ere Jordan saw its heirs' (Inf. I.
22-9).
The wastelanders display the symptoms of acedia from the opening
of the poem when they decry the coming of April, harbinger of
seasonal and spiritual rebirth, as a cruel disturbance of their emotional
hibernation or buried life. Paralysis of the will is symbolically evinced
in the 'crowds of people, walking round in a ring' (56):
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, shorl and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
(6<r-5)
Eliot's borrowing from Dante goes beyond the mere translation of the
verse from Inferno III, 'ch'io non avrei creduto / che morle tanta
n'avesse disfatta' (55-7). The crowds who go round in circles are kin
to the neutrals who 'have no hope of death', and 'whose blind life is
so mean, that they are envious of every other lot' (III. 46-8). Eliot
superimposes on Baudelaire's 'Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves'
the innennost frozen circle of hell, whose regent initially suggests to
Dante's eyes, tricked by the lurid light, a thick fog breathing or
windmill turning (Inf. XXXIV. 4-6). Some shades lie on their backs, some
stand erect, others on their heads, while one looks like a bow, his face
bent to his feet (13-15), an image captured in Eliot's 'each man fixed
his eyes before his feet'. In the manuscript version of The Waste Land
the poet also observes a man creeping 'head downward down a wall',
and eventually lying flat on his back thinking himself dead, and
imploring another, like Guido da Montefeltro, 'Do not report me to
the established world'.26 The irony works in a twofold manner: his
fellow citizens cannot know of his existence because they are locked
in the circle of their own experience; on the other hand, as Dante
remarks of the nonentities, 'Report of them the world pennits not to
exist' (Inf. III. 49). Eliot renders Prufrock's particular malaise, the
tendency to conceal oneself in a living death, a universal condition. In
this comfortless limbo 'one can neither stand nor lie nor sit' (340).
Lying in suspended animation like the Sibyl of Cumae, these modem-
day neutrals share her frustrated desire for death.
The urban landscape in this respect resembles the vast City of Dis
described in Inferno IX, an arid plain of open sepulchres. The waste
land, instead of being the land of the living referred to in Scripture,27
is a 'dead land'. The opening of the poem evokes the sprouting of a
corpse 28 which, like the one planted in Stetson's garden, resists being
dug up again. The spectral encounters Eliot dramatises recall those
adapted from Dante by Conrad in Hearl of Darkness. Marlow compares
the 'unreal' world of the African jungle, for instance, to 'the gloomy
circle of some Inferno' inhabited by what he calls phantom 'pilgrims'.
Kurtz also appears phantom-like 'as from a winding sheet', nothing
more than a disembodied voice in a 'disinterred body'. Withered to
the bone, Kurtz dwells in a 'sepulchral city'.29 For Eliot London is
another unreal, sepulchral city 'where the dead men lost their bones',
scattered like those in the valley of Ezekiel. Eviscerated Kurtz-like

figures, referred to by Eliot as 'phantasmal gnomes',30 populate the
modem city, reliving the horror of their lives at the moment of their
living death. In 'Elegy', for instance, the poet is haunted by a nightmare
of an injured bride who tears her cerements, flings open the sepulchral
gates, and petrifies her bridegroom.
The overwhelming question of what constitutes the 'real' person
haunts The Waste Land. Eliot sounds this central concern by referring
to the 'affecting' encounter between Statius and Virgil in the epigraph
which stands at the head of his own poetry: 'Now you can understand
the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our
vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing' (Purg. XXI. 133-6).
The reference is pertinent because Dante was the first poet since
antiquity to believe in the substantial unity of body and soul.31 The
people who appear in the Divine Comedy, however, are dead; their
souls remain separate from their bodies until the Last Judgement when
they will be reunited forever according to the Christian scheme Dante
employs. The disembodied state of the dead poses a dilemma for
Dante in terms of character representation. To solve it he follows St
Thomas Aquinas in presenting the soul separated in death from the
body as preserving its vital and sensitive faculties virtually intact. He
next reaches back to the mythical tradition of an underworld peopled
by shades and endows his characters with what Erich Auerbach calls
'shadow bodies'. These shadow bodies in tum enable his characters to
stand before the reader in sensuous concreteness, and manifest their
state by their physical presence.32
Eliot refutes the ontology of shadows in a peculiar manner by
transferring Dante's shadow bodies from the metaphysical to the
physical world. Even so, reality for Eliot is paradoxically not graspable,
and he cannot yet insist, like Dante, on a fusion of the tangible and
the spiritual as an object of poetry and belief. In place of the substantial
unity of the soul, Eliot substitutes Bradley's theory of the finite centre
or unit into which experiences group themselves. Common experiences
cannot be shared by all finite centres because, as Eliot notes in The
Waste Land, quoting Bradley, 'My external sensations are no less
private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case
my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside;
and, with its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others
which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears
in the soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that
soul:33 If all states of consciousness are intrinsically connected with
their objects, then the metaphysical cannot exist.34 If 'Nothing is real,

except experience present in finite centres',35 then, as Marlow says in
Hearl of Darkness, 'we live, as we dream - alone', and the external
world cannot be solid. From this 'point of view', it becomes easy for
Narcissus to mistake his image for his substantial self.36
It also becomes easy for Gerontion, whom Eliot considered a
precursor of the wastelander, to function as a disembodied conscious-
ness, a soul separated in death from a body that has lost its vital and
sensitive faculties. In the epigraph to an early draft of the poem,37
Eliot aligned Gerontion with Fra Alberigo, who is at a loss to explain
to Dante how his body remains on earth at the same time his soul
suffers in hell:
'Come'l mio corpo stea

nel mondo su, nulla scienza porto'.
('How my body stands in the world above,

I have no knowledge')
(Inf. XXXIII. 122-3)
Eliot translates this body/soul disjunction as a condition of the modem

inferno, making Gerontion in the process a descendant not only of
Plato's fractured man, but also of Descartes.
The Waste Land reflects a post-Cartesian world whose Gerontions
doubt the reality of their own existence. The overwhelming question,
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'

(113-14, 126)
like Gerontion's 'Think now', constitutes a waste land version of

Descartes' famous proposition: 'Je doute, donc je suis, ou bien ce qui
est la meme chose: je pense, donc je suis'.38 The full implications of
Gerontion's circular reasoning and Royce's retreat into a mental
wilderness take shape here. In the Clark Lectures Eliot articulated the
position of Descartes
when he clearly stated that what we know is not the world of

objects, but our own ideas of these objects. The revolution was
The Poetics of the Desert Sl
immense. Instead of ideas as meanings, as references to an outside

world, you have suddenly a new world coming into existence,
inside your own mind and therefore by the usual implication inside
your own head. Mankind suddenly retires inside its several skulls.39
Descartes posits no clear separation between the external world and a

subjedive perception of that world; the perceiving mind, in fad, ads
as the sole arbiter of reality. Mankind's several skulls, then, serves as
a haunting image for what Eliot in the lectures calls 'the disintegration
of the intelled in modem Europe'. In The Waste Land this disintegration
afflids the inhabitants in the fonn of a 'mental blight',40 or what
Gerontion designates as 'Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season'.
'Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think' (336): in Cartesian tenns
this means death.
Thoughts which revolve continually around the self or Anite centre
produce peculiar linguistic side-effeds:41
So through the evening, through the violet air

One tortured meditation dragged me on
Concatenated words &om which the sense seemed gone
The one essential word that &ees

The inspiration that delivers and expresses
This wrinkled road which twists and winds and guesses:
Oh, through the violet sky, through the evening air
A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone
Gathered strange images through which I walked alone. 42
The 'wrinkled road which twists and winds and guesses' ads as an
objective correlative for the speaker's sinuous sentences.43 The speaker
seeks the 'one essential word' which will mark a clear path in the dark
and tangled wood of his 'tortured meditation', and restore his meaning-
less 'concatenated words' into a proper 'chain of reasoning'. His
linguistic meandering is caused by what Eliot later calls a strange
catalepsy, a disease he shares with Prufrock, whose thoughts circle
back towards the overwhelming question, only to trail off once more
as he repeatedly wonders how he should begin.
This vicious circularity defines the nature of existence in the desert
and the city. In an early draft of The Waste Land, for example, Eliot
rails in propria persona against London as Dante rails against Florence
in Purgatorio VI:
London, the swarming life you kill and breed,

Huddled between the concrete and the sky
Knowing neither how to think, nor how to feel
London, your people is bound upon the wheel!

Phantasmal gnomes, burrOwing in brick and stone and steel
Record the motion of these pavement toYS.44
Londoners are subject to the revolving wheel of Fortune just as

Florentines are. 4S The city as concrete jungle acts as a counterpart to
Harry's vision of an 'over-crowded desert, jostled by ghosts' in The
Family Reunion:
The sudden solitude in a crowded desert

In a thick smoke, many creatures moving
Without direction, for no direction
Leads anywhere but round and round in that vapour -
Without purpose, and without principle of conduct
In flickering intervals of light and darkness. 46
In Burnt Norton III, Eliot squeezes the desert into the London under-
ground where directionless 'men and bits of paper' are 'whirled by the
cold wind'. In The Waste Land these infernal 'shrieking forms in a
circular desert' are kin to the crowds walking round in a ring who
hopelessly entangle themselves in the circularity and subjectivity of
their fallen existence. They think, feel, and will in a Bradleyan finite
circle closed on the outside which they mistake for the infinite reality
imaged by Dante as 'a sphere of which the centre is everywhere and
the circumference nowhere'.47
Eliot contrasts this circular desert city with the city of God
adumbrated in Plato's Republic: 'Not here, 0 Ademantus, but in another
world'.48 Dante similarly depicts the Florence of old in terms of the
circular structure of heavenly Jerusalem whose etymological meaning
is visio pads, and links contemporary Florence with the earthly Babylon,
or confusio, inverted counterpoint of the ordered city.49 The wastelan-
ders also glimpse the falling towers 'upside down in air' of the unreal
city over the mountains. Although they desire peace of mind or
shantih, they fail to make the journey or exodus from the city of this
world to the city of 'another world'. Since each man fixes his eyes
before his feet, he is trapped in a perceptual prison of his own making,

unable to break the circumference of his closed and self-sufficient
universe and glimpse the towers of the 'real city' ('vera cittade'; Purg.
XVI. 96).
(ii) VOICES CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS
The abortive exodus from the unreal to the real city suggests that the
waste land can be located to the east of Eden in Babel/Babylon.so Eliot
updates an ancient tradition which linked the fragmentation of human
speech with an increasing intellectual fragmentation in the fallen world
(d. Par. XXVI. 109-38). This symbolic interaction of city and language
as represented by the story of Babel constitutes a persistent motif in
Eliot's imagination just as it is in Dante's. Discordant voices assail
Dante at the very moment he enters Hell:
Strange tongues, horrible outcries, words

of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and
hoarse, and sounds of hands amongst them,
made a tumult, which turns itself unceasing
in that air forever dyed.
(Inf. III. 25-9)
Eliot alludes to the tortured wailings of this and the following canto
(IV. 25-7) in the verse, 'Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled'.
While these intermittent sighs are not as piercing as the shrieks heard
in the Inferno, other sounds in The Waste Land are. The rattle of bones,
for instance, adds to the general 'clatter' and 'chatter'. Although
Hieronymo is literally speechless after having bitten off his tongue,
Philomel's enforced muteness paradoxically 'Filled all the desert with
inviolable voice'. The urban dwellers, in fact, veer between cacophony
and silence:
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
(38-42)
S4 T.S. Eliot and Dante
The protagonist's eyes fail as he gazes into the heart of light, or

heavenly city, just as Dante's eyes fail when he encounters Beatrice in
the earthly paradise, or when he gazes at the beatific vision. 51 In such
moments speechlessness is a reminder that words are incomplete or
limited because they cannot hold the object of desire. At other
moments in The Waste Land a confusion of tongues prevails. Eliot's
characters are reduced to scattered voices speaking a 'Babylonish
dialect' ranging from English cockney to demotic French, from Provenf;al
to Sanskrit.52 To speak or to be silent in this world is ultimately to be
exiled to a foreign time and place, to be estranged from a true
community of people and words.
Eliot's awareness of scriptural texts, especially the books of Ezekiel
and Isaiah, heightens this sense of linguistic alienation. Eliot mingles
these prophetic voices with the others, subduing, though not nullifying,
their full impact. In 'The Burial of the Dead', for instance, he presents
a compressed and altered version of two passages from Ezekiel (2: 1;
6:6):
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images.
In the scriptural passages, Yahweh tells Ezekiel he must preach the

coming of the Messiah of a rebellious and faithless people, and then
proclaim the divine judgement on Israel for worshipping idols:
'Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. . . .
Say . . . "Wherever you dwell, the cities shall be laid waste and
the high places shall be desolate that your altars may be laid
waste and made desolate and your images be broken." ,
Eliot indicates subtly, then, one reason why the cities in his poem are
reduced to rubble. But in modifying the divine injunction to 'Son of
man / You cannot say, or guess', he throws into doubt the role of the
prophet of the desert. In the modem waste land, Ezekiel is not God's
mouth (d. Exodus 4:16), only another fragmented voice.
Isaiah's 'what shall I cryf (40:36-8) - used repeatedly and ironically
by Eliot in 'Difficulties of a Statesman' - can serve, by analogy, as an
equally effective punctuation for the prophetic voices in The Waste
Land. These voices also cry in the wilderness, but they cannot, as in
The Poetics of the Desert ss
Isaiah (or Mark 1:3), prepare a straight highway for their God. The
city dwellers know only the circular or winding road that leads to the
finite centre; like Dante, they have lost the straight way. No external
guide appears or need appear to redirect them, since each pilgrim is
his own Virgil. No exodus from the waste land occurs because the
prophetic voices have made the scriptures mute. By failing in their
office of interpreting the divine Word, they have rendered it, too,
barren and speechless. (The word within a word, unable to speak a
word', as Gerontion says, pondering the veritable paradox of the
Incarnation.) Even the final words of salvation are uttered enigmatically
as a fragmented syllable, 'Da' in Sanskrit, another foreign language. 53
The voice of thunder, effectively the counterpart to the heavenly voice
in Ezekiel and in Isaiah, sounds like another Babylonish dialect to those
locked in their own circle of words or prison-house of language, and
consequently goes unheeded. In this sense no linguistic exodus from
the waste land takes place as When Israel went out of Egypt, the
house of Jacob from a people of strange language'.54
One other signiAcant voice is heard in the poem - that of the poet
lamenting his mental breakdown while completing The Waste Land
near Lake Geneva (Leman). Eliot casts himself as a Jewish exile in
captivity awaiting the exodus from his own Babylon: 'By the waters
of Leman I sat down and wept' (182), unable to sing the Lord's song
in a strange land. Images of his literary captivity and suffering abound
in the Anal section of the poem. He imagines himself at Arst immured
in Ugolino's Hunger Tower, thinking of the key that will liberate him
from the finite centre of his own experience.55 Ugolino, unlike Francesca,
found his greatest grief in recalling the horror, rather than the
happiness, of his past life {XXXIII. 4-6).56 In the original manuscript of
The Waste Land, Eliot linked Ugolino's experience with the cry of
Arnaut Daniel purging his lust in the reAning Are, 'Consiros mei la
pasada dolor' (1n thought I see my past madness').57 These alien words
point the way out of the inferno of mad love to a purgatorio which is
only realised in Ash-Wednesday. These words in turn blended with the
cry of Kurtz, 'The horror! the horror!', which served as the original
epigraph to the poem. Kurtz, the 'eloquent phantom', spoke these
equivocal words of 'unspeakable truth' after being struck mad by the
horror of self-knowledge in the wilderness that had found him out. To
Eliot these words also suggest the madness of the literary enterprise.
Accordingly, he next represents himself as residing in the ruined tower
of a mad poet who once called his oeuvre a 'Tower of Babel in two
hundred volumes'.58 The Waste Land ends, in fact, with an announce-
ment from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy about the archetypal author of

'fruitless poetry' written in 'unknown languages': 'Hieronymo's mad
againe'. The madness lies in executing revenge on his enemies through
a confusion of tongues; Hieronymo, moreover, inteprets his action as
an image of the fall of Babylon. The Waste Land begins and ends with
the reminder that the madness of self-love and the wilderness of the
isolated individual consciousness are closely allied, the result of a failed
passage, 'translation' or exodus.
In light of this acute failure in linguistic epistemology, Eliot employs
the 'mythical method' in an effort to touch a shared cultural memory
and establish a basis for dialogue. As he put it in his review of Joyce's
Ulysses, 1t is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history.'s9 As an ordering principle,
the mythical method serves the same function for the modem artist
that allegory served for Dante: 'Allegory itself may be only a mode
of expression of a mind passionately eager to find order and signifi-
cance in the world - though it may find order or set order in ways
which we have come to neglect.'60 Eliot has Dante (and Joyce) share
his own preoccupation with disorder. In 1929 he remarked how
convincingly in the Divine Comedy, 'Dante has made to fit in real men,
his contemporaries, friends, and enemies, recent historical personages,
legendary and Biblical figures, and figures of ancient fiction . . . [all]
are transformed in the whole; for the real and the unreal are all
representative of types of sin, suffering, fault, and merit, and all become
of the same reality and contemporary.'61 Dante annihilates the temporal
and spatial relationships which separate the characters of his poem as
they lived in the flux of history, and manoeuvres them by blending
the real and the unreal into a contemporaneous existence. Eliot
commends Dante for displaying a continuous historical sense 'which is
a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and
the temporal together'.62
In The Waste Land Eliot attempts something comparable to Dante's
technique. In Dante's depiction of the hereafter, history has come to
an end, replaced by memory. The souls are locked in a timeless world
which is the fruit of their time on earth, and when speaking of
themselves, they are compelled, by virtue of God's judgement, to see
both in one. Their memory, as a result, necessarily focuses on those
decisive moments that have sealed their ultimate fate. The Divine
Comedy, then, consists of a long series of self-portraits arrived at by
self-recollection which strikes at the essence of character.63 Dante
withholds all background infonnation concerning Pia de' Tolomei, for

instance, in order to highlight the hour of her death:
'ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;

Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che innanellata, pria
disposando, m'avea con la sua gemma:
('Remember me, who am la Pia;

Siena made me, Maremma unmade me:
'tis known to him who, first plighting troth,
had wedded me with his gem:)
(Purg. v. 133--6)
Here, in Eliot's view, is one of 'a succession of phantasmagoric but

clear images which are coherent" in that each reinforces the last; of
glimpses of individuals made memorable by a perfect phrase'.64 In The
Waste Land phantasmagoric images also succeed one another. Through
an act of memory, Eliot Axes the final destiny of flawed individuals
lost in a world they cannot understand. This formless world, as distinct
from Dante's ordered hereafter, is located in the here and now.
Dante, however, could tap the riches of unified culture in medieval
Europe. This Eden, like the other, endures a fall translated in The Waste
Land as a personal and cultural confusion.65 The modem poet's
prophetic role as harbinger of a new cultural mosaic, as a result, is
seriously undennined. The twentieth-century waste land took root in
Donne's late-sixteenth-century world which, according to Eliot, was
'filled with broken fragments of systems'.66 In the seventeenth century
a concomitant crisis in language occurred67 which diminished the
power of poetry in subsequent centuries.68 Bradley's idealist philosophy
had posited an Absolute which would rebind these random and
apparently incompatible systems into a whole. But Eliot complained,
'Bradley's universe, actual only in finite centres, is only by an act of
faith unified'; that is, scepticism reigns because the finite centre cannot
hold. As a result, another fall takes place - that of the West. To
prevent such a collapse in linguistic tenns, Eliot, like the ailing fisher
king, seeks to set the images of his waste land in order. His structural
strategy resembles that of a writer he admired greatly: '1 will here
write down my thoughts without order, and not perhaps in uninten-
tional confusion; that is true order, which will always indicate my
object by its very disorder'. In his Pensees, Pascal defined his paradoxical
motivation as 'scepticism'.69 Because he inherits the detritus of the

breakdown of the medieval synthesis, the modem poet can no longer
assume, like Dante, a stable system of values. As a diracine, he can
only proclaim, 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.
The implication seems to be that these fragments do not cohere
either for the poet or for the reader. Dante's descent into the Inferno
is, as John Freccero points out, 'a journey of interpretation, an itinerary
of the mind seeking understanding. In a sense, then, it parallels our
own reading: the trajectory of the pilgrim is the intentionality of the
text.'70 Eliot's descent into the waste land, on the other hand, is a
hermeneutical journey of a different kind. Like the pilgrim's quest, it
ends enigmatically - in a dark and tangled wood where Dante's
journey begins. Similarly, the reader, even if an hypocrite lecteur who
expects to find an Ariadne's thread out of the narrative labyrinth, can
merge his voice with that of the speaker at Margate Sands, 'I can
connect / Nothing with nothing'. Eliot, like Dante, dramatises the
reader's interpretative impasse so that his attempt to distinguish the
various speakers among the dissonant voices can itself become sterile,
a Babel-like confusion. Eliot's mythical method, moreover, constantly
breaks up linear reading habits. The poetic images reRect the external
world they point to; the traditional mythos has exhausted itself j,:!st as
the landscape has. Understood in this sense, the reader is an exile who
finds himself on foreign soil because the text is a figure of the desert.
In 1923 an early reader distinguished between the world of The
Waste Land and that of the Divine Comedy: 1t does not present the
social order in a series of concentric circles, as in Dante, with the
individual passing from one to the other in mathematical succes-
sion . . . It rather presents his mind, or his mood, as the centre around
which the world gyrates wildly, and with which it makes few contacts,
and those chieRy enigmatic.'71 Although The Waste Land is much more
than this, the observation recalls Eliot's own statement about his poem:
'Tome it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant
grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.'n In
accusing himself of a modem cynicism, Eliot perhaps recognised in the
poet of The Waste Land the same trait he attributed to Donne in the
Clark Lectures:
There is a great deal of the modem 'recherche de l'absolu', the

disappointed romanticism, the vexation or resignation at finding the
world other than one wanted it to be. The literature of disillusion-
ment is the literature of immaturity. It is in this way that I have
The Poetics of the Desert S9
ventured to affirm that Dante is more a man of the world than is

Donne. He knew what he could get and he took it, without
criticising the condition of its teethP
Despite this drawback, Eliot still counted Donne as 'a true poet,
perhaps even a very great poet, of chaos'.74 The same can be said of
Eliot at this stage of his development. His remarkable achievement in
The Waste Land consists in registering an equally 'exact statement of
intellectual disorder'7s despite what he considered the mental chaos of
his age. To trace Eliot's movement away from the literature of
disillusionment, then, is to trace the process of his growing up to
Dante. 76
(iii) THE CACTUS LAND
In The Waste Land, as in the Inferno, Eliot presented us with a

'continuous phantasmagoria'.77 He next transformed the phantasmal
gnomes into hollow men dwelling in a 'cactus land'. Here, instead of
shrieks of horror piercing the 'starless air' (Inf. III. 22), we overhear
dried voices whispering together quiet and meaningless words 'As
wind in dry grass'. This semantic diSintegration, another Babel-effect,
announces a spiritual aridity further exposed by body language: 'Shape
without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without
motion'. Their features recall the emaciated Kurtz, a 'greedy phantom'
who is hollow to the core, and Dante's repentant gluttonous: 'Dark
and hollow-eyed was each one, pallid of face, and so wasted away
that the skin took form from the bones' (Purg. XXIII. 22-4). These
resemblances suggest that the hollow men are located metaphorically
in Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, awaiting a resurrection that never
occurs.
Counterparts to Dante's trimmers, 'who lived without blame, and
without praise' (Inf. III. 36), the inert hollow men, stuffed with straw
like the Guy Fawkes effigies, give a new guise to Prufrock's irresolution.
They form, in effect, a community of etherised, inarticulate Prufrocks
suspended in etemallimbo, united only in voicing their misery. Their
suffering, like 'the anaesthesia of Yirgil', is hopelessness, as Eliot says.78
By contrast, 'in Dante's Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly
are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is
capable'.79 The pain of the 'living' hollow men, therefore, is not
remembered like Arnaut Daniel's, for the blessed 'Remember us - if at

all - not as lost / Violent souls, but only / as the hollow men / The
stuffed men'. (Dante and Virgil show the same contempt for the
trimmers: 1et us not speak of them; but look and pass'; Inf. III. 50). The
well-known passage from Eliot's essay on Baudelaire provides a gloss
on their predicament: 'So far as we are human, what we do must be
either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and
it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at
least, we exist.'80 Eliot underlines the need for a moral perspective
without which human beings experience death in a spiritual no man's
land. The morally neutral hollow men, for eschatological reasons,
accordingly fear being reported to the established world: 'No nearer -
/ Not that final meeting'. The terror of Judgement Day, when all that
is hidden will be revealed, is captured by Eliot in Murder in the
Cathedral:
behind the face of Death the Judgement

And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active
shapes of hell;
Emptiness, absence, separation from God;
The horror of the effortless journey, to the empty land
Which is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,
Where those who were men can no longer tum the mind
To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretence,
Where the soul is no longer deceived, for there are no objects,
no tones,
No colours, no forms to distract, to divert the soul
from seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with
nothing,
Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,
We fear, we fear. 81
The 'empty men' who are paradoxically stuffed yet hollow, also inhabit
a spiritual void. They, too, have no one at this stage to lead them out
of the cactus land as Virgil led Dante out of the great desert.
Nor do they have a Beatrice figure to aid them. They shun her gaze
in fact:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column
Eliot's lines recall Dante's use of the familiar lyric trope of eyes to
signify the windows of the soul. In Purgatorio xxx and XXXI Dante both
longs and dreads to behold Beatrice's eyes in the garden of Eden
because they reflect the human and divine natures of Christ, represented
by a griffin drawing a chariot:
Mille disiri piu che Samma caldi

strinsermi gli occhi agli occhi rilucenti,
che pur sopra il grifone stavan saldi.
Come in 10 specchio il sol, non altrimenti

la doppia Sera dentro vi raggiava,
or con uni, or con altri reggimenti.
(A thousand desires hotter than flame held mine

eyes bound to the shining eyes, which remained
ever fixed upon the griffin.
As the sun in a mirror, not otherwise the twofold

beast was beaming within them, now with the
attributes of one, now of the other nature.)82
(Purg. XXXI. 118-23)
This sight, 'whence Love once drew his shafts' (Purg. XXXI. 117) at
Dante, moves him to tears of contrition for having betrayed Beatrice's
love after her death, and blinds him momentarily. Beatrice removes the
scales from Dante's eyes only after he has successfully described the
nature of Love or caritas to St John (Par. XXVI. 76-8). The 'sightless'
hollow man, who leads the 'blind life' (Inf. III. 47) of a neutral, lacks
such a vision of Love and does not dare meet these eyes. Eliot
forcefully registers the point in section IV, 'The eyes are not here /
There are no eyes here', a refrain having the effect of 'Here is no
water' - that is, of a failed exodus. The eyes appear like the reflection
of the sun 'there' - somewhere beyond hell's abyss in the garden of
Eden - as a sign of salvation, a hope that is little more than a glimmer
here, 'sunlight on a broken column'. The only light that breaks through
is 'the twinkle of a fading star' in a 'valley of dying stars', atmospheric
details that suggest the 'starless air' and 'silent' sun of Dante's hell (Inf.
23; I. 60).
III.
For those whose lives flicker in a spiritual twilight, the realm of
hope occupies a remote and distant 'there':
There is a tree swinging

There voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
To be 'there' is to be in Dante's earthly paradise (Purg. XXVIII. 1-21), a

'divine forest' where morning has broken in full sunlight, and tree
branches flutter in a gentle breeze that accompanies birds singing in
memory of man's happy state. 83 In that state voices simply are, they
exist unparched. For the hollow men this former happiness seems out
of reach, and their memory of a desire that can be no longer gratified
only renders them, like Paolo and Francesca, more hopelessly wretched:
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Walking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
Erotic passion is sublimated into religious passion. Or is it?

The lips form prayers to broken stone in iconoclastic parody of the
prayer from Psalm 50, uttered by the faithful as part of the Anglican
liturgy and, as well, by Dante's hollow men: 'Labia mea domine' ('Lord,
open my lips; and my mouth will speak out your praise'; Purg. XXIII.
11). This empty and meaningless gesture is doubly ironic, for it at
once leads to iconolatry, to worshipping that heap of 'stone images'
as in Ezekiel, and lands the hollow men in 'This broken jaw of our lost
kingdoms'.84 That is to say, they are broken men85 whose own images
have been shattered by their fall from wholeness and meaning, a fall
with a concomitant linguistic disability:
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
The 'tumid river' is a concise version of the image Eliot used in

'The wind sprang up at four o'clock':
Is it a dream or something else

When the surface of the blackened river
Is a face that sweats with tears7
I saw across the blackened river
The camp fire shake with alien spears
Here, across death's other river
The Tartar horsemen shake their spears86
The river of death suggests not only the Thames and the Congo of
Heart of Darkness, but also the Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood
where the violent suffer in Inferno XII (58-60), across which the Centaurs
or Tartar horsemen shake their spears at Virgil and Dante.87 There
Chiron, chief of the Centaurs, appoints Nessus to guide and finally
carry Dante across the river. Eliot telescopes this scene with the one
from Inferno III which has the damned huddled on the dark plain lying
between the gates of hell and the Acheron,
pronti sono a trapassar 10 rio,

che la divina giustizia gli sprona
sl che la tema si voglia in disio.
(124-6)
(prompt to pass the river,

for Divine Justice spurs them so,
that fear is changed into desire.)
Eliot adapts these scenes to suit his own purposes. The hollow men
are kin to the 10st, violent souls' of Inferno XII, and yet they
paradoxically cannot act, like the trimmers of Inferno III. Eliot accen-
tuates their indecision by freezing the 'action' of his poem at the
moment before the 'tumid river' is to be crossed, and then by providing
no guide or divine impulse for the crossing. This poetic strategy
renders the modem limbo of the still living more dreadful than Dante's.
'The face that sweats with tears' connects the river with 'Eyes that
last I saw in tears', originally the first section of the poem.88 In this
version it is impossible to determine, as Ronald Bush observes, whether
the eyes and the tears are the speaker's or the beloved's. 69 The reason,
I think, is that Eliot merges two scenes from the Divine Comedy which
involve weeping. I have referred earlier to Dante's contrition in
Purgatorio XXXI for his betrayal of Beatrice. Their meeting in Eden is in
fact foreshadowed in Inferno II, where both Dante and Beatrice are in
tears. Lucy pleads with Beatrice to help the pilgrim weeping on the
banks of the fiumana, a tumid river:
Non odi tu la pieta del suo pianto7

Non vedi tu la morte che il combaUe
su la fiumana, ove il mar non ha vanto7
(Hearest not thou the misery of his plaint?

Seest thou not the death which combats him
upon the river over which the sea has no boast?)
(10~8)
Beatrice responds by turning 'her bright eyes weeping' ('gli occhi

lucenti lagrimando'; II6) to Virgil, and urges him to rescue Dante,
who finds himself stranded on the desert slope. Dante's eventual
crossing of the fiumana re-enacts the figure of Exodus, that is, the
Israelites' crossing of the river Jordan into the promised land. 90 Eliot
prefers for the moment to leave the reader in doubt as to whether
such an exodus takes place in The Hollow Men. Although he excluded
all reference to weeping in this later poem, Eliot nevertheless makes it
clear the 'eyes' belong to the beloved.
Beatrice's eyes are described as shining brighter than the stars (Inf
II. 55) and reflect, in fact, the glory of the beatific vision. Dante must
learn to look beyond them to this final vision for, as Beatrice reminds
him, 'not only in my eyes is Paradise' (Par. XVIII. 21). When the hollow
men gaze into the heart of light, however, they respond like the lover
whose eyes and speech fail in The Waste Land:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
Eliot modulates a significant change of tone here. For the first time the
hollow men realise that their vision, like Dante's, can only be restored
when the beloved's eyes 'reappear / As the perpetual star' (the Blessed
Virgin Mary or 'living star'; Par. XXIII. 92-3), to gUide them as she
guided 'Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death's other
Kingdom'.91 This other Kingdom, Dante's community of the blessed
symbolised by a celestial rose made of threefold light (Par. XXXI. 1-3),
remains, however, 'The hope only / Of empty men'. In the cactus land
no view of the city as garden (Par. xxx. 124-32) seems possible.
As they await the reappearance of the eyes, their passport to reality
or the realm of light, the hollow men engage in a round game of
prickly pear, the cactus land version of the mulberry bush. The game,
in the language of metaphysics, exposes their plight of living under
the Shadow of death. On this side of the Shadow Eliot designates
them as inchoate potential (idea, motion, conception, emotion, desire,
potency, essence) which can only be realised on the other side of the
Shadow (reality, act, creation, response, spasm, existence, descent). In
the Divine Comedy, the shadowy beings who populate the realms of
the other world depend for their existence on God who is Pure Act,
or subsistent being itself.92 Dante witnesses this metaphysical reality
at the moment his journey ends; in the words of Santayana, 'not with
a bang, not with some casual incident, but in a sustained reflection, in
the sense that it has not ended, but remains by us in its totality, a
revelation and a resource forever'.93 Although the hollow men share
an awareness of something outside the self in a moment of self-
recognition, the world ends for them 'Not with a bang but a whimper'.
This whimper constitutes Eliot's version of Dante's weeping on the
banks of the fiumana. Eliot leaves the hollow men on the beach of the
tumid river contemplating the crossing to the Kingdom where the new
life begins.
(iv) THE GARDEN IN THE DESERT
After Eliot died in 1965, Frank Kerrnode compared him to Carlyle, the
figure who, in Arnold's famous words, 'led us out into the wilderness
and left us there'. 94 Some years earlier Eliot acknowledged that in The
Waste Land he had expressed for some 'the disillusionment of a
generation' and appeared to them as a lost leader, a Moses floundering
in a literary desert and concluded, 'those who were to find their way
to the promised land beyond the waste might drop a tear at my
absence from the roll-call of the new saints'.9S In ironically anticipating
Kennode's complaint, Eliot nevertheless implied that the poet's task

consists, at least from one point of vantage, in having the reader
glimpse a promised land.
Eliot does not leave the reader pennanently stranded in a literary
and spiritual desert of his own making. In Ash-Wednesday he climbs
another rocky mountain, that of Dante's Purgatorio. The forty days of
Lent, which begin on Ash Wednesday, commemorate the forty days
Christ spent in the desert. In biblical typology this period corresponds
to the wandering of Israel in the desert for forty years under Moses.
Eliot counterpoints the Babel of voices heard in The Waste Land with
the redeeming Word in the desert / ... most attacked by voices of
temptation'.96 In his letter to Can Grande, Dante established that
exodus is a figure, in the moral sense, of 'the conversion of the soul
from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace'.97 For Eliot 'the
way of penance to the means of grace'98 leads to a continuous
purgatory in this life; moreover, it signifies, as in Dante, a recovery
from the fall and a return to the garden or promised land. In Ash-
Wednesday Eliot explores the real continuity between poetry and
conversion, imaged as an exodus from the waste land.
This traversal, however, appears doubtful at first. The speaker reveals
a self-conscious acedia: 1 no longer strive to strive'; 'Because I know I
should not know'. Both the language, which acts as a semantic mirror
with its sudden reversals of meaning, and the staccato rhythm suggest
that this is a tentative, if not a false, beginning for the speaker. His
interior struggle revolves around the key words 'hope' and 'turn'. Will
the speaker abandon all hope like his predecessors in the waste land,
or will he make a turnabout7
Eliot successfully dramatises the predicament of his persona by
'getting as much as possible the whole weight of the history of the
language behind his word'.99 'Turning' from its Latin root 'vert' can
suggest either 'turning towards' (conversion), or 'turning away' (perver-
sion, aversion). The word has biblical resonances too: 'Turn thou us
unto thee, 0 Lord, and we shall be turned' (Lamentations 5:21). In the
liturgy of Ash Wednesday the act of 'turning' functions as a memento
mori: 'Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt
return.' The speaker's repetitive admission, 'Because I do not hope to
tum again', moreover, translates the first verse of Guido Cavalcanti's
'Perch'io non spero', a ballad written in exile to his beloved as he
nears death. 'Turning' would seem to entail radically different
possibilities.
The speaker feels a heightened tension because of his inability to
respond to the spontaneous fertility which surrounds him:
Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow
For there is nothing again
He depicts himself accordingly as an 'old man' who resists spiritual

regeneration: Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?' The eagle
forms part of the exodus figure, for Yahweh carries the Israelites out
of the land of Egypt to himself on eagle's wings:
In the waste lands he adopts him,

in the howling desert of the wilderness
He protects him, rears him, guards him
as the pupil of his eye,
Like an eagle watching its nest,
hovering over its young,
he spreads out his wings to hold him,
he supports him on his pinions.
(Deuteronomy 32:10-11;
d. Exodus 19:1-4)
Despite his initial reluctance, the speaker now implores the God of the
waste lands mercifully to make him forget the negative turnings of his
mind, 'These matters with myself I too much discuss / Too much
explain', and replenish his desiccated will,
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
He soon gathers 'strength beyond hope and despair' (III. 21) like the
pilgrim who hopes in Yahweh, renews his strength and puts out wings
like eagles (Isaiah 48:31).
Eliot makes Dante's dream of the eagle, which bears him towards
the regions of purgatorial fire (Purg. XI. 19-21), his own. He returns to
the image in The Family Reunion where Harry is compared to a 'bird
sent flying through the purgatorial flame' .100 Harry's pilgrimage of
expiation, 'Round and round the circle . . . So . . . / The crooked be
made straight',101 resembles that of the speaker here and evokes the
swirling penitents of Dante's purgatory 'ascending and circling the

mount, which makes you straight whom the world made crooked'
(Purg. XXIII. 125-6). In contrast to the aimless direction of the
mountainous road in the circular waste land, the mountainous road to
purgatory straightens the will which was made crooked by the disorder
of original sin. 'The recognition of the reality of Sin', according to
Eliot, 'is a New Ufe: 102 This New Ufe depends on right order in the
will as it turns towards its divine end. The perfection of the will
provides the central drama of Ash-Wednesday, culminaHng in the
speaker's acquisition of Dantescan wisdom, 'Our peace in His will'.
This haven of tranquillity is reached through the intercession of a
silent Lady. Cavalcanti had exhorted his written words as in a prayer
to do what he himself was unable to do: tell his lady of his sufferings.
Eliot's speaker turns to another Lady, the Virgin Mary as refuge of
sinners, to intercede for him at the moment of death: 'Pray for us
sinners now and at the hour of our death'. He also prays the Salve
Regina (which is sung in Purgatorio VII) and, implicitly, its central
petition: 'Turn thine eyes of mercy towards us'. Hope hinges on
turning his eyes towards the mother of mercy and meeting her glance
in a visual contact that seemed impossible for the hollow men. In so
doing Eliot converts Cavalcanti's song of secular exile into humanity's
song of spiritual exile from the garden: 'And after this our exile' (IV.
32) the prayer continues, 'show unto us the blessed fruit of your
womb, Jesus'. Uke Cavalcanti, he addresses his poem through his
persona:
Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
The transformation of the inner life in harmony with the fertile

surroundings is set to begin.
The speaker is curious as to how the exterior transformation has
taken place:
Who then made strong the fountains

and made fresh the springs
Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour
Who, in other words, changed the scorching red rock of the waste
land into the cool blue rock of the garden? These verses are often
related to Baudelaire's line in 'Bohemiens en Voyage', 'Fait couler Ie
rocher et fleurir Ie desert' ('Making the dry rock trickle and the desert
bloom'). The agent of this miracle in Baudelaire is Cybele, the 'Great
Mother'. In Eliot the intercession of the second Eve, the Virgin Mary,
restores the garden of Eden to its original order:
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Grace to the Mother

For the Garden.
The anaphoric sequence of section II follows the pattern of St Bernard's
prayer to the Virgin, 'The Rose wherein the Word divine made itself
flesh' (Par. XXIII. 73). The Virgin's womb is itself a horlus cone/usus, a
sacred space; and, through her, Dante's hierarchical universe reverses
into paradoxes which are reconciled by the Incarnation or the birth of
the second Adam. This extraordinary event ful61s the fertile Word in
Isaiah: 'Let the wilderness and dry lands exult / Let the wasteland
rejoice and bloom' (35:1). Exodus similarly informs the central paradox
of Ash-Wednesday: 'The desert in the garden the garden in the desert'.
To cultivate this veritable garden of love, the sylvan scene of man's
sexual fall, means, as Eliot disclosed in a letter written in 1928, to
discipline the passions:
to be unconscious of any void - the void that I find in the middle

of all human happiness and all human relations, and which there is
only one thing to 611. I am one whom this sense of void tends to
drive towards asceticism or sensuality, and only Christianity helps
to reconcile me to life, which is otherwise disgusting. 1ol
This ordering of private emotions impinges on the artistic enterprise,

and Eliot finds a model of literary askesis in Dante's 'brave attempts
to fabricate something permanent and holy out of his personal animal
feelings' or cauldron of unholy loves. 104 Dante discovered a method
of 'utilising, transforming instead of discarding, the emotions of
adolescence'; he made 'a discovery analogous to those concerning the
use of the waste-products of coal-tar in industry. The result of this
discovery was a real extension of the area of emotion, and an attitude
both more "spiritual" and more "worldly" than that of Donne or that
of Tennyson or that of Laforgue' .105 In this respect, Laforgue appears

to Eliot an adolescent in his erotic life, Donne middle-aged, and Dante
ageless. 106 The latter poet had hit upon the ancient yet revolutionary
idea of sublimating sexual love into a means of salvation, of trans-
forming eros into carltas.
Eliot's 1929 essay on Dante elucidates the thought:
The attitude of Dante to the fundamental experience of the Vita

Nuova can only be understood by accustoming ourselves to find
meaning in final causes rather than in origins. It is not, I believe,
meant as a description of what he consciously felt on his meeting
with Beatrice, but rather as a description of what that meant on
mature reflection upon it. The final cause is the attraction towards
God. A great deal of sentiment has been spilt, especially in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, upon idealizing the reciprocal
feelings of man and woman towards each other, which various
realists have been irritated to denounce: this sentiment ignoring the
fact that the love of man and woman (or for that matter of man
and man) is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love,
or else is simply the coupling of animals. 107
Dante counters the tendency of modem literature to substitute the

ephemeral for the permanent, human passion for divine: 'whether you
seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one -
you are seeking in the wrong place' .108 The medieval poet avoids this
pitfall because he 'always seems perfectly aware of every shade of
both human and divine love; Beatrice is his means of transition between
the two; and there is never any danger of his confounding the two
loves' .109 Dante and his contemporaries struggled 'to enlarge the
boundary of human love so as to make it a stage in the progress
toward the divine' .110 Eliot viewed his own poem as a conHnuation of
this enlargement process in modem times: 'The Vita Nuova . . . seems
to me a work of capital imporlance for the discipline of the emotions;
and my last shorl poem 'Ash-Wednesday' is really a first attempt at a
sketchy application of the philosophy of the Vita Nuova to modem
life: 1l1
Eliot marked the connection by entitling the original version of part
II of Ash-Wednesday 'Salutation', a reference to chapter III of the Vita
Nuova where Beatrice greets Dante for the first time 'with a salutation
of such virtue that I thought then to see the world of blessedness'.
The greeting initially affects Dante in the three principal forces of life
in the body: the heart, the brain, and the liver. In the Clark Lectures
Eliot lauded Dante and his contemporaries for attempting in their
erotic verse 'to suggest the beauty and dignity of the object contem-
plated by stating the effect of that beauty and dignity upon the lover
in contemplation'.112 The emotions and sensations are not described
for their own sake. I. A. Richards, on the other hand, upholds the
modem view when he declares that 'after Kant and Descartes ...
love is a spontaneous emotion bearing no relation to the object of
affection'.11 3 The emotions and their object are dissociated. Dante's
psychology of love corresponds, instead, to Eliot's call for a unified
sensibility which would enable the poet to 'look into the cerebral
cortex, the nervous system and the digestive tracts'.114 In Ash-
Wednesday Eliot accordingly merges Dante's physiological responses
to having his heart fed to the Lady in Vita Nuova III with the opening
of the Divine Comedy:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which
had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull.
The leopards recall the three beasts, representing major sinful disposi-
tions, which assail Dante in the dark wood. Eliot locates his scene,
however, in 'the cool of day' when God walked in the garden whose
limits Adam and Eve had trespassed.llS (It is the 'withered apple-seed'
of this primal experience that the speaker later spits out in section v.)
Eliot presents us intriguingly with three 'white' leopards, as if to
subvert the popular saying based on Jeremiah (13:23), 'ean the leopard
change his spots?' By associating the leopards, symbols of sinfulness
in medieval and Renaissance iconography, with whiteness, traditionally
a symbol of purity, Eliot implies that the purification of disordered
loves takes place in the garden 'where all love ends'.
The speaker, like Amaut Daniel, awaits 'with joy the day for which
I hope', whose Proven«;al translation, 'Jausen 10 Jom', Eliot used as an
alternate title for part II. In an appendix to the second edition of
Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards suggests that Eliot's
fascination with Purgatorio XXVI illustrates his 'persistent concern with
sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was the problem of the
last'. This incisive remark provoked Eliot, in 'The Modem Mind', to
retort that 'in his contrast of sex and religion, [Richards] makes a
distinction which is too subtile for me to grasp. One might think that
sex and religion were "problems" like Free Trade and Imperial Prefer-
ence'.n6 Despite the caginess of his response, Eliot does not fail to
acknowledge the importance of Dante's canto. In Ash-Wednesday he
makes Arnaut's cry, sovegna vos, his own. In this suffering, as opposed
to the 'eternal dolour' (N. 6) inscribed above the entrance to the
Inferno, is hope. As Eliot explains, 'The souls in purgatory suffer
because they wish to suffer, for purgation. And observe that they suffer
more actively and keenly, beings souls preparing for blessedness, than
Virgil suffering in eternallimbo.'117 Eliot interiorises Arnaut's suffering
by having the white leopards consume the inner organs of his persona.
The beasts Dante encounters impede his ascent to purgatory, whereas
these spotless leopards paradoxically aid the speaker to purge his
brutish lust and regain his spiritual health. us In this startling manner
Eliot links Amaut's day of deliverance with Beatrice's 'salutation', which
in Italian means either health or salvation.
The leopards leave only the bare bones which, Eliot adds with wry
humour, were 'already dry'. The 'dissembled' speaker now imagines
himself as the skeleton listening to God's voice in Ezekiel's valley:
And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
The rose of memory and the rose of forgetfulness which bloom in
Eliot's desert garden evoke the river Lethe, which obliterates the
memory of sin, and Eunoe, which restores the memory of good deeds,
situated in Dante's Eden (Purg. XXVIII. 121-32). The scattered bones, a
symbol of the fragmented or alienated self in The Waste Land, now
experience 'at-one-ment':
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
Ezekiel 37 speaks of the dead regaining life and bodies rising again.
This chapter from the Scriptures is a Sgurative reference to the return
of Judah from exile in Babylon and his subsequent reunion with the
divided tribe of Joseph as the new Israel: 'The Lord Yahweh says this:
I am going to take the sons of Israel from the nations where they
have gone. I shall gather them together from everywhere and bring
them home to their own soil. I shall make them into one nation in my
own land' (21-2). Eliot translates this Sgure of national revival as a
Pauline rite de passage, from the condition of the old self buried in sin
to the birth of the new self in grace. In this archetypal man the human
race is resurrected to its original unity, ready to form a future
community in the promised land that was the desert.
In depicting the restoration of the individual and the race from the
fall Eliot adduces a public myth which perhaps can best be illuminated
by reference to a passage in St Augustine:
Adam means ... 'The whole earth', according to Greek. His name
consists of four letters: A, D, A, and M. . . . Anatole is the east,
Dysis is the west, Arctis is the north and Mesembria the south. . . .
Thus, Adam is spread allover the earth. Once he was in a single
place, then he fell, was split into fragments and AIled the earth.
But the mercy of God collected the pieces everywhere, melted
them in the Are of love and fused together again what had been
broken.n9
God puts Adam, the original of the hollow men, together again,
making him whole (sanus) or 'holy'. Through this public myth Eliot
replaces the polarity of sanity and madness in The Waste Land with
that of faith and sin in Ash-Wednesday.
Despite this newly acquired wholeness, Eliot's speaker is tormented
by nostalgia for his previous sins that pluck at his fleshly garment. He
catches a glimpse of the twisted shape of his demonic self on the
banister 'under the vapour of fetid air' (cf. Inf. VI. 12). The confessional
structure of Ash-Wednesday requires this dramatic double-focus, the
'then' and 'now', two moments separated by conversion, and indicated
by the switch from present to past tenses. Eliot takes us to the 'som de
l'escalina' ('the top of the stair') in the phrase of Arnaut Daniel that stood
as the original title of part Ill. The ascent of the winding stairway
reminds the reader of Dante's arrival at the three steps of penitence -
confession, contrition, and satisfaction - leading to the gate of purga-
tory and the three types of disordered loves - distorted, defective,
and excessive - that need to be purged. 120 Once Dante enters

purgatory, an angel warns him not to look back at his former way of
life (Purg. IX. 131-2).121 Although Eliot invokes the sacrament of
confession, he resists neat categorisations (even Dante apologises for
his own ponderousness). Rather the three steps represent for Dante 'a
threefold act of introspection and are a visual impression of a moral
process associated primarily . . . with repentance for sin' .122
Eliot, too, pauses at the 'stops and steps of the mind'. Startling
visual images confront his protagonist at the second stair. The old
man's drivelling mouth and the aged shark's toothed gullet suggest
avarice, the bellied window gluttony, and the dancing broadbacked
Sgure evokes memories of 'Lilac brown hair' and the garden world of
the hyacinth girl. The enchanting love song played on an antique flute
distracts the protagonist from his destination just as the singing of
Dante's poem, 'Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona' ('Love which
discourses to me in my mind') by the musician Casella delays Dante's
ascent (Purg. II. 112-23).123 Dante confesses that the sweetness of the
song 'ancor dentro mi suona', still resounds within him. To be seduced
by one's own love song is, of course, the snare into which Prufrock
falls. For both poets this aesthetic temptation disrupts the possibility
of a radical break with the past. 124 Dante juxtaposes to Casella's erotic
song its precise opposite, the Psalm of Exodus through the desert to
the promised land, 1n exitu Israel de Aegypto' (46). In a similar vein
Eliot invests the literary text as a Sgure of Exodus when he defers his
word to another after climbing the Anal stair,
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.
Prayer, as in Little Gidding, is more 'Than an order of words, the

conscious occupation / Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice
praying'. Rather than a monologue, prayer is understood as a dialogue
between an l' and a 'Thou'. To enter the realm of silence is to
'communicate'in the etymological sense of binding together or making
one, a 'communion' of persons which serves as a necessary prelude to
communication with the Word. On account of this verbal intimacy,
God walks in the soul's garden that now occupies the same interior
space as the desert.
(v) THE WORD IN THE DESERT
This new sense of communication triggers a change, as well, in the

poet's view of language. Eliot's re-presentation of the scene from
Ezekiel proves crucial for understanding his modem poetics of the
desert, since his original epigraph to this section of Ash- Wednesday
was 'The Hand of the Lord was upon me: e vo significando'. Eliot took
the Italian phrase from Purgatorio XXIV where Dante propounds his
poetics of love known as the 'sweet new style' ('dolce stil nuovo'): 1 am
one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and goes setting it forth
after the fashion which he dictates within me.'125 In his 1929 essay on
Dante, Eliot insisted that acceptance of the forms of Dante's imagination
is 'more important than anything that can be called belief. There is
almost a definite moment of acceptance at which the New Life
begins.'126 As if to emphasise this turning point in his own develop-
ment, Eliot attached the opening sentence of the Vita Nuova in Italian
as an epigraph to his essay: 'In the book of my memory, after the Arst
pages, which are almost blank, there is a section headed Incipit vita
nova.'127 Eliot appropriates the familiar trope of the poet as glossator
of a book of memory, or individual human experience. For Dante
memory is a book which records the past and acts as one scripture
which is continually glossed by another, 'chiosar con altro testo' (Inf.
xv. 88-90). At the end of the book of his personal experience Dante
finds another volume, bound together by Love, which both contains
the universe and totally transcends it. The poet is in fact a scribe who
takes note or writes what Love dictates metaphorically on the tablet
of his heart, and then translates it into external signs ('e vo signiA-
cando') on the page. The process by which divine Love 'inspires' the
poet's production of the word is for Dante analogous to the 'spiration'
or 'procession' of love, as it is designated in theology, which describes
the inner life of the triune God resulting in the primal act of creation.
As Aquinas explains: 'The craftsman works through the word conceived
in his mind, and through the love of his will regarding some object.
Hence also God the Father made the creature through His Word,
which is His Son; and through His Love, which is the Holy Ghost.'128
The implication that the poet's words participate by analogy in the
creative activity of God's Word is one which Eliot also stresses by
juxtaposing Dante's phrase from the Purgatorio with that from the book
of Ezekiel describing how the Lord transported the prophet to the
valley of dry bones. Sacred scripture glosses Dante's secular scripture
as it will in tum gloss Eliot's own words. Eliot also relates the poet as
maker of images to the Incarnation, the Verbum caro factum est. In the
Clark Lectures Eliot defined this as a chief characteristic of genuine
'metaphysical' poetry of all ages: 'it elevates sense for a moment to
regions attainable only by abstract thought, or on the other hand
clothes the abstract, for a moment, with all the painful delight of
flesh'.12 9 Dante remains the great exemplar, for he is endowed with
what Eliot calls 'the gift of incarnation': 'Dante always finds the
sensuous equivalent, the physical embodiment, for the realisation of
the most tenuous and refined intensity (I say 'tenuous intensity' not
without forethought) of experience: it is as if his body were capable
of maintaining life and consciousness - not only maintaining but
indeed increasing it, for the last cantos of his poem are the most
passionate - at a higher altitude and in a more rarefied atmosphere
than those of other men: 130 The inability to create this 'sensuous
embodiment'131 disqualifies Cowley in Eliot's view from being a
genuine metaphysical poet: 'He fails to make the Word Flesh, though
he often makes it Bones:132 It is particularly apt, therefore, that in
Ash-Wednesday Eliot shows the poet being led to the valley of Ezekiel
to re-experience the vision of God's Word or the Logos (which
originally meant in Greek 'gathering into one what is scattered'),
incarnating dry bones.
When Eliot says that resurrection 'has a deeper meaning than we
understand'133 he underlines, I think, its importance for poetry as well
as for belief. In the Vita Nuova Beatrice's death represents a personal
loss, but also poses a poetic dilemma. Her physical dissolution means
that the poet's signs are void of any concrete referents in the external
visible world; images of Beatrice have, in short, become 'cadavers of a
past' .134 At the end of the Vita Nuova Dante adumbrates the book to
come, the Divine Comedy, where he will articulate his 'mirabile visione'
of Beatrice in the unknown world of the dead and implicitly bring her
back to life. This bold attempt at once to revive the images of his
memory and yet transcend them Signifies the poetic form of resurrec-
tion, and coincides with Eliot's notion of the modem poet as an
explorer beyond the frontiers of the spirit. As early as 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent' Eliot remarked that a poet writes 'not merely
with his own generation in his bones' but with the whole of European
tradition. By analogy with the scattered bones in the desert, 'No poet,
no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,
his appreciation is the appreciation of his relationship to the dead
poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him . . .
among the dead: 13s Just as the reunited bones will share the promised
land as their inheritance, so a 'common inheritance and a common

cause unite artists . . . of any time . . . into an unconscious commu-
nity'.136 The spiritual and poetic dreams of Eden, symbolised by the
mounts of purgatory and Pamassus respectively, occupy the same
space. Like Pound's Mauberley, Eliot aims to resuscitate the dead art
of poetry.
Blake had declared in 1810 that the function of the artist was 'To
Restore what the Ancients call'd the Golden Age'Y7 In Eliot's version
this aim is translated as
restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
Here Eliot asks us to recall the divine pageant in Purgatorio XXIX, where
Beatrice is drawn by the griffin, symbolic of Christ, in a triumphal
chariot. During the procession the whole of Sacred Scripture, in
successive order from Genesis to Revelation, comes into view. Eliot
associates the splendour of this pageantry with the world of what he
calls 'the high dream'; for him 'the modem world seems capable only
of the low dream' .138 The speaker's injunction to 'Redeem / The unread
vision in the higher dream' seems to refer to that scene. Dante claims
the Divine Comedy is a poema sacro inspired by the Holy Spirit's 'ample
shower' (Par. XXIV. 91-3), which the poet 'collects' from the Old and
New Testaments and in his turn 'pours again' ('repluo'; Par. xxv. 78)
on others. Since the divine text acts as both source and gloss for the
human, Dante' s 'dead poetry' will rise again ('Ma qui la morte poesi
resurga'; Purg. I. 7) through the agency of God's Word. 139
Eliot revives Dante's ancient rhyme in a number of ways, initially
by recapturing his mode of vision or 'disciplined dream': We take it
for granted that our dreams spring from below; possibly the quality of
our dreams suffers in consequence: 140 Dante almost anticipates a later
interpreter like Freud, since he poeticises dreams of erotic import and
charts the transformations of love. Like Dante, Eliot knows the tokens
of the ancient flames of desire. The original title of section IV, Vestita
di color di fiamma', is taken from Purgatorio xxx. 30, where Beatrice
returns to Eden, 'Olive-crowned over a white veil . . . clad, under a
green mantle, in colour of living flame'. Eliot alerts the reader to 'how
skilfully Dante expresses the recrudescence of an ancient passion in a
new emotion, in a new situation, which comprehends, enlarges, and

gives a meaning to it. . . . And in the dialogue that follows we see
the passionate conflict of the old feelings with the new, the effort and
triumph of a new renunciation, greater than the renunciation at the
grave, because a renunciation of feelings that persist beyond the
grave: 141 This renunciation involves sanctifying animal feelings. The
Lady in Ash-Wednesday restores the speaker 'Through a bright cloud
of tears', an image that condenses the cloud of flowers, through which
Beatrice first appears, with Dante's subsequent weeping. 142 A return to
Eden implies a return to the state of wholeness so that fallen times can
be 're-collected' in order to be redeemed. The speaker, therefore, views
the memory of events from the perspective of present regeneration;
that is, the 'years that walk between' leading up to the 'new years'.
Eliot's insertion of Amaut's sovegna vos at this juncture is a startling,
yet deft manoeuvre. The ancient flames of passion are refined by
plunging into the purgatorial fire. When the speaker finds himself, in
section VI, at the oneiric crossroads, 'the dreamcrossed twilight between
birth and dying', of the new and the old self, he must choose, like
Dante, between the dream of spiritual rebirth symbolised by the eagle
or the false dream of sensual love symbolised by 'the empty forms
between the ivory gates'143 Eliot relates private dreams to public
consciousness for, in Joseph Campbell's formulation, 'Dream is the
personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.'144
Eliot stirs the private and collective memories of the garden, and in
regaining Eden the poet and the reader share the public dream as
members of the same mythic family of Adam. Once we re-enter this
public dream, Eliot attempts to tap 'the power of the master who could
thus at every moment realize the inapprehensible in visual images'.14S
In order to make 'the spiritual visible', Eliot borrows or adapts a
number of images of Eden from Purgatorio XXVIll-XXXI, including the
music of birds, the eagle, the gushing fountains and springs. The
jewelled unicorn, a version of Dante's griffin, apparently represents the
risen Christ in a paradisal garden and seems to originate from a series
of tapestries known as 'The Lady with the Unicorn'.146 Eliot casts these
images or fuses them in unexpected ways by dissolving the sensual
into the ethereal, an apparent reversal of the incamational poetic. The
evocative power of the opening lines of section IV provides an instance
of this process:
Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between
The various ranks of green
The lack of punctuation and the ambiguous syntax render it difficult

to conclude whether the poet, puzzled as perhaps we are by this
sudden apparition, questions the identity of the figure or merely relates
her presence. The uncertainty lends an air of suspense to the otherwise
tranquil scene. But the lady in question is meant to remind us of an
old motif, the custodian of the garden (Matilda in the Divine Comedy)
now that Adam and Eve are gone. Despite the otherworldly setting
Matilda is a recognisable physical presence, whereas the unnamed
figure remains mysterious and shadowy. Eliot himself said that Matil-
da's identity 'need not at first bother US'.147 He deliberately declines to
name his mediating figure, leaving it open as to whether she suggests
Beatrice, Mary, Matilda, some ideal woman, or all of these. This rich
suggestiveness evokes a figure whose intercession is as merciful and
powerful as that of the figures in the Divine Comedy, but whose
significance does not depend on an hierarchical system. Similarly, the
image of a winding stair recalls Dante's purgatorial mount, but Eliot
designates no geographical location as Dante does. As F. O. Matthiessen
points out, Eliots wants 'To make as accurate a description of the
object as he can and then let its indefinite associations unfold in
different readers' minds'.148 Eliot attains, in other words, a paradoxical
precision in vagueness by combining the methods of Dante and the
symbolists.
Although poetry is an enfleshment of the Word, the shadowy beings
that populate the page remind the poet that his verbal power is
derivative, that words are shades, too, not solid things: Imago not
Verbum. Linguistic rejuvenation occurs when the devotional and liturg-
icallanguage of the Church 'rains' down as well on Eliot's text which,
by transfOrming the waste land into a garden, becomes a poema sacro
in its own right. As in Dante, God's eternal plan redeems the time, for
Eliot envisages the poetic canon extending from Homer to himself not
as scattered pieces of tradition or a heap of broken images from which
to construct a personal myth but rather as shadowy manifestations of
the vision of God's Book (d. Par. I. 22). The words of the poet in this
sense act as collective diachronic witness to the unfolding of God's
Word in time.
Through Eliot's reformulation of the modernist slogan, 'make it
new', the reader is able to re-enter the public myth which in the
fullness of time re-collects the fragments of man's intermediate exist-
ence into the unity of the beginning and the end. The vision has been
unread because up to now the poet has possessed, as Eliot observes in

The Rock, 'Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the Word'.
Knowledge of the Word pervades Eliot's poetry from this juncture
with the 'reborn image or word'.149 I have traced the process by which
Eliot raises the garden in the waste land: he now submits words to a
similar process. Eliot reveals in East Coker that the years entre deux
guerres as a frontiersman trying to clear the space for a new poetic
were 1argely wasted',
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
This profile of the poet scribe can be likened to Chaucer's playful

poem, 'Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn', in which
Geoffrey has to emend the text of his lazy amanuensis by rubbing and
scraping until he gets the words in the right order. The original sin of
that archetypal poet who first named the world resulted in a fallen
speech which future generations of poets have had to wrestle with.
The effects of what Eliot, after Mallarme, called 'the natural sin of
language'lS0 are depicted in Burnt Norton:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Words, like the emotions, need a diScipline, an askesis. The Incarnation

renders possible the formation of 'concatenated words' into rightly
ordered speech and displaces the effects of Babel. The Logos made
flesh turns out to be 'the one essential word' sought by the confused
speaker in The Waste Land.
In some brief remarks on Mallarme and Poe which grew out of the
Clark Lectures, Eliot affirms that poetry is incantation 'qui insiste sur la
puissance primitive du Mot'. A restoration of the primitive power of
the Word enables the poet to expand his sensibility beyond the
frontiers of the known world ('au-deJa des limites du monde normal'}.1S1
Eliot claims in effect that Mallarme achieves the same heights as Dante
achieved in his poetry, although by a different route. Eliot describes

the poetry that arises from this expansion of sensibility in his essay
on 'Johnson as Critic and Poet': 'Besides the poetry of sound - and,
from one point of view, occupying an intermediate position between
the poetry of sound and the poetry of sense - there is a poetry which
represents an attempt to extend the confines of the human conscious-
ness and to report of things unknown, to express the inexpressible: 152
Eliot joins in effect the symbolist poetry of incantation with Dante's
poetry of incarnation.
Ash-Wednesday shows the fruit of this collocation:
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
Eliot engages in an onomatopeic and semantic tour de force (word!

world/whirled, speech, silence, stillness) to suggest the principle that
temporal words cannot be separated from 'the living stillness' of
eternity, for the sound becomes an incarnation of meaning. 153 The
silent Word, even if it is unheard, remains paradoxically 'within / The
world and for the world'. Eliot follows the prologue to St John's
Gospel which describes the Word made flesh as light shining in
darkness, or grace dispelling sin. Eliot's verbal universe, like Dante's,
has the incarnate Word as its divine centre and is therefore punningly
'logo-centric'.
Eliot conceives of his art, then, as recovering this divine centre:
a my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among
noise and deny the voice
The word will not resound for those who metaphorically walk in
darkness, even, paradoxically, during the day time; for those whose
internal noise leaves no room for silence; for those, like the hollow
men, who avoid the face of the beloved; for those who deny the voice
of Christ's reproach from the cross: '0 my people, what have I done
unto thee?' (Micah 6). If the word goes unheeded by these, it still
resounds in the poet's prayer. Eliot aptly punctuates it with verbal
repetition and internal echoes:
Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are tom on the hom between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness1
The voice of the poet pleads with the veiled sister154 to intercede for
those like himself who have up to now resisted the Word and the
possibility of transformation.
With the divine reproach still resounding within him, the speaker
finally unites his cry with that of the Other, 'Suffer me not to be
separated'. '0 my people' prOvides a present gloss on an absent text,
'what have I done to you, / how have I been a burden to you1 Answer
me I brought you out of the land of Egypt: With this implicit reminder
of Exodus, the poet blends his voice with those of the community:
'And let my cry come unto Thee'. The language of faith expressed by
a silent and devout crowd in a purgatorial deserP55 replaces the
Babylonish dialect of shrieking forms in an infernal desert.
Ash-Wednesday is consequently an 'open' poem in the sense that
each of its sections closes with words either from the liturgy or from
the Bible. The words of the poet, by explicitly referring the reader to
the Word of God, join together the human and divine realms. Eliot,
like Dante, makes his text a vehicle, an Exodus to the Book of GOd. 156
By restoring with a new verse Dante's ancient rhyme, the poetry of
Ash-Wednesday, as F. R. Leavis claimed some years ago, is 'more
disconcertingly modem than The Waste Land'.157 Spiritual and poetical
discipline coincide in a way that had been forgotten by the modem
writer. In 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Eliot had hinted that
the process of writing brings the poet to 'the frontier of metaphysics
or mysticism': 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality:158 In Ash-Wednesday Eliot seems
to discard the cherished theory of impersonality in favour of speaking
to the reader candidly as T and of merging the roles of poet and
pilgrim for the first time. The impetus for this reorientation seems to
have originated with Dante: 'the metaphysical poet must be subjective,
or at least have a subjective side to him. It is not for nothing that the
Divine Comedy is related in the first person:159 This accent on the
personal does not make Ash-Wednesday a 'confession' in the modem
sense any more than the Vita Nuova is. The post-Romantic emphasis
on the autonomous human personality finds its roots, according to
Eliot, in Rousseau's Confessions and results in the subjective episte-
mology of modem thought which, as John MacMurray notes, 'takes
the Self as the starting point, and not the world, or the community or
God . . . the Self is an individual in isolation, an ego or an '1", and
never a "thou" '.160 For Eliot 'the familiar gospel of Rousseau: the
denial of Original Sin'161 paves the way for understanding ethics from
'a point of view', a sign of a developing emotionalism in the perception
of human values. To be human therefore depends on 'nature' rather
than on 'grace'. Autonomy necessitates severance from God and a
uniquely modem style of salvation best exemplified in lapidary fashion
by Irving Howe: 'a salvation of, by and for the seIf'.162 This experiment
at forming a non-Christian but civilised mentality would ultimately fail
in Eliot's view: 'To do away with a sense of sin is to do away with
civilisation'.163 The moral law of the jungle would then encroach on
the frontiers of the spirit. This encroachment manifests itself in what
M. L. Rosenthal calls 'the centrifugal spin towards suicide of the
speaking voice', a distinctive feature of modem literature. 164 Eliot
counters the suicidal tendency of the autonomous speaking voice by
making his words fully centripetal, converging on the centre of the
silent Word. The poet's task consists in redeeming the time so that, as
Eliot put it a year after publishing Ash-Wednesday, 'the faith may be
preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild
civilization and save the World from suicide' .165 Eliot's version of the
New Life recovers the debris of the spiritual waste land, and reaffirms
the bonds of the most ancient of traditions. The poetry of disillusion-
ment has gradually turned into the poetry of hope.
4
Eliot's Book of Memory
(i) MEMORY AND DESIRE
Eliot begins the poetry of hope in imitation of Dante by looking into

the book of his memory and finding there the record of a journey
which culminates in a new life. Eliot's preoccupation with memory
stretches back to his early poetry, notably from 'Dans Ie Restaurant'
to The Waste Land, until in Ash-Wednesday memory alternates with
forgetfulness and is then restored. In the second chapter I have called
this transformation process the art of sea-change. What I propose here
is to re-examine from a different angle the interaction between memory
and desire, at first in 'La Figlia Che Piange' and then in The Cocktail
Party. Finally, I will try to show how Eliot moves from a Bergsonian
view of memory in poems such as 'Preludes' and 'Rhapsody on a
Windy Night', to a Dantescan view - based on Augustine - by the
time he writes 'Animula' and Four Quartets. Through this movement
Eliot establishes the elements of his modernist book of memory.
In 'La Figlia Che Piange' Eliot's observation of the statue of a weeping

girl prompts him to consider art's relation to memory and desire. The
84
Eliot's &ok of Memory 85
epigraph refers to the encounter between Venus, disguised as a maid,

and Aeneas, who wonders how to name the goddess of love who will
later arrange his disastrous affair with Dido. Eliot's commentary on the
scene in which Aeneas betrays the great passion of his life provides a
frame of reference for his poem:
Aeneas and Dido had to be united, and had to be separated. Aeneas

did not demur; he was obedient to his fate. But he was certainly
very unhappy about it, and I think that he felt he was behaving
shamefully. For why else should Virgil have contrived his meeting
with the shade of Dido in Hades and the snub that he receives?
When he sees Dido he tries to excuse himself for his betrayal. . . .
She avoids his gaze and turns away, with a face as immobile as if
it had been carved from flint or Marpesian rock. I have no doubt
that Virgil, when he wrote these lines, was assuming the role of
Aeneas and feeling very decidedly a worm. l
Eliot reconstructs these feelings of shame arising from the necessity of

the union and separation of Virgil's lovers. When they meet in the
underworld, Dido hardens her heart and her features turn to stone,
and Aeneas is the one left weeping. In 'La Figlia Che Piange', the poet
plays the god of love or fate who stages the meeting and parting of
lovers which this time leaves the girl in tears:
So I would have had him leave,

So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and the shake of the hand. 2
The poet's initial, cold indifference suggests that his own heart has
turned to stone. Once he has dismissed her image, however, he
experiences a change of heart:
She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.
Despite his ironic perspective, the poet remains troubled and shares
the guilt that Virgil and his persona, Aeneas, feel.
The image of the weeping girl owes something as well to D. G.
Rossetti's 'The Blessed Damozel? in which earthly passion is depicted
as persisting beyond the grave, even though the Damozel is supposed
to be enjoying heavenly beatitude. This apparent distortion of Dante's
meeting with Beatrice, involving a confusion of sensual with spiritual
love, led Eliot to remark, 'Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, Arst by my rapture
and next by my revolt, held up my appreciation of Beatrice for many
years.'4 That love can never be requited either in this world or the
next was typical of the nineteenth-century attitude Eliot detected in
Baudelaire:
In much romantic poetry the sadness is due to the exploitation of

the fact that no human relations are adequate to human desires, but
also to the disbelief in any further object for human desires than
that which, being human, fails to satisfy them. One of the unhappy
necessities of human existence is that we have to 'find things out
for ourselves.' If it were not so, the statement of Dante would, at
least for poets, have done once for alI.s
For Eliot the romantic ideal fails to transcend the object of desire.
Dante, on the other hand, had succeeded in making the transition from
earthly to heavenly love.
Although no actual death occurs in 'La Figlia Che Piange', the poet
compares the separation of the imaginary lovers to the rupture of soul
and body. The memory of his dream girl's 'hair over her arms and her
arms full of flowers' stirs the poet's- own desire. The flowers, the
garden urn, the sunlight weaving in her hair, are images which suggest
that in his imagination the poet casts the girl in the role of Dante's
Beatrice, and hints at their meeting in the earthly paradise. But to
remember the experience of an ecstatic moment in the garden is to be
haunted by the spectre of removal from it. Through this plight of
memory, which is also evoked in the stories of Orpheus and Lot's
wife, Eliot implies that the problem of desire at its final level is really
Eliot's Book of Memory 87
the problem of death.

In the Vita Nuova Beatrice's death poses a poetic dilemma since it
deprives Dante's images of their reference point. In 'La Figlia Che
Piange', the poet attempts to bridge the gap between desire and its
fulAlment by summoning the girl's image into a rehearsed yet lifelike
existence through the medium of the spoken word:
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair -

Lean on a garden urn -
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair-
Clasp your flowers to you with pained surprise -
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
When the force of his word dissipates, his love remains reified, a mere
image etched in stone. There is no awakening of faith as in Shake-
speare's The Winter's Tale, prompting Hermione's 'resurrection' from
dead statue to living wife. The weeping girl does not function either
like her redemptive counterpart in Eliot's poetry, Marina, by regener-
ating the poet. She is no Beatrice either, not because the poet banishes
her, but rather because she fails to point beyond herself, remaining
enclosed within the confines of the poet's memory and desire instead.
'La Figlia' poses a threat to Eliot similar to the one the 'stony lady' in
Rime Petrose poses for Dante: the threat of being absorbed in the
images or products of one's own memory, of repeating, in essence,
Pygmalion's folly.
II
Petrification afflicts lovers as well as poets. The Cocktail Party, which

represents Eliot's mature reflection on the subject, takes the form of a
measured response to the image of the modem inferno dramatised in
Sartre's Huis Clos. Instead of 'Hell is other people', Eliot has Edward
assert
Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.6
The play examines the hell of seeing other people as 'projections' of

one's own desires, and the isolation resulting from this self-refraction.
Celia, for instance, recognises that she has not loved Edward but rather
her own image:
The man I saw before, he was only a projection -
I see that now - of something that I wanted -
No, not wanted - something I aspired to -
Something that I desperately wanted to exist.
It must happen somewhere - but what, and where is it7
Edward, I see that I was simply making use of you.
And I ask you to forgive me.
(p.382)
By adopting the perspective of Narcissus, Celia magnifies Edward to a

man-sized beetle. The reification of love is in fact a dehumanising
process which leads to an identity crisis, as Sir Henry indicates:
There's a loss of personality;

Or rather, you've lost touch with the person
You thought you were. You no longer feel quite human.
You're suddenly reduced to the status of an object -
A living object, but no longer a person.
It's always happening, because one is an object
As well as a person.
(p.362)
Edward learns that the way 'To finding out / What you really are'
consists of changing one's point of view, 'The change that comes /
From seeing oneself through the eyes of other people' (p. 395). He
must resist the tendency to self-absorption, to always thinking well of
himself (p. 403).
To be enamoured of a false image of the self constitutes hell: to
love something created by one's own imagination, as Celia understands
it, means loneliness, for 'Then lover and beloved are equally unreal /
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams' (p. 416). To regain
a true image of the self requires seeing the beloved as a human being,
not a projection, who exists outside the self. This is the process by
which Beatrice imparadises the mind of Dante in the Divine Comedy.
In The Figure of Beatrice, a book Eliot commissioned for Faber and
Faber, Charles Williams outlined how the beloved flourished in Dante's

imagination:
The image of Beatrice existed in his thought; it remained there and

was deliberately renewed. The word image is convenient for two
reasons. First, the subjective recollection within him was an image
of an exterior fad and not of an interior desire. It was sight and
not invention. Dante's whole assertion was that he could not have
invented Beatrice. Secondly, the outer exterior shape was understood
to be an image of things beyond itself . . . Beatrice was, in her
degree, an image of nobility, or virtue, of the Redeemed Life, and
in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained
Beatrice right to the end. 7
Edward, on the other hand, fabricates the image of his beloved from
purely subjedive memories nurtured by interior desires. Edward in
turn complains to Lavinia, 'you're still trying to invent a personality
for me I Which will only keep me from myself' (p. 396). The images
cast by the various lovers in the play are in fad all fabrications, all
unreal. They remain static in the memory because a self-centred
perspedive ignores the changes people constantly undergo (pp. 384-
5). Edward discovers he is 'lost in the dark' (pp. 364, 387) as to his
true identity. Celia describes him as 'a child who has wandered into a
forest / Playing with an imaginary playmate / And suddenly discovers
he is only a child / Lost in a forest, wanting to go home' (p. 416).
Lavinia tells him 'You might be able to find the road back / To a time
when you were real' (p. 396). Like Dante, Edward finds himself in a
dark wood, having lost the straight way. Edward charaderises his
midlife crisis as being haunted by the memory of lost desire:
The one thing of which I am relatively certain

Is, that only since this morning
I have met myself as a middle-aged man
Beginning to know what it is to feel old.
That is the worst moment, when you feel that you have lost
The desire for all that was most desirable,
Before you are contented with what you can desire:
Before you know what is left to be desired;
And you go on wishing that you could desire
What desire has left behind.
(p.381)
Edward lingers repeatedly and voluptuously over the word 'desire',

down to the last line of his speech. We sense that for all his protests
he is too much involved, too much obsessed with the way desire has
deserted him. He desires not desire's fulfilment, but desire itself. In this
futile pursuit Edward repeats the errant desire of Dante's fallen Adam. 8
Misdirected love affairs have left both Edward and Lavinia chasing
'The shadow of desires of desires' (p. 410). As Sir Henry counsels
them,
You will have to live with these memories and make them
Into something new. Only by acceptance
Of the past will you alter its meaning.
(p. 439)
The transformation of their relationship will depend ultimately on

renewing their memories in the manner of Dante and redirecting their
desires towards mutual love.
Edward and Lavinia adopt the spiritual cure Williams called 'the
affirmative way' of which Dante is the chief exponent. This is the
approach to God through love of human beings whom he has created
after his own image. 9 In Eliot's words, the married couple
Maintain themselves by the common routine,

Learn to avoid excessive expectation,
Become tolerant of themselves and others,
Giving and taking, in the usual actions
What there is to give and take. They do not repine;
Are contented with the morning that separates
And with the evening that brings together
For casual talk before the fire
Two people who know they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them.
(p.417)
The relation depicted here of husband and wife, of parent and child,
does not seem very hopeful. Sir Henry's statement, however, represents
Eliot's view only partially since Edward and Lavinia move towards a
greater mutual understanding and are finally convinced 'that every
moment is a fresh beginning' (p. 440). In The Confidential Clerk the

question of understanding between parents and children is raised again
as if to qualify the earlier statement. 10 The play ends with Lady
Elizabeth's exhortation, 'Claude, we've got to try to understand our
children', and Kaghan's response, 'And we should like to understand
you'.u Understanding is achieved by metaphorically '[dying] to each
other daily' (p. 384), by being tolerant towards others, by giving and
taking in the usual actions people consider trivial. The 'martyrdom'
involved in the common routine transforms the tedium vitae experienced
by Eliot's characters such as Prufrock. In short, Eliot affirms human
love as an image of divine love, an affirmation which culminates with
Lord Claverton's statement in The Elder Statesman:
If a man has one person, just one in his life,

To whom he is willing to confess everything -
And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,
Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,
But also situations which are simply ridiculous,
When he has played the fool (as who has not?) -
Then he loves that person, and his love will save him. 12
In The Cocktail Party, Celia shares this need to confess her sense of
sin and thus begin a new life. lung has claimed that the beginnings of
psychiatry 'are to be found in its prototype, the confessional',13 and
Reilly accordingly acts as both psychotherapist and priest for Celia.
IAlienation' for her means primarily a spiritual rather than psychological
phenomenon (p. 415):
It's not the feeling of anything I've ever done,

Which I might get away from, or of anything in me
I could get rid of - but of emptiness, of failure
Towards someone, or something, outside of myself;
And I feel I must . . . atone - is that the word?
(p. 416)
She, too, begins to realise that love entails the recognition of the
existence of another being outside of herself. As with the wastelanders,
Reilly tells her, 'Compassion may be already a clue / Towards finding
your own way out of the forest' (p. 416). Accordingly, she will not
find love in the union of man and woman, but rather in the union of
the soul with her mystical spouse, Christ. She achieves a vision similar
to the one enjoyed by Dante when he moves from seeing his own
image in a clear fount (Purg. xxx. 76) to seeing 'nostra effige' ('our
image') in the God-man who created him in his image and likeness. At
the moment of the beatific vision, Dante becomes a 'transhumanized'
Narcissus who shares the common nature of man. I4 For Celia the
mystical ecstasy
is remembered like a dream

In which one is exalted by intensity of loving
In the spirit, a vibration of delight
Without desire, for desire is fulfilled
In the delight of lOving.
(p. 417)
Celia adopts the negative way which 1eads towards possession / Of

what you have sought for in the wrong place' (p. 418). The soul is to
achieve divine union by divesting itself of the love of created beings,
as Eliot's epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes, taken from St John of the
Cross, has it. IS When Celia asks whether the affirmative or negative
way is better, Reilly replies,
Neither way is better.
Both ways are necessary
Both ways avoid the final desolation

Of solitude in the phantasmal world
Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires.
(pp. 418-19)
Through her death by crucifixion, Celia imitates the 'design' laid down
by her divine lover, her at-one-ment finally overcoming her alienation.
In this context Reilly characterises her death as 'happy' because she
underwent 'the process by which the human is / Transhumanized' (p.
421). This process of 'transhumanization' renders The Cocktail Party a
human and divine comedy written under the sign of Terence's motto
now altered, Nothing human or divine is alien to me'.
(ii) MATTER AND MEMORY, OR THE SOUL'S PROGRESS
In discussing The Waste Land I noted how Eliot opposed the metaphys-
ical theory of the substantial unity of the soul to Bradley's theory of
the finite centre. Some of the early poems, such as 'Preludes' and
'Rhapsody on a Windy Night', can be glossed by Bergson's Matter
and Memory which made a great stir at the turn of the century. Initially
Bergson distinguishes the kind of memory which consists of mechanical
repetition and becomes a bodily habit, such as walking. 'Pure memory',
on the other hand, includes mental representation and records 'all the
events of our daily life' .16 Bergson equates pure memory with spirit,
but claims its contents are 6ltered, as it were, by the brain. The activity
of the brain (which is not merely a storehouse of images) involves
pure perception of matter. Memory manifests itself in images or absent
objects which are remembered. These in turn enter into our perceptions
as objects of an intuition of the real. Recollection and perception, then,
interpenetrate each other, and unite in 'memory-images', or a 'synthesis
of the past and present in view of the future'P In this way, spirit and
matter, soul and body, unite not in space but in 'duration' or 'time
perceived as indivisible', a living present.
In Prelude III the memory and perception of the unidentified woman
act in tandem to unite the disparate experiences in the external world.
Her vision of the street - the night reveals the thousand sordid images
which constitute her soul - and the street are indistinguishable. In
Prelude IV we witness a similar merging of subject and object in a
man's act of memory. He identifies his 'soul stretched tight across the
skies' and its suffering with the trampled city street. I8 For Bergson the
soul is not a metaphysical entity, but emerges from a process of
continuous change. The body is the actualisation of the soul, an
inversion of Aristotle's view. Eliot at once poeticises this process and
undermines its validity. In 'Preludes' memory can only conjure up
images of the sordid, contemptible side of contemporary urban life.
There is no room for happy memories or hope for the future. Bergson's
'duration' seems interminable and depressing to the suffering soul
locked in its perception of an infernal vision of the street.
Eliot records a comparable infernal vision in 'Rhapsody on a Windy
Night'. The street lamp marks time in the course of the speaker's
journey through the city, illuminating the squalid scenes of the present.
When his memory acts upon these scenes it can only throw up 'A
crowd of twisted things' such as a twisted branch on a beach, a rusty,
broken spring in a factory yard, the automatic hand of a joyless child
which grips a newly found toy, images which suggest death or
lifelessness. The desperate frenzy of time's attempt to revive the
memory is suggested by the startling analogy, 'Midnight shakes the
memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium'. This desolate,
nocturnal world is 'Held in a lunar synthesis', but the moon, which

harbours no bitterness, has lost her memory of better things. The dark
world of this windy night resembles the infernal world governed by
Proserpine, or the moon of heU (Inf. x. 80). The speaker's journey
paraUels the first stage of Dante's journey, which also takes place
between midnight and 4 a.m. on Holy Saturday moming. 19 The
damned souls there possess only a dim knowledge of the future and
none of the present for, as Farinata says,
tutta morta
Fia nostra conoscenza da quel punto,
che del futuro Sa chiusa la porta
(all our knowledge shall be dead, from that moment

when the portal of the Future shall be closed)
(Inf. x. 106-8)
All they retain is the memory of the horror of their earthly life, now
mentally re-enacted in eternity. The future (when time will end with
the Last Judgement) holds no hope for them either. In 'Rhapsody',
memory also holds the key to the door of the future, and as the
speaker climbs the stairs he is exhorted, ironically, to 'prepare for life'.
The door is not open to Bergson's elan vital, however, but to death.
For Eliot the boredom of the mundane and the sordid constitute
damnation in an infernal present. The use of memory at this stage
entails the 'enchainment of the past and the future' rather than liberation
from them, and exposes the limits of Bergsonism.
As a solution Eliot wiU revert to 'orthodox theology and its
admirable theory of the soul',20 the very theory he had been previously
trying to dislodge. In the Clark Lectures, for instance, Eliot compares
the worlds of Dante and Donne in terms of their understanding of the
soul. Eliot accuses Donne of not basing his images on any philosophical
belief, illustrating his point from a celebrated passage in 'A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning':
Our two soules therefore, which are one,

Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Uke gold to airy thinness beat
Donne is not expounding any theory of the soul according to Eliot,
for the image creates rather than clarifies an idea: 'if gold can be beaten
out thin, why should not a soul7'21 Even if he appears on questionable
ground here,22 Eliot indirectly points to the shortcoming of his early
poetic treatment of the soul. Despite the valiant efforts of Bergson to
unite the operations of the soul with those of the body, his theory
highlights only their separation. Eliot classified this separation as a
modem conception whose seeds were planted in the seventeenth
century.23 Modem man is consequently still in search of a soul. 24 No
such dichotomy affects the poetry of Dante and his contemporaries
since, in Eliot's view, it is based on the philosophy of Aquinas.
To demonstrate the differences between the two ages, Eliot, in the
epigraph to the Clark Lectures, takes a passage from Vita Nuova XVIll
in which Dante announces to a group of ladies, 'The end of my love
was once the salutation of this lady whom you appear to mean; and
in that dwelt my beatitude, which was the end of all my desires', and
juxtaposes it with these lines from a popular song:
I want someone to treat me rough.

Give me a cabman.
Grover Smith argues that this juxtaposition represents the insoluble

dilemma of body versus soul for the would-be Dantean.2s But Eliot is
in fact working towards a resolution: 'The only difference there [in
Dante's time] is between higher and lower, more and less courtly
loves. . . . There is no imagined struggle of soul and body, only the
struggle toward perfection.'26
Eliot deals with the soul as a metaphysical substance of divine origin
for the first time in 'Animula'. The poem is based on Purgatorio XVI, in
which Marco Lombardo discourses on the freedom of the will, and on
the soul:
Esce di mano a lui, che la vagheggia

prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla
che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,
l' anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,
volentier toma a cio che la trastulla.
Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore;
quivi s'inganna, e retro ad esso corre,
se guida 0 fren non torce suo amore.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre;

convenne rege aver, che discemesse
della vera cittade almen la torre.
(From the hands of Him who loves her before she is,
there issues like a little child that plays, with weeping
and laughter, the simple soul, that knows nothing except
that, come from the hands of a glad creator, she turns
willingly to everything that delights her. First she
tastes the flavour of a trifling good; then she is
beguiled, and pursues it, if neither guide nor check
withhold her. Therefore laws were needed as a curb; a
ruler was needed, who should at least see after the
tower of the true City.)
(85-96)
Eliot calls Dante's theory of the soul 'the philosophy of Aristotle

strained through the schools',27 In the Aristotelian tradition love is
conceived as 'appetite', the movement towards its end of any object
or person in the order of creation. The human soul, which takes its
origin from God, is therefore impelled to return to him: 'The spirit
shall return unto God, who gave it' (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Dante expands
this idea in the Convivio. The soul, whose natural inclination is to find
joy, truly desires to return to its maker, the supreme Joy, although it
fails to realise this. The pilgrim's soul, in fact, often mistakes a lesser
joy for its goal during its temporal journey. Because of its lack of
experience and knowledge, the soul turns to things of little value,
always expecting to achieve the supreme Joy and always disappointed:
And so we See little children intensely longing for an apple, and

then going on further, longing for a little bird, and then, further on
longing for fine clothes, and then a hom, and then a mistress and
then wealth, but not much, then much, and then enormous.28
But the soul, in Augustine's famous formulation, remains restless until

it rests in God. This love of God, according to Dante, is man's first
love, his prima voglia. It precedes even the love of self, which is usually
regarded as the ground of other loves. So as it issues from the hand
of God, the soul initially experiences ineffable joy. After entering the
body it soon forgets this divine happiness, but nevertheless retains a
residue of it and a vague 'eros-longing' for what it originally felt.
Dante compares it to the sensation we feel when we awaken from a

dream whose exact nature we have forgotten, but whose joy lingers
on.
In 'Animula' Eliot provides an interesting adaptation of this viewpoint.
The simple soul emerges from its maker, ready to embark on the
journey of life. Exposed to the natural world, the soul at first responds
only to sense experience, and eventually 'Confounds the actual with
the fanciful'. But as the soul grows, the heavy burden of distinguishing
between appearance and reality, or 'is' and 'seems', perplexes and
offends it. The 'pain of living' forces it to take refuge in 'the drug of
dreams', as the intellect pursues knowledge 'Behind the Encyclopaedia
Britannica'; knowledge, that is, for its own sake devoid of any moral
foundation. With characteristic irony, Eliot now outlines the devastating
consequences of its journey by substituting 'time' for 'God' in the line
from Dante:
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul

Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum. 29
Time has deformed and distracted the soul from its true goal, only to
meet with an abrupt end, 'Living in the silence after the viaticum',
when it suddenly meets its maker once more. This final section urges
prayers for various individual types of disordered desires: power,
violence, greed, and lust. This 'new life' seems at best a rude awakening,
and the last line of the poem is taken from the 'Hail Mary', but with
a twist: 'Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth'. The birth can
be understood as both spiritual and physical. The prayer expresses a
need for the soul to put its papers in order, to 'desire and control'.
Natural death does not suffocate the divine breath of life, but only
causes a temporary separation of soul and body until their union at
the end of time. As Eliot put it later, in order to affirm 'the individuality
of each human being one must, in fact, believe in the soul'.JO
Eliot returned to this idea in 'The Cultivation of Christmas Trees':
The accumulated memories of annual emotion

May be concentrated into a great joy

Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear carne upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming. 31
Memories are personal; their accumulation brings greater insight into

another birth which took place in the fullness of time and looks
forward to the end. Viewed in this way, the soul's 'death-day' can tum
out to be a 'birth-day' into a second life beyond the reach of the hand
of time.
(iii) MEMORIA SUI/MEMORIA DEI
Four Quartets charts two related journeys that take place within the
poet's memory. The first traces 'the growth of the poet's mind' as it
recalls and evaluates the experiences that have shaped its life. Ghosts
from the past visit the locale of each quartet, for, through the
imagination, Eliot brings to life those spectres of the dead, as Blake
calls them, who inhabit the memory. Among these ghostly visitors are
the children in the rose-garden, the dancing Elyots of the poet's
ancestry, and the 'familiar compound ghost' or dead master of poetry.
Eliot imitates the journey to the realm of the dead undertaken by
Dante and his encounters with past masters, such as Brunetto Latini
and Amaut Daniel, as well as his ancestor Cacciaguida. The second
journey involves a quest for spiritual roots or 'the mind's journey to
God'. Wallace Stevens once said, 'The major poetic idea in the world
is and always has been the idea of God.' For Stevens, however, a chief
characteristic of the modem imagination is 'the movement away from
the idea of God'.J2 Eliot takes a different view: 'between the usual
subjects of poetry and "devotional" verse there is a very important
field still very unexplored by modem poets - the experience of man
in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human
feelings in terms of the divine goal'.JJ For Stevens 'the great poems of
heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth
remains to be written'.J4 Eliot instead anticipates Charles Singleton's
suggestion that Dante proposes 'a journey to God even in this life, a
journey of the mind and heart, a possibility ideally open to umana
specie'.JS In Four Quartets, as in the Divine Comedy, the journeys of poet
and pilgrim are one.

The speaker of Four Quartets, as William T. Moynihan observes, is
'a fictive Eliot, nQt Eliot the shaper of the poem'.36 As a guide for the
journeys, Eliot's fictive self at times resembles Virgil in his role of
taking the pilgrim only as far as the gate of paradise. (He does not
know the way to the heavenly city; Purg. II.63.) The guide can therefore
give specific directions, 'Here is a place of disaffection' or 'Descend
lower'; but he can also be tentative, as evidenced by words such as
'perhaps', 'if', 'it seems', and 'sometimes I wonder' that punctuate his
ruminations. 37 Although he assumes the role of Virgil, this does not
mean, as some have suggested,38 that Eliot never explores what is
beyond the gate. In Burnt Norian, for instance, he invites the reader to
follow him 'Through the first gate, / Into our first world'. Since this is
later referred to as a 'remembered' gate in Little Gidding v, we are
invited to 'unbar the gates of Memory', in Blake's phrase, and enter
the garden of our first world.
Eliot does not set out to replicate Proust's literary attempt, based
on Bergson's philosophy of memory, to recapture lost time and a lost
paradise. Instead of exploring the past by means of an involuntary,
associative memory, Eliot depends, in the view of Georges Poulet, 'on
a voluntary memory, on a continuous abnegation, on a patient effort
to recover, to reassemble, to readapt under new conditions, what was
lost'.39 The passport to a lost self in Proust usually involves a return
to childhood in order to achieve an integrity in time. Eliot's quest, like
that of Dante, relates the self to both time and eternity.
The opening verses of Burnt Norton present us with two ways of
understanding time that Eliot eventually repudiates:
Time present and time past

Are perhaps both present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. 40
The first proposes a deterministic view of time since the future imposes
itself on the past and the past 'gnaws', to use Bergson's word, into the
future. It leads to what Eliot later calls 'the enchainment of past and
future' (79). If the second proposition - all time exists merely in the
present - is true, then time becomes an unreal movement without a
beginning or end, without a past or future. From this perspective time
is unredeemable because it flows and ebbs without cause in a meaning-

less present.
To liberate oneself from the oppressive presence of the past and the
future, Bergson advises the individual to 'abstract himself from the
present moment through the use of what he calls the intuitive or
imaginative memory.41 In Eliot's rendition,
What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
The movement from the realm of immediate experience to the realm

of speculation, however, proves a false diversion. If an abstraction
remains a perpetual possibility, then it can never be realised. A division
between potency and act constitutes a metaphysical impossibility. In
the journey from reality to abstraction we might carry the experience
of both an actual and an imaginative past, but we always return to the
present moment and come full circle. The imaginative excursion into
memory seems futile. To resolve the impasse Eliot invokes Augustine.
Louis Martz has suggested that when Eliot says 'Footfalls echo in
the memory' and 'my words echo / Thus, in your mind' he is evoking
the memory of a possible childhood experience based on the following
passage from the Confessions:
Although as for things past, whenever true stories are related, out
of the memory are drawn not the things themselves which are past,
but such words as being conceived by the images of those things,
they, in their passing through our sense, have, as their footsteps,
left imprinted in our minds. 42
Augustine spoke of how the memory reacts to true stories left as

'footsteps' in the mind. Eliot, however, speaks of passages 'which we
did not take' and of doors 'we never opened'. He is exploring instead
the realm of imaginative memory or speculation.
If the passage from the Confessions cited above does not fit exactly
the context of Eliot's statement, there is one that does. Speaking of
the liberal arts in book X, Augustine says,
For any knowledge I may have of grammar, or of the art of

debating, or of the different categories of questions, remains in my
memory, but not as though I merely retained an image of it, leaving
the facts outside myself, or as though it had sounded in my ear and
then passed away. It is not like a voice which is imprinted on the mind
through the ears, leaving a trace by which it can be recalled, as if its
sound were still to be heard even after it has become silent.43
The footsteps or 'traces' are echoes of things that exist within the
inner recesses of memory, not outside the individual. Truth, whether
intermediate or ultimate, resides within the mind and can be recalled
by the memory.
Augustine linked the problem of self-knowledge to time. The self,
he found, is scattered in a past which is no longer, a present which he
cannot get hold of, and a future that is not yet. He is divided up in
time the order of which he does not know." To re-collect the self, he
withdraws into his memory or mind, contemplates there his past
experiences as if they exist in the present, and from these he infers
future actions. 4s Although memory serves as an aid to self-discovery
- the process Augustine called memoria sui46 - it remains limited. No
one can remember, for instance, the moment of his birth, nor can he
know with certainty what is to come. Because man is born and dies in
medias res, his radical finitude prevents him from joining time's full
narrative, the beginning and the end. The mind is not large enough to
contain itself, leaving the individual unable to plumb the depths of his
own being. God makes up for what is lacking in the self-awareness
afforded by memory by perceiving the passage of time as one in a
durationless instant: 'both the past and the future have their beginning
and end in the eternal present'.47 This 'eternal present' redeems the
time and loosens the fetters of past and future. Only in God can
Augustine find 'a safe haven for my mind, a gathering-place for my
scattered parts, where no portion of me can depart from yoU'.48 As
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo explains,
St. Augustine's memory is similar to, but not really like the platonic
anamnesis, the unconscious retention of things seen in some early,
disembodied existence. It is rather that portion of man's spirit which
is the seat of both self-consciousness and self-transcendence, that
place in which all men retain their implicit awareness of God's
existence and in which the contemplative guards the residue, the
10ving memory', of his vision of that which truly is.49
This 10ving memory' or memoria DeiSO haunts Eliot's mental itinerary

as it does Dante's.
Once the memory is understood as the seat of both self-conscious-
ness and self-transcendence, we can profitably speculate on how the
inhabitants of our first world moved
in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, qUietly, quietly
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
The rose-garden of Burnt Norton triggers primal memories of both an
earthly and supra-terrestrial paradise of bliss. The human race could
not desire happiness if it had not experienced it before. According to
St Augustine, 1t may be that we were all once happy individually, or
it may be that we were all happy in Adam, the first sinner, in whom
we all died and from whom we are all descended in a heritage of
misery.'SI The human race was happy and fell in Adam because God,
unlike man, sees all things at once, not through memory. Adam's
recollection of Eden, of lost blessedness, is inherited by postlapsarian
humanity, whose fall into time makes it forget the existence of the
immortal soul. Eliot's excursion into a world of speculation marks, in
this context, a return to his original state as a child of Adam. Uke
Dante in the garden of Eden, the poet attempts to find his real self as
'it might have been' if Adam had not fallen and the human race's
original identity had been preserved intact. The expulsion from the
garden suggests that human kind cannot bear the reality of paradise, 52
but the memoria Dei still lingers .:llld echoes latently in the innermost
chambers of the soul. Eliot adapts a number of images from Dante's
Paradiso in order to suggest that human kind, despite having lost its
first home, is on a journey to another home in eternity. In canto xxx,
for example, Dante sees a river of light sparkling like topaz-gems and
banked with flowers. Beatrice explains to him that these are not true
substances, but only shadowy manifestations, a device making them
intelligible to a mortal. As he gazes upon the river, a Ught pouring
down from above strikes the convex surface of the primum mobile and
appears to him as a pool of reflected light from the yellow centre of
the heavenly rose, symbolic of the community of the blessed:s3
come fec'io, per far migliori spegli

ancor degli occhi, chinandomi all'onda
che si deriva perche vi s'immegli;
E Sl come di lei bevve la gronda

delle palpebre mie, COSI mi parve
di sua lunghezza divenuta tonda
E come clivo in acqua di suo imo

si specchia, quasi per vedersi adorno,
quando e nell' erbe e nei fioretti opimo,
Sl soprastando al lume intomo intomo

vidi specchiarsi in piu di mille soglie,
quanto di noi lassu fatto ha ritomo.
E se l'infimo grado in se raccoglie

Sl grande lume, quant' e la larghezza
di questa rosa nell' estreme foglie?
(as then did I, to make yet better mirrors of my eyes,

down bending to the wave which floweth that we may better us.
And no sooner drank of it mine eyelids' rim than into
roundness seemed to change its length
And as hill-side doth reflect itself in water at its

foot, as if to look upon its own adornment when it is
rich in grasses and in flowers,
so, mounting o'er the light, around, around, casting
reflection in more than a thousand ranks I sawall that
of us hath won return up yonder. And if the lowest step
gathereth so large a light within itself, what then the
amplitude of the rose's outmost petals?)
(Par. xxx. 85-90, 109-17)
The leaves of the rose are full of children, baptised and unbaptised:
Well mayst thou perceive it by their faces, and also their

child-voices if thou look aright and if thou listen.

(Par. XXXII. 46-8)
In Eliot's rose-garden we hear the echoes of these childlike voices 'for

the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly, containing
laughter.54 'And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses / Had the
look of flowers that are looked at' because, as in the Paradiso, light is
reflected from the eyes and eyesight somehow reverses upon itself.55
The lotos rose acts as a symbol of the Hindu God,56 and, as well, of
Christ, the Word made flesh in the Rose. Eliot collocates Eastern and
Western traditions once more.
Eliot refers to Dante's river of light leading to the beatific vision as
'a white light still and moving' (Burnt Norion II). Dante also described
his vision of the Trinity by employing the metaphor of the 'circle of
light', combining it with the symbol of fire and the stillpoint:57
E poi che Ie parole sue restaro,

non altrimenti ferro disfavilla
che bolle, come i cerchi sfavillaro.
Lo incendio lor seguiva ogni scintilla;
ed eran tante, che il numero loro
piu che il doppiar degli scacchi s'immilla.
10 sentiva osannar di coro in coro
al punto fisso chi li tiene all'ubi,
e terra sempre, nel qual sempre foro.
(And when her words stayed, not otherwise doth iron

shoot forth sparkles, when it boileth, than did the
circles sparkle
And every spark followed their blaze; and their numbers
were such as ran to thousands beyond the duplication
of the chess board. From choir to choir I heard
Hosanna sung to that fixed point which holdeth and
shall ever hold them to the where, in which they have
been ever.)
(Par. XXVIII. 88-96)
Dante perceives the nature of God within a single point of time, 'un
punto solo' (Par. XXXIII. 94), the eternal present, a perception Eliot
expresses in verses he repeats now with charged meaning:
Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(My italics)
God is the 'point where all times are present' ('il punto / a cui tutti li
tempi son presenti'; Par. XVII. 17-18).
How can memory retain knowledge of a timeless order? St Bonav-
entura's meditations on time and memory complement those of St
Augustine, and illuminate Eliot's text still further. According to Bonav-
entura, we receive nothing through intelligence which is not present
to our memory. As Eliot himself claims, memory is indispensable for
contemplating the still point:
The operation of memory is retention and representation, not only

of things present, corporeal, and temporal, but also of past and
future things, simple and eternal. For memory retains the past by
recalling it, the present by receiving it, the future by foreseeing it.
It retains the simple, as the principles of continuous and discrete
quantities - the point, the instant, the unit - without which it is
impossible to remember or to think about those things whose source
is in these. 58
In its retention of all things temporal, memory resembles eternity

'whose indivisible present extends to all times'.59 Through these
workings of memory the soul finds its true identity, its original image
and likeness, and becomes a portrait of its Maker. The soul can
internally contemplate God through his creatures 'for they are shadows,
echoes, and pictures, the traces, simulacra, and reflections of that First
Principle'.60 As a result, 'we may contemplate God not only outside of
us but also within us and above us . . . outside through His traces,
inside through His images, and above us through His light, which has
signed upon our minds the light of eternal truth, since the mind itself
is immediately formed by Truth itself'.61 When Bonaventura spoke of
speculatio he played, like Eliot, on its various shades of meaning:
reflection, speculation, consideration. In Burnt Norion, Eliot, like Bonav-
entura, seems especially mindful of the metaphor of the universe as
mirror (speculum) through which God can be seen or known:
I can only say there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say how long, for that is to place it in time
Contemplation of the still point, which is neither in time nor in space,

releases the mind from its bondage to time. At the end of Burnt
Norion II Eliot can therefore affirm
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden
Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.
Only through memoria sui transformed into memoria Dei can time be
conquered.
Eliot, like Dante, compared God to both a circle and a point. He is
a circle, in the famous medieval definition, whose centre is everywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere. He is also a point where all
times converge, 'dove s'appunta ogni ubi ed ogni quando' ('where
every where and every when is focussed'; Par. XXIX. 12), which point
Eliot affirms in The Rock as 'eternity crossing the current of time':
In every moment of time you live where two worlds cross,

In every moment you live at a point of intersection,
Remember living in time, you must live also now in Eternity.62
The reflected light which enables the time-bound Dante to see the
heavenly rose and Eliot the lotos rose, radiates from this divine still
point on which heaven and all nature depend (Par. XXVIII. 16, 41-2; d.
Par. XIV. 1-3). As the circle exists because each point on the circumfer-
ence is in a particular relation to its centre, so the universe exists
because everything is in a particular relation to God. Eliot concretises
this process in Burnt Norion IV through the rhetorical question, Will
the sunflower turn to us?' As flowers open up to the sun from which
they receive their vigour, so in the supernatural order all things turn
naturally and continually towards the divine centre: 'the light is still /
At the still point of the turning world'.
In Dante this divine point dilates, and in dilating produces three
circles to represent the Trinity. One of the circles represents Christ.
Dante tries to make out how human flesh is fitted into the circle of
divinity, 'come si convenne / l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova'
('how the image was fitted to the circle and how it has its place there';
(Par. XXXIII. 136-8), just as a geometer might try to square the circle.
The image of the 'box circle' recalls this idea, and Eliot later translates
it in The Dry Salvages as follows:
Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.
(116-19)
For Eliot this impossible union of spheres of existence, the Incarnation,

has broken open the closed circle of Bradley's or Heraclitus' Arnte
centres.63
Eliot envisages the universe as a turning circle with God as its
unmoving centre. In the Divine Comedy the uncreated Light is perfect
simplicity - semplice lume - containing and unifying all created things,
past, present, and future. Eliot's 'white light', around which revolve the
concentric circles in Dante, is Divine Love, Unmoved Mover of the
whole universe: 64
Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Dante had expressed this concept in the follOwing way:65
10 credo in uno Iddio

solo ed eterno, che tuUo il ciel move,
non moto, con amore e con disio.
(I believe in one God, sole and eternal, who moveth

all the heaven, himself unmoved, with love and with desire.)
(Par. XXIV. 131-2)
The Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, who moves the cosmos because he

is the object of love, is transformed by Dante into the Christian God,
who moves the cosmos through active love of his creation. In Eliot's
passage desire is the turning world, while love is the still point, only
the goal and end of desire. Love literally makes the world go round.
Dante emphasises movement centering in God at the outset of the
dramatic action when Virgil reports Beatrice's motivating impulse:
10 son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare

vengo di loco, ove tomar disio;

amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.
(I am Beatrice who send thee;

I came from a place where I desire to return;
Love moved me, that makes me speak)
(Inf. II. 70-2)
Eliot, like Dante, focuses on the human will. In the final image of the
Paradiso, it is also described as a wheel turning towards its natural end:
All'alta fantasia qui manco possa;

rna gia volgeva il mio disiro e il velie,
SI come rota ch' egualmente e mossa,
I'amor che move il sole e I'altre stelle.
(To the high fantasy here power failed;

but already my desire and will were rolled
even as a wheel that moveth equally
by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.)
Setting love in order depends on will and desire becoming one at the
point where, in the formulation of A. Bartlett Giamatti, 'perfect stillness
creates perfect motion'.66 Will and desire gravitate towards divine
Love as do the heavenly bodies in a dance of glory. The divine point
becomes the centre of the human soul67 which the philosophers call a
'Simple substance'. In Little Gidding it arrives at 'A condition of complete
simplicity', or complete immateriality in a final, luminous vision.
The syllabic echo amor-move reverberates from the beginning to the
end of the Comedy. In the Inferno desire remains unfulfilled. Because it
is not directed towards its natural end, it embitters memory and
engenders misery, as in the case of Paolo and Francesca. In this episode
'amor' is quoted frequently, but the joining echo is 'morte': 'Amor
condusse noi ad una morte' ('Love led us to one death'; Inf. v. 106). It
is what Glauco Cambon calls an inverted linguistic image of heavenly
love as presented in the Paradiso.68 In this canto of love the word
'muovere' almost totally disappears. Instead of purposive movement
towards the divine centre, lust is envisaged as mad and disorderly, a
whirl of passion. In a heavenly context, on the other hand, ,disio'
connotes fulfilment because it aims at the one object of desire:
appressando se al suo disire,

nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,
che retro la memoria non pub ire.
(as it draw nigheth to its desire,

our intellect sinketh so deep,
that memory cannot go back upon the track.)
(Par. I. 7-9)
Eliot also modulates the dual connotation of desire. The inhabitants of

The Waste Land experience unhappiness, like Virgil, as desire without
hope, ('sanza speme viveme in disio'; Inf. N. 42). In Burnt Norton, and
later in Little Gidding, he presents the nexus of memory and desire in
a totally different light:
This is the use of memory:

For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.
Memory liberates desire from its earthly attachments in time, and helps
it to reach out towards its timeless object whose unfamiliar name is
Love. Eliot maintains substantially the same viewpoint as that of
Purgatorio XVIII. 28-33, which he quoted in the Clark Lectures:69 'Then,
even as fire moves upward by reason of its form whose nature it is to
ascend, there where it endures longest is its material; so the enamoured
mind falls to desire, which is a spiritual movement, and never rests
until the object of its love makes it rejoice'.
Eliot creates a modem version of the twelfth-century mysticism
whose origin he locates in Aristotle's Metaphysics. In the Clark Lectures,
he opposes this mysticism to Bergsonism:
You know how the Absolute of Bergson is arrived at: by a turning

back on the path of thought, by divesting one's mind of the
apparatus of distinction and analysis, by plunging into the flow of
immediate experience. For the XII century, the divine vision or
enjoyment of God could only be attained by a process in which
the analytic intellect took part; it was through and by and beyond
discursive thought that man could arrive at beatitude. This was the
form of mysticism consummated in Dante's time. 70
As an example of classic mysticism, Eliot cites a prose passage from

Benjamin Major, where Richard of St Victor distinguishes the three
stages of the soul's progress towards the beatific vision.71 Eliot singles
out how the style is not an expression of the man, but of the object.
Its resolutely impersonal tone, devoid of any biographical details or
personal sentiment, distinguishes it from the 'psychological' mysticism
of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics and presumably of Bergson.
Eliot finds the same method and goal in Aquinas and Dante: 'the
divine contemplation, and the development and subsumption of emotion
and feeling through intellect to the vision of God'.n As early as 1920
Eliot stated that contemplation is the end of poetry:
There are . . . many scattered lines and tercets in the Divine Comedy
which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated reader,
just sufficiently acqUainted with the roots of the language to
decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty.
This impression may be so deep that no subsequent study and
understanding will intensify it. But at this point the impression is
emotional; the reader in the ignorance which we postulate is unable
to distinguish the poetry from an emotional state aroused in himself
by the poetry, a state which may be merely an indulgence of his
own emotions. The poetry may be an accidental stimulus. The end
of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all
the accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see
the object as it really is and find a meaning for the words of Arnold.
And without a labour which is largely a labour of the intelligence,
we are unable to attain that stage of vision amor intellectualis Dei. 73
Eliot's new style since The Hollow Men and Ash-Wednesday consisted
of an attempt to modulate the tone of personal confession with
impersonal observation, or to join what might be called the language
of 'consciousness' with the language of 'being', inner experience with
outer reality.74 Eliot's development of this 'metaphysical' style owes
an increasing debt to Dante's practice of converting plain philosophical
statement into poetic vision. 75
If this goal of contemplation for both poet and pilgrim is not
achieved, then, as Eliot concludes in Burnt Norton, 'Ridiculous the waste
sad time / Stretching before and after'. Time remains, in Aristotle's
definition, the measure of motion according to before and after, rather
than a point where all time is present, and before and after have no
significance: 76
In sua eternita di tempo fuore,

fuor d' ogni altro comprender, come i piacque,
s'aperse in nuovi amor I'eterno amore.
Ne prima quasi torpente si giacque;

che ne prima ne poscia procedette
10 discorrer di Dio sopra quest'acque.
(In his eternity beyond time, beyond all other

comprehension, as was his pleasure, the eternal
love revealed him in new loves.
Nor did he lie, as slumbering, before; for nor

before nor after was the process of God's
outflowing over these waters.)
(Par. XXIX. 16-21)
Eliot, like Dante, invites the reader to cross over from the 'human
to the divine, from time to eternity' (Par. XXXI. 37-8). He asks him to
move in imagination
above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
(Burnt Norion II)
'The controlled symmetry of these lines', where, as David Spurr points

out, 'in Dantescan manner, the stars appear both at the precise center
and the precise end of the strophe',77 suggest that our point of vantage
is similar to Dante's when he looks down upon 'this threshing floor'
of earth from the region of the stars (Par. XXII. 124-54; XXVII. 82-6).78
But just as we are ready to come out to the stars, Eliot asks us to
remember earth and origin.
Burnt Norion dwells on private memories which unfold as a public
dream of Eden. The site of East Coker allows Eliot to trace the roots
of his more immediate family since 'Home is where one starts from.'
The dream vision of a country dance, which Eliot described by copying
the exact words of his ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot, as if from a literary
mirror of the past or from his own book of memory, provides a

glimpse of time intersecting with eternity:
In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie -
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn.
The scene, David Spurr maintains, evokes the image of time as a circle:
'The perimeter of the open field and the dance around the bonfire
form . . . in a series of concentric circles with a "heart of light" at
their center: 79 In the Paradiso Dante pictures the angelic orders which
move all the heavens above the earth forming nine concentric circles
as in a dance: 80
Come da piu letizia pinti e tratti

alIa fiata quei che vanno a rota
levan la voce a rallegrano gli atti,
cosi all' orazion pronta e devota

Ii santi cerchi mostrar nuova gioia
nel tornear e nella mira nota.
(As by access of gladness thrust and drawn,

at once all they who circle in the dance uplift
their voice and gladden their gestures,
so at the eager and devoted prayer the sacred circles

showed new joy in their revolving and their wondrous note.)

(Par. XIV. 19-24)
Dancing for Sir Thomas Elyot signifies concord between man and
woman, the spirit of order that is manifest in all of nature. In the
Renaissance people believed that this cosmic order held a stable
universe together in a regular series of relationships which embraced
God, man, and beast, the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and
extended to the humours, the elements, and stars in their course:
'Behold . . . the order that God hath put generally in all His creatures,
beginning at the most inferior or base, and ascending upward . . . so
that in everything is order, and without order may be nothing stable
or permanent.'81 This harmonious unity afforded a secure resting place
for the questing soul.
But it is precisely this dream of order that Eliot shatters in the
second movement, by depicting the disorder of the natural cycle, and
in the opening movement when he surveys 'the withered stumps of
time':
In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass
Despite the appearance of linear progression, time is really circular, for

each moment curves back along the circumference to its point of
origin. The old stone houses, for example, are used to construct new
buildings which in turn crumble back to the earth:
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
The 'earth feet, loam feet' of the dancers suggest that they, too, must
return to the earth from which they came. To reinforce this idea, Eliot
both alludes to and imitates the rhythm of the well-known passage
from Ecclesiastes which presents time as cumulative repetition:
Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
The 'silent motto' of Mary, Queen of Scots, 'in my beginning is my

end', completes the image of time as deterministic circle.82
By collocating the passage from The Governour with that from
Ecclesiastes, Eliot implies that the 'new joy' that arises from cosmic
harmony in Dante is counterpointed by the emptiness of things human
on earth, where life appears to be no more than a succession of
unrelated and meaningless events ending in death. 'All is vanity' for
'no memory remains of earlier times, just as in times to come next
year itself will not be remembered' (Ecclesiastes 1:11). All human
accomplishments will no longer be remembered in time. Though he has
permitted man to consider time in its wholeness, man cannot compre-
hend the work of God from beginning to end' (Ecclesiastes 3:11);
although God has given the human mind awareness of 'duration', or
has endowed him with the power of reflecting on the sequence of
events and therefore of controlling the present, this awareness is none
the less deceptive for it does not reveal the meaning of life. Eliot
corroborates this insight:
Had they deceived us,

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The only wisdom which can put the vanity of human wishes in
perspective is the wisdom of humility. Humility is necessary because
we 'all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant
into the vacant'.
In this last passage Eliot may be echoing Pascal's statement, 'the
eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me'. Charles Mauron, in
his essay 'On Reading Einstein', which Eliot translated for the Criterion
in 1930, points out that Pascal was thinking of space and time as
'things-in-themselves' rather than as one interdependent reality in
Einstein's four-dimensional space-time continuum.83 Mauron's argument
- Einstein's theory of relativity does not annihilate mystical knowledge
but fortifies it - is, as C. A. Patrides explains, extremely vital for Eliot
'in the sense that the elimination of every "reality-in-itself" obliges us
to revert to an awareness of our own lives in relation to something -
or Someone - other than ourselves'.84 Augustine's concept of eternity
as a realm where God sees the whole as simultaneously present is
similar to Eliot's space-time,85 and this similarity allows Eliot to posit
the existence of a still point, which is not in space or time but which
controls the world of flux. On this point the cosmos of Dante, Sir
Thomas Elyot, and Einstein converge.
The full implications of Eliot's stance become clear in a letter he
wrote to Bonamy Dobree in 1927:
If there is no fixed truth, there is no fixed object for the will to

tend to. If truth is always changing, then there is nothing to do but
to sit down and watch the pictures. Any distinctions one makes are
more or less arbitrary. I should say that it was at any rate essential
for Religion that we should have the conception of an immutable
object or Reality the knowledge of which will be the final object of
that will; and there can be no permanent reality if there is no
permanent truth. 86
The laws that govern the physical universe are fixed, for it is our
perception that fluctuates in proportion to the scientific knowledge we
have gained from Aristotle to Einstein; the laws of the moral universe
also remain the same, revolving around the still point. Eliot images
this process in East Coker by urging men to leave their ancestral homes
and journey towards a permanent reality which shatters or squares the
human circle. If time is viewed in sequence, then its linear progression
bends into the circle of eternity, the alpha from which man comes, as
Augustine understood it, and the omega to which he is trying to
return. 87 Eliot affirms the same idea: 'In my end is my beginning.'
(iv) MEMORY AND THE WORD
Memory provides not only the central theme of Four Quartets but also
generates its form. It is, in the words of William V. Spanos, 'a series
of mnemonic or circular meditations on the past (personal, historical,
racial) activated by the poet's profound sense of dislocation . . . and
by his need for continuity, for absolute origins'.88 Eliot imitates the
form of Augustine's Confessions, the peregrinatio vitae, by having the
last movement of Little Gidding round back as in a circle to the rose-
garden at the beginning of Burnt Norton. 89 The poet's circuitous journey
through his remembered past as he seeks what is permanent in the
ephemeral contains a recollective form of closure which is similar to
that found in the Divine Comedy. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Eliot's contem-
porary, has called Dante's contrapuntal arrangement of themes

'reminiscence and anticipation': 'Some of these reminiscences are refer-
ences to parts of the journey already completed - backward glances,
so to speak. Another type is the description of a figure that is still to
come:90 Dante's narrative strategy focuses on two modalities of
memory which can also be seen at work in the Four Quartets.
Kierkegaard distinguished these modalities as 'repetition' and 'recollec-
tion': 'Repetition and recollection are the same movement only in
opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated
backwards, whereas repetition properly so called, is repeated forwards: 91
'Recollection' places the events of history sub specie aeternitatis. This is
the use of memory, 'to detach oneself from one's own past',92 for
people vanish and return in an altered relationship. Eliot comes close
to the view put forward by the German historian Ranke - 'every
generation is equidistant from eternity'93 - when he envisions the
opponents in the Wars of the Roses as being 'folded in a Single party'.
Eliot's figural interpretation of history imitates Dante's vision of
redeemed souls folded together in the form of a white rose.
Because Four Quartets, according to Spanos, undermines memory as
recollection, it is not ultimately 'a logocentric poem, a poem of presence
but an ec-centric poem, a poem that dis-covers - and, I am tempted
to say, finally celebrates - the absence of presence at the still point of
the turning world'.94 Eliot's Logos, however, is not disembodied as in
Plato, nor is it a memory irredeemably lost in history. Rather Eliot
follows Dante's basic strategy of repetition in the etymological sense
of re-petere: to search again into the possibilities of conversion. Giuseppe
Mazzotta sheds light on Dante's view:
History, as the allegory of renewal, makes a fresh start by going

back to the past, and, through a theology of hope, opens up to the
belief that the new will arrive. Like the figural pattern of history it
describes, repetition is indeed a 'recollection forward'.95
For Eliot memory liberates the individual from the future as well as
the past and triggers the theological poetic of hope where 'All shall
be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well'. Like Dante, Eliot
strives to imitate history's movement towards an eschaton, the silence
of the end when the meaning of history and language will be disclosed.
In Augustine's linguistic epistemology words function as transient
auditory forms whose echoes fall into nothingness in order to make
way for each other. If syllables were to echo and re-echo continually
in one's mouth, we would not be able to understand what they mean

because we are limited to understanding parts rather than wholes. 96 It
is from the point of view of the end that the temporal fragments of a
song, a person's life, and the greater history of human kind emerge as
a total and intelligible structure. Memory plays a key role in this
intelligibility:
Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I

begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But
once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from
the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages
my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is
divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the
one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other
looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my
faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes
what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the
process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion
as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation
is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it
has all passed into the province of memory.
What is true of the whole psalm is also true of all its parts and
of each syllable. It is true of any longer action in which I may be
engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a
small part. It is true of a man's whole life, of which all his actions
are parts. It is true of the whole history of mankind, of which man's
life is apart. 97
In Burnt Norton v Eliot takes over Augustine's linguistic and musical

analogy:
Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
Eliot returned to this analogy in his introduction to Paul Valery's The

Art of Poetry:
I speak as one with no technical training in music, but I find that I

enjoy, and 'understand' a piece of music better for knowing it well,
simply because I have at any moment during the performance a
memory of the part that has preceded and a memory of the part that
is still to come. Ideally, I should like to be able to hold the whole
of a great symphony in my mind at once. The same is true, surely,
of a great tragedy: the better we know it, the more firmly we hold
it in mind, during the action, wh~t has preceded and what is to
come, the more intense is our experience.98
For Eliot, as for Augustine and Dante, the meaning of time and
language is discovered through memory.
Words, too, are on a pilgrimage from time to eternity. Eliot arrives
at that frontier between poetry and mysticism described by Jacques
Maritain: 'Poetic experience is from the beginning orientated towards
expression and terminates in the uttered word; mystical experience
tends towards silence and terminates in an immanent fruition of the
absolute.'99 Human words, because uttered in time, are inadequate to
express a timeless reality. tOO And yet art, according to Eliot, continually
'aspires to the condition of the timeless' by 'its speaking, in the
language of its time and in the imagery of its own tradition, the word
which belongs to no time'. tOt This timeless poetic word participates in
the Incarnate Word which, for Augustine, was not a mere utterance in
time: 'For your Word is not speech in which each part comes to an
end when it has been spoken, giving place to the next, so that finally
the whole may be uttered. In your Word all is uttered at once and the
same time, yet eternally.'t02 As a consequence, the poet's language as
well as the pilgrim's will reaches the still point:
What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
Having taken a linguistic journey sub specie aeternitatis, where every

word is an end and a beginning, the poet can now affirm,
The end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This affirmation is consonant with Eliot's lifelong poetic practice. In

1933, for instance, he defined the auditory imagination as 'returning to
the origin and bringing something back seeking the beginning and the
end'.103 And in 1946 he stated, 'every language, to retain its vitality,
must depart and return upon itself; but without the departure there is
no return, and the returning is as important as the arrival. We have to
return to where we started from, but the journey has altered the
starting place: so that the place we left and the place we return to are
the same and also different: lo4 From this vantage point the journey of
language imitates the journey of the Word as outlined by Augustine:
For he did not delay, but rushed on, calling to us by His death, life,
descent, and ascension to return to Him. For He went away and
behold He is still here. He would not be with us long, yet He did
not leave us. He went back to that place which He had never left,
for the world was made by Him. And He was in the world, and He
came into this world to save sinners. . . . First descend that you
may ascend, ascend to God. For in mounting up against God you
fell. lOS
The language of paradox - 'Descend that you may ascend', 'He went
back to that place which he had never left' - forms the basis of the
theological poetic in East Coker III. The verbal universe acts here as a
speculum, a semantic mirror: words resemble each other, but their
meanings differ. The assertion culled from 5t John of the Cross, 'where
you are is where you are not', for example, is made possible by the
linguistic traces left by the trek of the Incarnate W ord. 106
According to Charles Singleton, Dante patterns the Divine Comedy

with the reader in mind - 'for us to descend that we may ascend (this
being, in the moral allegory, our joumey),.107 This injunction of Dante's
follows the Christian paradigm of original sin 'in our first world' where
our parents aspired to 'ascend' and be 'as God', and atonement or the
'descent' into humility of the Incarnation: 'Man could never make
satisfaction within his own limits, being unable, by subsequent obedi-
ence, to descend so low in humility as in his disobedience, he had
aspired to ascend; and that is why it was impossible for man to make
satisfaction by himself . . . and all means of justice except for the Son
of God to humble Himself, becoming flesh' (Par. VII. 97-102; 118-20).
This redemptive pattern of descent-ascent provides an added dimension
to Eliot's affirmation - recalling Heraclitus - in The Dry Salvages III,
'And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back'.
The soul's descent into humility prepares its ascent to God, ascensio
mentis ad deum, like a fire, to use Augustine's image, that rises upward
and sings a song of ascents. lOS This song of ascents provides a model
for the Four Quartets as well as for the Comedy; its Eastern equivalent
is the Gita or 'song of God'. Eliot counterpoints the modem 'song of
myself' with the 'New Song', as the Incarnate Word was traditionally
referred to, and sounds in a new key Pater's observation that all art
constantly aspires to the condition of music.
Eliot's incarnational poetic focuses on 'The point of intersection of
the timeless / With time', when words moving in time reach out
toward silence. 109 The poet is consequently a musician for 'the music
of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its
relation first to words immediately preceding and following it, and
indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that
of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings
which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of
association' .110 Dante also depicts the poet as a musician who creates
harmony by 'binding' words together to form an interrelation of parts
in a whole or 'legame musaico'.ll1 Both writers stress the intercon-
nectedness of words, the correspondence of parts in a whole, with
their characteristic emphases. Eliot constantly searches for 'the arrange-
ment of the right words in the right order'112 so that he can make
sense of those 'concatenated words' of The Waste Land. His perfect
order of speech aspires towards the silent Word at the still point.
Dante's terza rima reflects the triune God, and the metaphor of 'binding'
imitates the activity of the divine Author at the end of the Divine
Comedy:
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'intema

legato con amore in un volume,
cio che per l'universo si squadema.
(Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love

in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe)
(Par. XXXIII. 85-7)
Memory, as Mazzotta explains, is the crucial metaphor for Dante's

image of the volume: 'These images of binding, gathering and -untying
are the thematic scaffolds which dramatize the perfection of the cosmos
and within which the poet attempts to recollect and enclose all he has
seen within the intelligibility of his language: ll3
Memory is a key metaphor for the process of gathering in Eliot's
work too. For Augustine memory is a storehouse which involves the
activity of the mind, since to think means to re-collect scattered images
and to rearrange them in the memory.114 Similarly for Eliot, 'The poet's
mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new compound are present together: 115
Gathering fragments is precisely the way that Eliot wrote his poems,
as he informed Donald Hall in the long Paris interview of 1963: 'That's
one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout
the years poetically - doing things separately and then seeing the
possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind
of whole of them: 116 Even if he didn't say so explicitly, the writing of
Four Quartets rested on the same principle with the difference that the
act of gathering is performed by the author not only outside the work
but also within the work itself. In Little Gidding, for example, Eliot
gathers up themes and images from the previous Quartets. He employs
the rhetorical device of memory as repetition:
You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?
This self-conscious language acts as a mnemonic device for the reader

by stirring his memory as he interprets the text. The repetition of the
poet's own words, phrases, and ideas, charged with meaning in an
altered context, produce, as John Danby notes, a kind of organic
memory that 'constantly imposes a special discipline on the reader -

the discipline not of note-taking and concordance-making, but rather
of deciding on the relevance of the echo, and of resisting the
temptation to be distraded by the cataloguing or distraded by
reducing the repetitions to a lowest common factor. 11 7
Through repetition of images such as the fire and the rose Eliot
prepares us for an 'approach to the meaning', for the discovery that
'The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation'. Dante
had distinguished four levels of meaning to describe the allegory of
the Divine Comedy. Eliot demurs before this vast, encyclopaedic struc-
ture, but his own poem, on a smaller scale, is not without a sense of
medieval elaborateness. In a previous chapter I have tried to show that
a failed anagogical sense operates in The Waste Land, whereas in Ash-
Wednesday the exodus pattern is re-enaded, although not as system-
atically as in the Comedy. Something similar occurs in Four Quartets.
Dante's fourfold exegesis cannot be consistently applied here either,
although varying interpretations concerning the separate levels of
meaning have been suggested. lIS What can be safely assumed is that
Eliot invests any given symbol with an accretion of meaning. The
rose, for example, as Eliot himself indicates,1I9 connotes at once the
sensuous, the socio-political, and spiritual dimensions of life. These
connotations have been implicit from the beginning of Four Quartets
and have gathered in significance as the poem moves towards its final
image. Similarly, 'the crowned knot of fire' suggests 'the burning knot
of ghostly love' of the medieval mystical treatise, The Cloud of
Unknowing, Dante's 'nodo' or 'complex' of the universe in Paradiso
XXXIII. 91. The fire evokes the incendium amoris for the individual, the
Heraclitean and Stoic ekpyrosis or universal conflagration, as well as
the 'coronata fiamma' of Paradiso XXXIII. 119. The connotations seem
endless. 120 The modem poet is engaged in a practice that rivals Dante's
method, a practice Eliot described in 1931:
Symbolism is that to which the word tends both in religion and in

poetry; the incarnation of meaning in fad; and in poetry it is the
tendency of the word to mean as much as possible. To find the
word and give it its utmost meanin~ in its place; to mean as many
things as possible, to make it both exad and comprehensive, and
really to unite the disparate and remote, to give them a fusion and
a pattern with the word, surely this is the mastery at which the
poet aimspl
Symbolism understood in this sense is the modem counterpart to

Dante's polysemy.
The Four Quartets function as an end or focal point from which
Eliot's early images - the rose-garden, fire, stairs, chapel, among others
- might be examined and re-collected. Like Dante, Eliot gathers up the
heap of broken images from his earliest poetry to form his own book
of memory, which in tum is bound by the divine Author. Eliot's poem
might be an epitaph but it takes on 'new life'. The poet does not
repudiate language, but opts instead for a better 'translation' of those
'moments' in time, his own words, as in John Donne's 'Meditation
XVII'; 'all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man
dies, one chapter is not tom out of the book, but translated into a
better language; and every chapter must be so translated . . . God's
hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered
leaves again for the library where every book shall lie open to one
another'.l22 In this sense, too, the poet can affirm, 'in my end is my
beginning' .
This concept of the 'open book' suggests that for Eliot the problem
of the end is a philosophical as well as a literary one. The pre-Socratic
philosopher Alcaemon of Crotona had observed, 'Men perish because
they cannot join the beginning with the end'.123 For Eliot the crown
of a lifetime's effort is the end: finis coronat opus. In the final movement
of Four Quartets 'past and future are gathered' (Burnt Norton II, my
italics) at the divine still point. The Incarnation, which unites the
space-time continuum of words, acts as the linguistic and philosophical
centre of both the Divine Comedy and the Four Quartets.
5
The Aesthetics and Politics of

Order
(i) STYLE AND ORDER
The gathering of images in a book of memory reveals only one facet

of Eliot'sf lifelong fascination with the idea of order. In 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent' Eliot enunciated the view that a standard of all
'classical' art is the ordered relationship of the parts to the whole: 'The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is
modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art
among them: 1 Dante's art, which was rooted in the local and yet
embraced the universal, represented the embodiment of what Eliot
called the 'Mind of Europe'. The Divine Comedy offers concrete
illustrations of the simultaneous ideal order among poets, living and
dead, shown first in the meeting of Dante and Virgil, and then, in
Inferno IV, when they meet the great poets of antiquity:2
Lo buon maestro comincio a dire:

'Mira colui con quella spada in mano,
che vien dinanzi a' tre SI come sire:
quegli e Omero poeta sovrano

l'altro e Orazio satiro, che viene,
124
The Aesthetics and Politics of Order 125
Ovidio e il terzo, e I'ultimo Lucano:

(The good Master began to speak: 'Mark him
with sword in hand, who comes before the three
as their lord:
that is Homer, the sovereign Poet; the next

who comes is Horace the satirist; Ovid is the
third, and the last is Lucan:)
(Inf. IV. 85-90)
Eliot acknowledges this coexistence of poets first in the epigraph to

Prufrock and Other Observations taken from Purgatorio XXI which describes
the meeting of Virgil and Statius, and Anally, in Little Gidding, when
he himself meets the familiar compound ghost.
The view that the artist is deAned by this ideal order of tradition
rather than by his 'personality' distinguishes the classicist from the
romanticist. The split between the man who suffers and the mind
which creates allows for an ordering of emotions as displayed in the
Divine Comedy, where 'Every degree of the feeling of humanity, from
lowest to highest, has, moreover, an intimate relation to the next
above and below, and all fit together according to the logic of
sensibility.'3 The Comedy 'is the most comprehensive, and the most
ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made'.4 Eliot cites
as evidence the canto in which Dante greets his old master, Brunetto
Latini, the episode of Paolo and Francesca, and the voyage of Ulysses. s
Dante the pilgrim shows pity for each of the characters in question,
but Dante the poet sees their punishment as fitting. This distancing of
the self permits the poet to order the emotions according to the
requirements of the dramatic moment. Eliot Ands the difference between
classicism and romanticism to be the difference between 'the complete
and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the
chaotic'.6
Eliot's study of Dante under the tutelage of George Santayana's
Three Philosophical Poets gave impetus to his own consideration of the
relationship between philosophy and poetry. The question that
Santayana poses informs the centre of Eliot's discussion: 'Are poets, at
heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy, in the end, nothing
but poetryf At first glance the poet and philosopher seem to have
little in common. 'The poet has his worst moments when he tries to
be a philosopher', claims Santayana? Eliot concurs that poetry and
philosophy are 'better perfonned inside two skulls than one',8 but a
rapprochement between the abstract reasoning of philosophy and the
inspired imagination of poetry is ultimately possible for Santayana as
it is for Eliot:
The order [philosophy] reveals in the world is something beautiful,

tragic, sympathetic to the mind, and just what every poet is trying
to catch . . . a steady contemplation of all things in their order
and worth. Such contemplation is imaginative. . . . A philosopher
who attains it is, for the moment, a poet; a poet who turns his
practised and passionate imagination on the order of all things, or
on anything in the light of the whole, is for that moment a
philosopher. 9
Eliot claimed similarly that
It is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order

upon reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of order in
reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconcil-
iation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a
region where that guide can avail us no further. 10
Dante serves as the prime model for the mind of the poet which
circumnavigates the universe in an orderly and all-inclusive fashion.
It is a bold manoeuvre to proclaim oneself a poet of order, like
Dante, in the twentieth century when, as Eliot says, 'there are more
social circles than there were circles in Dante's Inferno . . . there are
more philosophers, complete, incomplete, and inchoate, than there were
builders at Babel'.u In the dark Lectures Eliot analysed what he called
'the disintegration of the intellect in modern Europe' from the point of
view of the artist. His aim was not to cast the artist in the role of
purveyor of gloom and doorn, but rather to affirm his place 'in the
development and maintenance of the human mind'.12 It was not out
of any sense of nostalgia that he held up the model of Dante and the
Middle Ages for those intent on reintegrating the intellect: 1 have not
in any way advocated a return to the XII century, whatever that might
mean, but only the eternal utility, in a world of change, of any
achievement of perfection.'I3 In the trecento - as Eliot refers to it - a
perfect art arose as a consequence of harmony between philosophy
and poetry, with the result that 'the human spirit reached a greater
sum of range, intensity, and completeness of emotion than it has ever
attained before or since' .14 Eliot also counters the prejudice which
views the poetry of that age as 'fantasy and foolery' written in a
quaint, Pre-Raphaelite style and given to visions. Instead he considers
it 'the product of men who felt and thought both clearly and beyond
the ordinary frontiers of the mind. . . . Their syntax and choice of
words affirm their superiority. You cannot live on a high plane and
indulge yourself in verbiage.'1s In yoking together orderly style and
lucid thought, Eliot invokes the now-familiar image of the poet as both
a Dante and a Ulysses opening up new frontiers.
To demonstrate the relation between an incarnational poetic and
orderliness in verse, Eliot compares the poetry of the Middle Ages
and the seventeenth century, focusing on Dante and Donne as the
main representatives:
I want to show, if I can, how the acceptance of a system of thought

and feeling results, in Dante and his friends, in a simple, direct and
even austere manner of speech, while the maintenance in suspension
of a number of philosophies, attitudes and partial theories which are
enjoyed rather than believed, results, in Donne and in some of our
contemporaries, in an affected, tortuous, and often over elaborate
and ingenious manner of speech. 16
On examining the figures of speech of Dante and Donne, Eliot claims

the difference between their images lies in the 'focus of interest':
The interest of Dante lies in the idea or feeling to be conveyed; the

image always makes this idea or feeling more intelligible. In Donne,
the interest is dispersed, it may be in the ingenuity of conveying
the idea by that particular image; or the image itself may be more
difficult than the idea; or it may be in the compulsion, rather than in
the discovery, of resemblances. Part of the pleasure may be in the
natural incongruity which is actually overcome; part of the feeling
is the 'feel' of an idea, rather than the feeling of a person who lives
by that idea. It is an harmony of dissonance. 17
By way of example, Eliot cites an image from the beginning of Paradiso

(II. 31--6) when Dante enters the first heaven:
Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse

lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che 10 sol ferisse.
Per entro se l'eterna margarita

ne recepette, com'acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.
(Meseemed a cloud enveloped us, shining, dense, firm and

polished, like a diamond smitten by the sun.
Within itself the eternal pearl received us, as water doth

receive a ray of light, though still itself uncleft.)
Eliot comments:
You observe the strict utility of these images. They are to convey
a supersensuous experience, the adjectives are chosen as they might
be in a scientific treatise, because they are the nearest possible to
approximate what he is driving at. The image of the light passing
through water is undecorated and is not, nor is intended to be,
interesting apart from the experience which it makes more appre-
hensible. And this I think is characteristic of all of Dante's similes
and metaphors: they have a rational necessity. IS
The image of light passing through water is one which Eliot appropri-
ates in The Rock. It is a mark of his own movement towards adopting
lucid figures of speech.
In his essay on the metaphysicals in 1921, Eliot indicates that Donne
and Chapman both embraced an incamational poetic, that is 'a direct
sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into
feeling'.19 Five years later Eliot claims that Donne fails to sustain this
sensuous embodiment in an orderly manner. Donne's method, rooted
in the conceit, 'fades into a play of suggested ideas'.2o He cites The
Anatomy of the World as a 'meditation of thoughts floating about
separately, floating ideas turned in upon themselves'.21 Eliot develops
an extended analysis of the image Donne employs in 'The Exstasie'
and in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning' further to illustrate his
I
thesis. Eliot argues that 'The Exstasie', one of Donne's finest poems,
opens with what he calls 'one of the most hideous mixed figures of
speech in the language':
Where, like a pillow on a bed,

A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,

Sat we two, one another's best.
To compare a bank to a bed fails to dignify or elucidate, according to

Eliot. To make matters worse, the simile collides with a metaphor -
the bank is pregnant: 'Having already learned that the bank was shaped
like a pillow, we do not require to be told that it was pregnant, unless
an earthquake was preparing, which was not the case'.22 Moreover,
the reason the bank swells - to provide a pillow for the dropping
head of the violet - remains unjustified because· it violates the natural
order (banks do not exist to support violet's heads). Rather than clear,
undecorative images that clarify the thought, as we find in the Divine
Comedy, the use of the conceit in 'The Exstasie' fragments thought
into thought, which fragmentation makes Donne 'a mind of the
trecento in disorder; capable of experiencing and setting down many
supersensuous feelings, only the feelings are of a mind in chaos, not
of a mind in order'.23
If Donne's poetry fractioned thought into innumerable thoughts,
Crashaw's split emotion into emotions. Eliot criticises, for example,
Crashaw's dissection of the grotesque image of a tear resting its head
on a pillow and aligns it with Donne's image in 'The Extasie'.24 The
dissociation of the intellect and the emotions in the seventeenth
century resulted in a mental chaos, one' of whose chief symptoms is
cynicism.
Eliot saw in Donne's cynicism towards the world a forerunner of
Laforgue's self-directed irony. The French symbolist poet possessed 'an
innate craving for order: that is, every feeling should have its intellec-
tual equivalent, its philosophical justification, and that every idea should
have its emotional equivalent, its sentimental justification'.2s In
Laforgue's poetry Eliot detected a more advanced stage of the disin-
tegration of the intellect than in Donne. The former's life was
consciously split into thought and feeling, but his feelings were such
'as required an intellectual completion, a beatitude, and the philosophical
systems which he embraced were so much felt as to require a sensuous
completion'.26 In describing Laforgue, Eliot was describing himself.
With Dante as the touchstone, Eliot systematically criticises his earlier
poetic practice.
A further dimension of the disintegration of the intellect is witnessed
in the dissociation of sound and sense in the verse of the nineteenth
century:
It is a variation of focus: the focus is shifted, even if ever so little,

from sound to sense; from the sound of the word to the sound of
the sense of the word, if you like; to the consciousness of the
meaning of the word and pleasure in that sound having that
meaning - no amount of subtlety can quite express the Ane shades
of transitionP
Eliot describes this transition as being analogous to the shift of focus

from metaphysics to psychology: 'the word is not merely the noise, as
in the lyric, not merely the meaning, as in philosophical poetry; the
word is interesting for its own meaning, as well as what the writer
means to mean by it'.28 The 'conceited style' of Donne and his school
leads ironically to the 'rhetorical style' of Augustan writers, such as
Dryden and Johnson, who were its chief censurers. The poet ultimately
arrogates to himself the powers of Humpty Dumpty. The attempt to
associate sound, image, and thought in the nineteenth century was
'inorganic, and resulted in crudity of versification'. Eliot cites Arnold's
'Scholar Gypsy' and Swinburne's 'Hertha' as cases in point,29 These
poets failed to realise that 'sound and Sense must cooperate; in even
the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of words
cannot be disregarded without impunity'.3o To illustrate his point, Eliot
cites the following verses from Swinburne:
There lived a singer in France of old

By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
In Swinburne, Eliot argues, the meaning and the sound are interchange-
able. He employs the most general words - 'Gold', 'ruin', 'dolorous' -
because 'his emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision,
never focused'. He wants the vague associations of ideas that the
sound of words give him: 'the word . . . gives him the thrill, not the
object'. Against these inde6nite images, Eliot pits the sharply delineated
images from Inferno xxx. 64-5: 'Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli / Del
Casentin discendon giuso in Arno' {'The rivulets that from the verdant
hills of Casentino descend into the Arno').3! What we witness as a
result of this juxtaposition is a further degeneration of language:
'Language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the
object that the two are identified. They are identified in the verse of
Swinburne solely because the object has ceased to exist, because the
meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language,

uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric
nourishment.' 32
The evolution from Donne's style to Swinburne's becomes clearer
now. By being 'more interested in ideas themselves as objects than in
the truth of ideas', Donne 'almost anticipates the philosopher of the
coming age, Descartes'.33 Donne's conceited style, then, reflects an
increasing concern with the private mental processes of the poet and
a decreasing concern with external reality. That Donne could entertain
two opposing ideas simultaneously can lead the way to - this
projection is mine not Eliot's - Orwell's 1984. Its neo-Cartesian slogan
in this respect might be rendered, 'I doublethink, therefore I am'. In
Swinburne the word itself becomes the focus of attention: he practically
converts the word into an object. He consequently fails to embody
the external world, instead rupturing the natural affinity between
rightly ordered speech and reality achieved by Dante. Eliot summarised
the situation in this way: 'The trecento had an exact statement of
intellectual order; the seicento had an exact statement of intellectual
disorder; Shelley and Swinburne had a vague statement of intellectual
disorder.'34 The modem metaphysical poet should shun a language
which is vague and fails to present the object, and embrace one instead
'which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new groups of
objects, new feelings, new aspects'.3S For Eliot, Dante remained the
supreme practitioner of this realist conception of language.
I have noted how, in Ash-Wednesday, Eliot attempts to reassociate
sound and sense through the power of the Incarnate Word. A prose
model for Eliot at this time is Lancelot Andrewes to whom he assigns
a place in Dante's community of the born spiritual, one 'Che in questo
mondo, / Contemplando, gusto di quella pace' ('who in this world by
contemplation tasted of that peace'; Par. XXXI. 110--11). Eliot notes
three conspicuous qualities of his style: 'ordonnance, or arrangement
and structure, precision in the use of words, and relevant intensity',
the last of which, Eliot explains, means a disciplined treatment of the
subject according to its true importance.36 It is no accident in this
respect that Andrewes' sermons tackle the same subject, the Incarnation,
'and we are able to compare seventeen developments of the same
idea'.37 As opposed to Donne's sermons, Andrewes' prose proceeds in
'the most deliberately orderly manner, and as a result, phrases such as
lithe word within a word, unable to speak a word" , never desert the
memory. It is a phrase which haunts Eliot from Gerontion to Ash-
Wednesday.38
Similarly, Eliot pictures the ideal literary critic as one who is attentive
to the poet's use of the primitive power of the Word and the perfect
order of speech:
The ideal literary critic . . . should be primarily concerned with the

word and the incantation; with the question whether the poet has
used the right word in the right place, the rightness depending
upon both the explicit intention and inde6nite radiation of sound
and sense. He should differ from the practitioner of other sciences,
not so much by what he needs to know - for he needs to know
everything - as by his centre of values: in the beginning was the
word. 39
Eliot reinforced this vantage point when, in the Clark Lectures, he

described the 'dear, simple, and economical' style: 'Repetitious and
monotonous it may seem. But on examination you may find that every
phrase makes what went before it a little more intelligible, there is not
a word wasted.'40 This is the ideal of orderly style that Eliot celebrates
in Little Gidding v, where the common word is exact, 'taking its place
to support the others', with the result that every phrase and every
sentence is right. Eliot achieved the height of this style in describing
the encounter with the familiar ghost. I will defer discussion of this
achievement to the final chapter.
(ii) THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF ORDER
When For Lancelot Andrewes was published in 1928, the volume bore a
significant subtitle: Essays on Style and Order. Its Significance lies in
Eliot's wish to indicate certain lines of development in his thought.
And order is precisely the concept which unites his ethics, aesthetics,
and politics.41
The touchstone to understanding Eliot's perspective in this transition
is the work of Charles Maurras, to whom the 1929 essay is dedicated.
Eliot regarded Maurras as a kind of Virgil leading him into the world
of Dante, and used the following epigraph for his essay from Maurras'
own study of Dante: 'La sensibilite, sauvee d' elle-mane et conduite
dans l'ordre, est devenue un principe de perfection' ('Sensibility, saved
from itself and submitted to order, has become a principle of perfec-
tion'). Maurras' union of style and order is dose to Eliot's own: 'Style
consists in the order and movement which we introduce into our
thought. . . . Order is what we should call confonnity of being to all

the elements of fate.'42
Eliot aligns the views of Maurras on Dantescan style with T. E.
Hulme's understanding of order in a passage from Speculations:
[Man) is endowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally

accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never himself
be perfect. Certain secondary results in regard to ordinary human
action in society follow from this. A man is essentially bad, he can
only accomplish anything of value by discipline - ethical and
political. Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and
liberating. Institutions are necessary.43
Eliot joins the idea of a metaphorical fall as expressed in his theory of

dissociation of sensibility, with the belief in an actual, historical fall.
Hulme's anti-Romantic perspective counters Rousseau's belief that
institutions corrupt the natural goodness of humanity.
Eliot agrees with Hulme's point that a tenet of modem humanism is
man's perfectibility, and, as a consequence, he aligns its representatives,
Irving Babbitt and Norman Foerster, with Rousseau. 44 Eliot cited as
typical of Babbitt's attitude towards religious belief his declaration, 'To
be modem has meant practically to be increasingly positive and critical,
to refuse to receive anything on an authority "anterior, exterior, and
superior" to the individual: 45 Eliot's Catholicism and literary classicism
implied instead, as Middleton Murry observed, 'the principle of
unquestioned spiritual authority outside the individual'.46 From this
religious-literary vantage point, Eliot disputed Babbitt's claim for the
autonomy of the individual will over any higher force: What is the
higher will to will, if there is nothing "anterior, exterior, or superior"
to the individual? If this will is to have anything on which to operate,
it must be in relation to external objects and objective values.'47 When
Babbitt replied that the old curbs of authoritative government and
religion would be supplanted by what he called an 'inner check', Eliot
took this idea to be synonymous with Matthew Arnold's 'best self':
1n Culture and Anarchy . . . we hear something said about "the will
of God"; but "the will of God" seems to become superseded in
importance by "our best self, or right reason, to which we want to
give authority"; and this best self looks very much like Matthew
Arnold slightly disguised.'48 Whatever the universal implications of the
humanist theory, Eliot argued, the individual's private will remained
the 'higher will'. Liberalism and humanism were clones of each other.
If Eliot's attack on liberal humanism seems predictable, his joining

of Hulme with the first theorist of the modem state is surprising. He
describes Machiavelli as a 'man who accepted in his own fashion the
orthodox view of original sin'. This is evidenced by Machiavelli's
realpolitik, his depiction of human motives without the addition of
superhuman grace: What Machiavelli did not see about human nature
is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the
belief in Divine Grace.' The creed of Machiavelli is, accordingly,
unpalatable to those over the last three centuries who have tried to
exchange religious belief for 'belief in Humanity'. Machiavelli's 'imper-
sonality and detachment' allowed him to examine the corruption of
the Church while at the same time maintaining its value to the State.
Eliot quotes his statement from the Discourses, 'Religion produced good
order, and good order is generally attended with good fortune and
success in any undertaking', to support his own brand of Machiavelli-
anism: 'Liberty is good, but more important is order; and the
maintenance of order justifies every means.'49 This pithy statement is
not as sinister as it seems. It echoes Hulme's own sweeping statement,
'Nothing is bad in itself except disorder; all that is put in order in a
hierarchy is good.'50 Order is not a synonym for repression, but a
positive ideal, serving as the foundation of love, mercy, and justice.
For this reason, Eliot seconds Machiavelli's opinion that a National
Church fosters civic virtues and social harmony. The utility of Machia-
velli lies in his 'perpetual summons to examination of the weakness
and impurity of the soul. Weare not likely to forget his political
lessons, but his examination of conscience may be too easily
overlooked'.51 Eliot is always interested in the moral dimension of
political behaviour.
'Axe not Religion and Politics the same thingr asked Blake in
Jerusalem. Eliot, like Dante, is careful not to confuse the two realms:
Weare in danger always of translating notions too literally from

one order to another. I discern two chief pitfalls. The ideas of
authority, of hierarchy, of discipline and order, applied appropriately
in the temporal sphere, may lead us into some error of absolutism
or impossible theocracy. Or the ideas of humanity, brotherhood,
equality before God, may lead us to affirm that the Christian can
only be a socialiSt.52
This point cannot be overemphasised. In a letter written to Bonamy

Dobree in 1930 Eliot claims that the catchwords, 'Order' and 'Authority',
of his own time are more dangerous than 'Liberty' and 'Reform' were
in the nineteenth century. Writing about 'The Literature of FasCism'
for the Criterion in 1928 Eliot makes the same point: 'So far as
bolshevism is a practical way of running Russia - if it is - for the
material contentment of Russians, it seems to me worthy of study. So
far as it is a kind of supernatural faith it seems to be a humbug. The
same is true of fascism. There is a form of faith which is solely
appropriate to a religion; it should not be appropriated by politics:s3
His objection to these substitute faiths 'is the same as my objection to
the cult of the Golden Calf'.S4 He interpreted this modem tendency to
substitute political for religious creeds as an offshoot of Matthew
Arnold's attempt to substitute poetry for religion. ss
Eliot's persuasion was that there are 'only two finally tenable
hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic' - by which
he meant liberalism, socialism, fascism, and bolshevism.s6 Political
ideologies which act as the opiate of the masses deny man's spiritual
dimension and therefore constitute 'heresies':
The Catholic should have high ideals - or rather, I should say

absolute ideals - and moderate expectations: the heretic, whether he
call himself fascist, or communist, or democrat or rationalist, always
has low ideals and high expectations. For I say that all ambitions of
an earthly paradise are informed by low ideals.s7
Eliot's blanket condemnation might seem excessive, but his basic point,
that politics cannot fill what is essentially a spiritual void, is not
without merit. To regain Eden in terms of a temporally perfect order
means to bestow on earthly statehood the attributes of the heavenly
kingdom. In Eliot's view 'no great change can ever come without a
moral conversion' of individuals. His political pragmatism is based on
the principle that
The Catholic cannot commit himself utterly and absolutely to any

one form of temporal order. I do not mean that he must remain
aloof, or refuse to champion any course to which reason, sensibility
and wisdom converge to point; but that his attitude must be always
relative, that he must never devote the same passion to any
Kingdom of this world that he should render to the Kingdom of
God. s8
The summum bonum for the Christian, who must not neglect his civic
duties in the earthly city, is eternal life in the City of God. This
explains why Eliot claimed his announcement of faith religious, political,
and literary (Anglo-Catholic, royalist, and classicist) gave some critics
the wrong impression that all were 'inextricable and of equal
imporlance'.59
We might consider his Christian belief as a hindrance, but Eliot
viewed it rather as an aid in enlarging the breadth of his political
vision, in liberating him from too great subservience to intermediate
ideological principles. Political action is restricted to the temporal
sphere, whereas the Church's mission transcends time: 'To identify any
particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error:
for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with
the contingent:60 But since eternity intersects with time, the individual
cannot adopt a political ideology that subverts objective ethical and
moral values. In this context Eliot's terse response to the charge of
anti-Semitism, 'I am a Christian, and therefore, I am not an anti-
Semite',61 becomes clearer. 'In the eyes of the Church', he added, 'to
be anti-Semitic is a sin:62
In relating political authority to sin, Eliot was reaching back to a
tradition as old as Augustine, who regarded the earthly city as a
product of man's fallen condition, only made redeemable through
subservience to the City of God. In The Rock this idea is expressed as
follows: ' "Our citizenship is in Heaven"; yes, but that is the model
and type for your citizenship upon earth:63 Eliot found this tradition
summed up in a passage from Dante's Purgatorio which served as a
source for 'Animula':
Onde convenne legge per fren porre;

convenne rege aver, che discernesse
della vera ciUade almen la torre.
(Therefore laws were needed as a curb; a ruler was

needed, who should at least see afar the tower of
the true City)
(Purg. XVI. 94-6)
According to Eliot, 'the human soul - l'anima simplicetta - is neither

good nor bad; but in order to be good, in order to be human, requires
discipline: Onde convenne legge per fren po"e'.64 He shared with his friend
Paul Elmer More what he called 'the fundamental beliefs of an
intellectual conservatism, that man requires an askesis' as expressed in
politics.65 Like Dante, Eliot applies Augustine's point about original sin
and the individual soul to the social order. Hulme's position can Anally
be traced to Dante's statement in the De Monarchia on the necessity
of Church and Empire as external authorities for inner discipline and
control: 'since governments exist to. guide men toward specific
goals . . . there would have been no use for them if man had remained
in the state of innocence in which he was created. For devices such as
governments are remedies for the infirmity of sin:66 Sin, then, is also
a disorder that affects the human being as a social and political animal
and must therefore be rectified. The recognition of sin is the beginning
of a new political as well as spiritual life. This point is consolidated in
Purgatorio XXVII when Virgil dismisses Dante, who has now achieved
interior freedom after having been cleansed of his sin:
Libero, dritto e sano e tuo arbitrio,

e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
perch'io te sopra te corono e mitrio
(Your will is free, straight and whole, and not to

follow its direction would be sin: wherefore I
crown and mitre you (king and bishop) over yourself.)
(Purg. XXVII. 140-2)
Eliot comments: 'Dante has now arrived at a condition, for the purposes
of the rest of the journey, which is that of the blessed: for political
and ecclesiastical organization are only required because of the imper-
fections of the human will: 67 We have come full circle. In Eliot's view
human beings need divine grace to aid their enfeebled will to recover
the state of Eden. Institutions are necessary instruments in the earthly
city to facilitate this process in so far as they guide the individual
towards the towers of the true city.
(iii) CHURCH AND STATE: MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
The theological and spiritual dimension of order is best exemplified by

Piccarda's apothegm in Paradiso, 'In His will is our peace'. The
apothegm is an instance of Maurras' notion of order as 'conformity to
all elements of its fate', here translated as conformity to the will of
God or providential order. In this sense, then, sin is behovely and all
things shall be well. Dante's political vision follows immediately from

this thought. The Church, representative of God's will in the world,
calls the individual freely to accept its authority which binds him not
through tyranny but through love. The relation between the Church
and its members is, like the bond of love, based on freedom and must
therefore be felt, in time, as a kind of ineluctability. It is crucial to
distinguish, then, the authority of the Church from the power of
Machiavelli's earthly princes. The power of the prince or king is good
only in so far as it freely aligns itself with the Church's spiritual
authority; otherwise it would be a perverted power which negated the
freedom of its subjects. Similarly, the Church, if it imposed itself by
force, would negate the principle of authority.
Eliot dramatises this distinction between temporal and spiritual
power in Murder in the Cathedral. In the words of the third priest,
I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal

government,
But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation.
King rules or barons rule:
The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice.
They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it,
And the steadfast can manipulate the greed and lust of others,
The feeble is devoured by his own.68
In opposition to this practice of power politicS, Thomas urges the

subservience of temporal rulers to the sovereignty of God:
Temporal power, to build a good world,

To keep order, as the world knows order.
Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder,
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt.
(p. 250)
Those who trust only in temporal order 'Are stabilising chaos, perpet-
uate disorder' as an early draft has it.69 The tempter responds
boastfully, 1 know how to hold my estates in order'. But the crux of
the situation lies in the opening statement of the chorus, We try to
keep our households in order', an allusion to Isaiah 38:1, which points
to impending death. And Thomas, before he is martyred, repeats the

cry of Antigone, 'I give my life / To the Law of God above the Law
of Man' (p. 274); that is, 'The Kingdom of God is greater than the
kingdom of Man.'70 He dies convinced that 'here is no continual city'
(p. 243), alluding to Hebrews 11:13-16, a passage on which Augustine
based his idea of the two cities. He considers himself 'no traitor, no
enemy of the state'.
To set one's house in order means making perfect the will. As the
chorus, echoing Dante, affirms, 'The peace of this world is always
uncertain, unless men keep the peace of God' (p. 263). Thomas himself
understands that
A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made
by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's
will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may
become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God,
for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them
back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr
is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will
in the will of God, [not lost it but found it, for he has found
freedom in submission to God].71
The will to power and the will to holiness are clearly distinguished,
and what remains for Thomas is to rectify his intention: 1 have
therefore only to make perfect my will' (p. 271) by losing his will in
the will of God and paradoxically finding freedom as a result. Eliot's
point is the equivalent of Piccarda's:
Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse
tenersi dentro alia divina voglia,
per ch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse.
(Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold
ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills
are themselves made one.)
(Par. III. 79-81)
Neither Eliot not Dante resorts to merely temporal resolutions to

political contradictions. Dante's final vision of 'a divine order which
penetrates and controls the world's confusions and resolves its contra-
didion' refleds the words of the Psalmist, 'The Lord is King now, he
has put the world in order, never to be thrown into confusion more.'72
Similarly, Eliot resolves the historical and political impasse of the

English Wars of the Roses in his vision of the timeless rose in Little
Gidding. Order in the universe, as Dante believed, reflects the design
of the divine artist (Par. I. 103-8).
Thomas's statement brings into focus the traditional problem of
God's foreknowledge and man's free will: 'Only / The fool, fixed in
his folly, may think / He can turn the wheel on which he turns' (p.
247). The image of the wheel is central to the play and is sounded in
Thomas's first speech where it is affirmed that everyone is fixed in a
eternal action
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.
(p.245)
For Eliot as for Dante the wheel can 'turn and be forever still' because
God is the first cause, the unmoved mover.73 In Inferno VII. 67 Dante
says Fortune should not be reviled since she turns her wheel in
conformity with God's will; moreover, man's free will is beyond her
pale of influence (Inferno xv. 91-9). Eliot translates these concepts in
the following manner:
Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of
statesmen
Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,
Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of
time.
(p. 240)
Only by yielding his turning will to God's will can the statesman
reach the stillness of the unmoved mover, and achieve the peace and
prosperity that only he can give.
This background illuminates the devastating irony behind the
portrayal of the dictator in 'Triumphal March', whom the people
honour as the 'still point of the turning world'. Eliot satirises this
displacement of 'supernatural faith': the entry, as Grover Smith suggests,
mocks that of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. For Eliot the
alternatives are crystal clear: 'If you will not have God (and He is a
jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin',74 whom
The Aesthetics and Polities of Order 141
he considered tyrannical. The poem alludes to Sordello's condemnation

in Purgatorio VI of the political chaos which beset Italy and the Holy
Roman Empire. Eliot's portrayal of the strong-man dictator is an
implicit criticism of the messianic political hopes Dante placed in the
coming of Henry VII to set all things right: ('ch'a drizzare Italia / verra';
Par. xxx. 137-8). Faced with the twin tyrannies of fascism and
communism, citizen Eliot, like citizen Dante, chose to constitute a party
by himself.
When World War II broke out, Eliot's response was typical: 'The
feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation,
which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, of
repentance and amendment; what happened was something in which
one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not a criticism of
the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilization: 7s He
accordingly set out to 'redeem the time' in his wartime quartets and
rebuild that civilisation from its Christian roots. His own literary
patriotism is witnessed in the following remark: 'Dante, no one can
doubt, was passionately devoted to his native Florence, and he certainly
lived through a period of disorder; but I think that his love of Florence
is revealed, not by a recital of her martial glories, but by his vehement
lament over her corruption:76
Eliot related his criticism as well as his poetry to the social and
political life of his time. In his blueprint for a Christian society, he
based his universal 'idea', though not its particulars, on Dante: 77 'It
would be a society in which the natural end of man - virtue and well-
being in community - is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural
end - beatitude - for those who have the eyes to see it . . . our
temporal and spiritual life should be harmonized: the temporal and
spiritual would never be identi6ed. There would always remain a dual
allegiance, to the State and to the Church: 78 Eliot's statement recalls
the distinction made in De Monarchia between the two ends which
Providence ordains for humanity: 'the bliss of life' and 'the bliss of
eternal life'.79 Dante blames the corruption of his times on the bad
government of the popes and emperors through his mouthpiece Marco
Lombardo:
Ben puoi veder che la mala condoUa
e la cagion che il mondo ha faUo reo.
(Clearly thou canst see that evil leadership is the
cause which hath made the world sinful.)
(Purg. XVI. 103-4)
For Eliot, however, the struggle between Church and State is neces-
sarily a healthy one: 'At times, [the Church] can and should be in
conflict with the State, in rebuking derelictions in policy, or in
defending itself against encroachments of the temporal power, or in
shielding the community against tyranny and asserting its neglected
rights, or in contesting heretical opinion or immoral legislation and
administration.'80 He even went so far as to affirm that 'a certain
tension between Church and State is desirable. When Church and State
fall out completely, it is ill with the commonwealth; and when Church
and State get on too well together, there is something wrong with the
Church.'sl These statements furnish the context for the second knight's
'temptation' of the audience in Murder in the Cathedral:
Had Becket concurred with the King's wishes, we should have had
an almost ideal State: a union of spiritual and temporal administra-
tion, under the central government. . . . And what happened1 The
moment that Becket, at the King's instance, had been made
Archbishop . . . he affirmed immediately that there was a higher
order than that which our King, and he as the King's servant, had
for so many years striven to establish; and that - God knows why
- the two orders were incompatible. . . . But, if you have arrived
at a just subordination of the pretensions of the Church to the
welfare of the State, remember that it is we who took the first step.
We have been instrumental in bringing about. the state of affairs
that you approve. We have served your interests; we merit your
applause; and if there is any guilt whatever in the matter, you must
share it with us.
(pp.278-9)
The issue is whether to find freedom in voluntary submission to the

will of God or to find 'absolute submission to the will of a Leader ...
made an article of faith'.s2 Eliot replies with an incisive paradox: 'Surely
the royalist can only admit one higher authority than the Throne,
which is the Church.'s3 Eliot chose Becket to dramatise this principle;
he could just as easily have chosen Thomas More.
For Eliot the constant danger which the Church faces in the modern
world is Erastianism.84 This viewpoint has led Nunzio Cossu to define
Eliot's thought as a type of 'English neoguelfism' based on his call for
a National Church as a way of affirming the universal Church on
earth, ss a call which is epitomized in the following verses from The
Rock:
When your fathers fixed the place of GOD
Then they could set about imperial expansion

Accompanied by industrial development.
Exporting iron, coal and cotton goods
And intellectual enlightenment
And everything including capital
And several versions of the Word of GOD;
The British race assured of a mission
Performed it.56
The point that God's will works in history through the British race is
Eliot's version of Dante's conviction of the special providential mission
assigned to the Holy Roman Empire as the instrument of world order
and peace. Eliot commits himself, like Dante, 'to what in the eyes of
the world must be a desperate belief. that a Christian world-order, the
Christian world-order, is ultimately the only one which, from any point
of view, will work'.87 Eliot judges temporal values in the light of
eternal values. In the opening of East Coker Ill, for instance, he depicts
contemporary society as being mechanistic and materialistic, Anding
itself in a spiritual dark wood. It is a claim he repeats in The Idea of a
Christian Society:
Perhaps the dominant vice of our time, from the point of view of
the Church, will prove to be Avarice. Surely there is something
wrong in our attitude towards money. The acquisitive, rather than
the creative and spiritual instincts, are encouraged. The fact that
money is always forthcoming for the purpose of making more
money, whilst it is so difficult to obtain for purposes of exchange,
and for the needs of the most needy, is disturbing to those who
are not economists. . . . And I believe that modern war is chiefly
caused by some immorality of competition which is always with us
in times of 'peace'; and that until this evil is cured, no leagues or
disarmaments or collective security or conferences or conventions
or treaties will suffice to prevent it. 88
In this conviction Eliot recalls Dante's point in the De Monarchia that

humankind can only enjoy the peace when 'the waves of distracting
greed are stilled'. 89 Dante saw avarice as the greatest obstacle to justice
in the world. 90 It is a charge which Eliot also levels against the 'True
Church', which 'need never stir / To gather in its dividends' in 'The

Hippopotamus', and in 'Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service', where
presbyters are referred to as 'sapient sutlers' and the young faithful are
'Clutching piaculative pence'.91 This is why Eliot acknowledged, 'For
myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a
right theology - and right economics to depend upon right ethics:92
If concrete application of his immediate goals seems indistinct, his
ultimate goals are less so. It is from the perspective of Eden, with its
emphasis on 'rightness' and 'straightening out what is crooked', that
Eliot, like Dante, puts forward his vision of a secular order.
Eliot's position should not be misconstrued. He did not consider
himself as ultramontane as his Italian mentor, but he clung to the idea
that Catholicism was the only remedy for the ills of the modem
world. 93 It would be misleading in this context to characterise Eliot as
an 'imperialist poet' whose master was Virgil, the prophet of the
Roman Empire, the secular body of the Church.94 Eliot's 'imperialism'
is of a special kind, as he made clear in 1926:
The old Roman Empire is a European idea, the new Roman Empire
an Italian idea, and the two must be kept distinct. . . . The general
idea is found in the continuity of the impulse of Rome to the
present day. It suggests Authority and Tradition, certainly, but
Authority and Tradition (especially the latter) do not necessarily
suggest Signor Mussolini. It is an idea which comprehends Hooker
and Laud as much as (or to some of use more than) it implies St
Ignatius or Cardinal Newman. It is in fact the European idea - the
idea of a common culture of western Europe. 95
Eliot's vision casts aside actual Rome and the historical Roman Empire,
as A. D. Moody points out, but invokes the ideal Rome of Dante
which embraces in its expansion the Church of England too, an empire,
in short, 'founded not upon Caesar, but upon divine Love'.96 The
dominant force in a common European culture was the Christian
religion. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot registers a
detached appreciation of his faith as a cultural fact:
It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity

that the laws of Europe have - until recently - been rooted. It is
against a background of Christianity that all our thought has
significance. An individual European may not believe that the

Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does,
will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend
upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could
have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the
culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the
Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I
am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If
Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. 97
By reminding modem man of his Christian roots, Eliot acts as a

custodian of this cultural legacy of a Europe which achieved its highest
expression in the work of Dante.
To those, like Middleton Murry, who argued that 'the modem
consciousness beginS historically with the repudiation of organized
Christianity',98 this stance towards culture seemed reactionary, out of
step with the twentieth century. From Eliot's perspective the fact that
Christianity was also out of step in the early years of the historical
Roman Empire was crucial. His conversion is, perhaps, as Donald Davie
suggests, the 'one event . . . that lifts him far above the common-
place'.99 Eliot once remarked that the religious side of Hulme's classicism
'is in a sense reactionary, but it must be in a profounder sense
revolutionary' since it initiated 'a new attitude of mind'.lOo We can see
the modem metaphysical poet in the same light. A passage from the
Turnbull Lectures confirms this view:
The artist is the only genuine and profound revolutionist, in the

following sense. The artist, being always alone, being heterodox
when everyone else is orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else
is heterodox, is the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the
restorer of the real. He may appear at one time to hold one extreme
opinion, at another period another, but his function is to bring back
humanity to the real. lOI
If we are accustomed to think of Eliot as a revolutionary in style but

a conservative in thought, he mischievously upsets our conventional
responses, maintaining that he is a revolutionary in thought as well.
By going beyond the frontiers of the real, the artist restores our sense
of reality or perspective. In this profounder way, Eliot may be seen as
a radical conservative.
The location of order, then, is not an end in itself. It is completed
by the attainment of serenity which Eliot found, for example, in

George Herbert's poetry: 1t is on [the] note of joy in convalescence of
the spirit in surrender to God, that the life of discipline of this haughty
and irascible Herbert finds conclusion: In His will is our peace.'102
Maurras guided Eliot, as Virgil guided Dante, towards a region of
religious sensibility that Maurras could not enter.
If Eliot's works taken together become, by analogy, a Dante
exploring the spiritual and social life of our time, the passage on art
and order from Poetry and Drama cited earlier (see above, p. 126)
reaffirms his Dantescan strategy of bringing hi~ readers from a state of
misery to one of felicity. If art can be a Virgil whose function was, in
Eliot's words, 'to lead Dante towards a vision he could never himself
enjoy and . . . Europe towards the Christian culture which he could
never know',10J then the reader can be a Dante too. But author and
reader move from fiction to life, from a fiction that is not a fiction, as
Charles Singleton says of the Divine Comedy,104 towards a vision
denied to Virgil: the 'order' of the universe bound in one volume by
the Love that moves the sun and other stars. For Eliot, too, 'Love . . .
[is] a principle of order in the human soul, in society and the
universe.'los In setting out to order the fragments of his age through
this vision, Eliot retained Dante as the supreme guide. He could say
of Dante as Statius said of Virgil, 'Per te poeta fuj, per te cristiano'
(Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian'; Purg. XXII. 73).
6
Eliot's Dante and the Modems
(i) LITTLE GIDDING: EUOT AND YEATS'S GHOST
Dante's shadowy presence in Eliot's poetry is perhaps nowhere more

keenly felt than in the meeting with the 'familiar compound ghost'
which takes place in London. The scene, with its burning streets that
resemble a wartime Inferno, continues to fascinate readers even while
generating controversy. Eliot's intention in depicting this hallucinated
scene after an air-raid was 'to present to the mind of the reader a
parallel, by means of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio'.1
But the nub of the problem, as A. C. Charity formulates it, is that
We cannot, on this ghost's simple say-so, turn Hell into Purgatory.
And if one asks again, why the recourse to Dante? one begins to
wonder if it is not partly out of weakness here, and not of strength;
partly to assist the poet to disavow that which, another way, he
would acknowledge; both to help him form, and to evade, a
judgement.2
Eliot was in fact not eager to render any moral judgement with the
sweeping finality of a Dante and refused to sharpen his pen against
147
those who did not subscribe to the ethical vision he proposed in Four
Quartets. This new stance marked a departure from his adoption of an
'orthodox sensibility' as a criterion in After Strange Gods to judge his
literary contemporaries - Yeats included - in Dantescan fashion. A
number of reasons emerge to explain why the poet avoids any direct
confrontation with the ghost. In the first version of the passage Eliot
had 'Are you here, Ser Brunetto?' which he later replaced with What!
are you here?' and added the new idea of restoration
by that refining fire

Where you must learn to swim, and better nature.
By way of explanation for this revision, Eliot wrote to John Hayward

on 27 August 1942:
I think you will recognise that it was necessary to get rid of

Brunetto for two reasons. The first is that the visionary figure has
now become somewhat more definite and will no doubt be identified
by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so
precise as that. However, I do not wish to take the responsibility
of putting Yeats or anybody else into Hell and I do not want to
impute to him the particular vice which took Brunetto there.
Secondly, although the reference to that Canto is intended to be
explicit, I wished the effect of the whole to be Purgatorial which is
more appropriate. That brings us to the reference to swimming in
fire which you will remember at the end of Purgatorio 26 where
the poets are found. The active co-operation is, I think, sound
theology and is certainly sound Dante, because the people who talk
to him at that point are represented as not wanting to waste time
in conversation but Wishing to dive back into the fire to accomplish
their expiation. However, I have for the moment at least discarded
the whole image and rather like the suggestion of the new line
which carries some reminder of a line, I think it is about Mark
Antony.3
Eliot had employed 'swim' literally to re-enact Guido Guinicelli's

disappearance in Purgatorio XXVI 'like a fish going through water' ('come
per l'acqua pesce andando al fondo'; 134-5). Eliot then changed 'swim'
to 'move' and recast the line, Where you must move in measure, like
a dancer'. The new line incorporates Yeats's image of the dance in the
Byzantium poems with those souls in Purgatorio XXVI-XXVII who purge
Eliot's Dante and the Moderns 149
themselves with joyful pain in the reAning fire. Blake, a formative

influence behind Yeats's poems, portrayed these figures as dancers in
his illustrations to the Divine Comedy. Although Eliot did not seem to
be aware of Yeats's borrowing from Blake,4 the image of the dance
fits his collocation of these various figures since, as he himself
suggested, it is symbolic of 'an askesis ... a moral training'.s What I
am suggesting is that Eliot produces in this celebrated passage creative
readings of both Dante and Yeats which he then brilliantly super-
imposes one over the other.
The figure of Yeats, who forms the most recognisable aspect of the
familiar dead master, haunted Eliot's imagination as a great yet
disturbing presence. On the verso of the notesheets for the first annual
Yeats lecture delivered in June 1940, Eliot wrote a first draft of part of
Little Gidding, so much were the two enterprises identified in his mind.
In hailing Yeats as the major poet of his age, Eliot did not shrink from
stating in a general way the differences which had separated the two
poets over the years. I quote this statement because it is not often
emphasised:
To be able to praise, it is not necessary to feel complete agreement;

and I do not dissimulate the fact there are aspects of Yeats's thought
which to myself are unsympathetic. I say this only to indicate the
limits which I have set to my criticism. The questions of difference,
objection and protest arise in the field of doctrine, and these are
vital questions. I have been concerned only with the poet and
dramatist, so far as these can be isolated. In the long run they
cannot be wholly isolated.6
Eliot indicates at one point, for example, that he dislikes the title of
Yeats's play, Purgatory, because he cannot accept 'a purgatory in which
there is no hint, or at least no emphasis upon Purgation'. 7 On the
other hand, Eliot commends Yeats for 'the purification of his verse'
which is marked in his later plays by a steady improvement 'towards
greater and greater starkness'.8 These remarks set the stage for the
dead master's pronouncement, 'our concern was speech, and speech
impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe'.
This last verse implies more than Mallarme's 'donner un sens plus
pur aux mots de la tribu'. What Eliot captures in this phrase is the
whole history of a literary relationship based on mutual respect, but
even more on mutual differences. Yeats, for instance, referred to himself
in 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931' as one of 'the last romantics', who
'chose for theme / Traditional sanctity and loveliness'. It is a curious

statement from one who spoke for many of his contemporaries and
ours when he insisted, in the same breath, that the word 'belief' did
not in any way belong to our age.9 Deprived of a form that could
render coherent belief, Yeats, like most modems, attempted to make
of his own imagination such a form, perhaps affirming with Blake's
Los, 1 must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's'. Yeats
called this system 'an almost infallible church of poetic tradition'.Io In
Blake's time, he explained, 'educated people ... "made their souls"
by listening to sermons and by doing or not doing certain things. . . .
In our time we are agreed that we "make our souls" out of some of
the great poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or
Goethe, or Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy:n This desire to be
'self-born, born anew',12 or to remake himself, led Yeats to claim, 'all
art is an asceticism of the imagination'.!3 But, at the same time, he
distinguished between two kinds of asceticism: 'The imaginative writer
differs from the saint in that he identifies himself - to the neglect of
his own soul, alas! - with the soul of the world: The saint seeks not
an 'eternal art', or the 'artifice of eternity' in the phrase of 'Sailing to
Byzantium', but his own eternity.14 The artist seeks an eternity for a
soul, his mask or double, made in his own image and likeness; the
saint seeks an eternity for a soul made in the image and likeness of a
Maker. The difference lies between 'self-renewal' and 'being renewed'.
Eliot remarked that, in doing so, Yeats was subscribing to the Amoldian
tenet, poetry can replace religion. IS
We can understand Eliot's bafflement by Yeats's claim both to
embrace traditional sanctity and yet to preserve the modem distinction
between 'error' and 'sin' which Dante refused to make. I6 Eliot both as
a classicist and as a Christian was engaged in rediscovering the sense
of sin. He tends to unite spiritual and aesthetic questing, Yeats to
separate them: 1f it be true that God is a circle whose centre is
everywhere, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and the artist to the
ring where everything comes round again: I7 For Yeats the poet must
not seek for what is still and fixed, but rather remain in the cyclical
world of impermanent things and achieve what in 'Under Ben Bulben'
he calls 'Profane perfection of mankind'. For Eliot this would make the
poet a slave to the temporal world while denying him the possibility
of intersecting with the timeless. The saint's task is to apprehend this
point of intersection, but in doing so he remains as much a part of the
temporal order as do the poet and the artiSt. I8
These differing perspectives on the relationship between art and
Eliot's Dante and the Modems 151
eternity help explain why Eliot identified Yeats in his imagination in

the way that Dante had identified Brunetto Latini in his. Brunetto had
taught Dante 'how man makes himself eternal' through his art. In
Inferno XV Brunetto believes, ironically, that his pupil's quest repeats
his own, and predicts that Dante will follow his star and reach the
,glorioso porto' (,glorious port') of earthly fame. For the pilgrim who
seeks heavenly glory instead, Brunetto's voyage constitutes a literary
version of Ulysses' 'foUe volo' . Yeats, like Brunetto, on the other hand,
believes that man is 'self-sufficing and eternal',19 affirming with Blake,
'the world of imagination is the world of eternity'. In the exchange
with the familiar ghost, Eliot modifies Yeats's Blake-inspired reading of
Dante to make a telling point.
In Ash-Wednesday and 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul' Eliot and Yeats
climb the winding stair of Dante's mount purgatory. Their attitudes to
the ascent are, as we might expect, markedly different. The 'tower'
here, as in 'The Blood and the Moon' and other poems, is called
'blessed' by Yeats and leads him to contemplate the goodness of what
he has made in the manner God contemplated his primal creation. But
the nature of this blessedness is secular. The 'soul' wants to be purged
of former sins and seek ultimate forgiveness. So far Yeats imitates
Dante's ascent and that of Eliot in Ash-Wednesday. But the 'self',
representative of the creative power of the poet, looks down from the
tower at the world below and finds he can go no further, and prefers
instead to return to the world of human passions, absolve himself of
his past misdeeds, and proclaim the holiness of all things.
Eliot renders Yeats's desire for absolution in 'the rending pain of re-
enactment / Of all that you have done, and been', which in tum recalls
Francesca's 'There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in
wretchedness'. Eliot slightly alters Yeats's attitude by having the ghost
confess,
I am not eager to rehearse

My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both good and bad.
In this alteration Eliot gains the sense of forgiveness and penance that
was also captured in an early draft:
Fire without and fire within

Shall purge the unidentified sin
This is the place where we begin.20
One aspect of the ghost's theory which his pupil must now reconcile
to his own practice is precisely this notion of 'purification' as it pertains
to language. When faced with a choice between speech and silence in
'A Dialogue of Self and ,Soul', Yeats opts for the former. To follow
the soul into another life beyond time would mean to surrender the
self and - even more inconceivable for the poet - his tongue. By
retreating from the soul's ascent, Yeats attempts to achieve blessedness
and self-forgiveness through the medium of his own words. Ironically,
however, the dialogue ends in a monologue of the self. Similarly, the
heart in 'VaciUation' refuses to have its sins purged by Isaiah's coal
and its tongue struck dumb in the simplicity of fire as the soul suggests.
The 'unchristened heart' prefers, like Homer, to speak of original sin
rather than of purification. In 'The Rose upon the Rood of Time' Yeats
expresses the fear that he might 1eam to chaunt a tongue men may
not know', a tongue that sounds like Babel but is actually God's
Word. 21 According to the affirmation in 'The Song of the Happy
Shepherd', 'words alone are certain good'.
Eliot sets out to reverse the purely humanistic notions of language
adopted by Yeats in the same way that Dante reverses those of
Brunetto in Inferno xv. To build one's own tower, like the descendants
of Noah who intended to make a name for themselves, is to find
oneself in Babel, as Eliot discovered in The Waste Land. 'To purify the
dialect of the tribe' implies renewing the life and language of self and
community by a medium outside the poet's own craft. Triumphing
over what Eliot, after Mallarme, called 'the natural sin of language'22
requires a purged or redeemed speech, a willingness on the part of the
poet, as in 'Marina', to resign his speech for that unspoken. If Eliot
disagrees with Yeats on this crucial point, he none the less pays tribute
to his ghost just as Dante pays tribute to Brunetto.23 Eliot lauds the
honesty of Yeats as a poet of old age, and quotes in support these
lines from 'The Spur' :24
You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance upon myoid age;
They were not such a plague when I was young:
What else have I to spur me into song?
Eliot comments, 'To what honest man, old enough, can these senti-
ments be entirely alien? They can be subdued and disciplined by
religion, but who can say they are dead?'lS Through the image of the
dancer, Eliot succeeds in merging Yeats with Amaut Daniel, who
plunges into the refining Are and metaphorically purifies the poet's
tongue as well. By having the ghost share the traits of both Brunetto
and Arnaut, Eliot transforms an infernal scene into a purgatorial one.
Dante's crowning achievement is, as Roger Scruton ,suggests, at once
stylistic and spiritual: 1t is as though the poet rose to felicity through
purification of sinful speech.'l6 The same can be said of Eliot.
In attempting to arrive at 'a condition of complete Simplicity', Eliot
perhaps recalls Pierre's moment of spiritual insight in Tolstoy'S War
and Peace: 'Simplicity is submission to the will of God.'l7 This version
of Dante's 'His will is our peace' has its linguistic repercussions. The
communication of the familiar compound ghost defers to that of the
Holy Ghost, who consumes the Babelic confusion of tongues in the
pentecostal Are, the gift of tongues. In this way, 'the communication /
Of the dead is tongued with Are beyond the language of the living'.
This communion of saints has its literary counterpart in the 'uncon-
scious community' of artists. There are echoes in the speech of the
familiar compound ghost from Shakespeare, Milton, Mallarme, Swift,
and others whose voices blend with Dante's; Eliot has been refining
their words into the Etemal Word. l8 The verbal echoes function as the
equivalent to Dante's meeting with the shades of the dead poets in
the Divine Comedy. Little Gidding is the symbol, both religious and
literary, of the call for communication and community foreshadowed
in Ash-Wednesday. In both poems Eliot finds himself speaking in unison
with others, the 'we' of shared experience that A. D. Moody describes:
'there is the gathering of the cultural tradition, in its philosophical,
literary and social aspects, into the one present moment; and there is
the effort to unite himself with the living and the dead in God'.l9 To
bind together all things into a book of memory is to re-enact the
fundamental meaning of the Christian Logos.
Eliot borrows a number of textual and linguistic details from Dante
to depict the encounter with the compound ghost. The meeting, for
instance, takes place 1n the uncertain hour before the morning', a
reworking of Dante's line, 'Dianzi, nell' alba che precede al giomo'
(Purg. IX. 53).30 The ghost's proverbial 'Last season's fruit is eaten /
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail', recalls the lament for
fame of Oderisi in Purgatorio XI ('Earthly fame is nought but a breath
of wind'; 99) which deflates Brunetto's quest. 31 Some of the ghost's
traits recall Brunetto too. The 'brown baked features', for instance, are
those of Brunetto in Inferno xv. 26. 'That pointed scrutiny with which
we challenge / The first met stranger in the waning dusk' is a faint
echo of 'each looked at us as one looks at another in the evening
under a new moon, their eyebrows puckered together as they peered
at us as an old tailor does at the eye of his needle'.32 The poet and
his double meet 'Between three distrids', presumably between heaven,
purgatory, and hell. 33 The ghost fades on the blowing of the hom by
which the all dear - or the world's end - is sounded. The hom might
also be the one that sounds below the sand where Brunetto ran: 'Ma
io senti' sonare un alto como' (Inf. XXXI. 12). On this sounding, Dante
sees Nimrod who holds the hom that had destroyed speech.34 For this
reason, too, speech needs to be purified.
To amplify the Dantescan echo, Eliot attempted to imitate the style
as well as the content of a canto from the Inferno or the Purgatorio. As
he himself indicated in his lecture at the Italian institute,
My first problem was to find an approximation of the terzJl rima
without rhyming. English is less copiously provided with rhyming
words than Italian . . . I therefore adopted, for my purpose, a
simple alteration of unrhymed masculine and feminine terminations,
as the nearest way of giving the light effed of the rhyme in
ltalian.35
Eliot employs lines of ten, eleven and twelve syllables (Dante's
endecasillabo) and achieves the effed of rhyme - in linking together his
terzine as well - by alternating the final stress, first on the penultimate
syllable, then on the final syllable, then again on the penultimate
syllable.36 The following unrhymed masculine and feminine endings
from the ghost passage successfully approximate a pattern similar to
Dante's terzJl rima: 'morning', 'night', 'unending'; 'tongue', 'homing',
'tin', 'sound was', 'arose', 'hurried'. What Eliot learned from trying to
imitate Dante's rhythm and style in English was its extreme difficulty:
This section of a poem - not the length of one canto of the Divine
Comedy - cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than
any passage of the same length that I have ever written. It was not
simply that I was limited to the Dantesque type of imagery, simile
and figure of speech. It was chiefly that in this very bare and austere
style, in which every word has to be 'functional', the slightest
vagueness or imprecision is immediately noticeable. The language
has to be very dired; the line, and the single word must be
completely disciplined to the purpose of the whole; and, when you

are using simple words and simple phrases, any repetition of the
most common idiom, of the most frequently needed word, becomes
a glaring blemish.37
These comments constitute Eliot's general statement about poetry

which in Little Gidding is translated as the 'complete consort dancing
together', the linguistic askesis needed to form a perfect order of
speech. Eliot's Dantescan exercise becomes a paradigm for the craft of
modem poetry. Even more remarkable is Eliot's imitation of Dante's
'very bare and austere style' which is reminiscent of Yeats's own
'starkness'. In the end the familiar compound ghost writer is Eliot
himself, who joins the styles of both Yeats and Dante and makes them
his own.
(ii) LITTLE GIDDING REVISITED: HEANEY AND JOYCE'S GHOST
Modem writers continue to lionise Dante as Dante lionised Virgil: 'Tu

se' 10 mio maestro e il mio autore' ('You are my master and my
author'; Inf. I. 85). Poets as diverse as Geoffrey Hill, Thomas Kinsella,
and Seamus Heaney have identified themselves with the medieval
master, which identification is testimony to the staying power of the
Comedy. Heaney in particular has recently reminded us that 'when
great poets tum to the great masters of the past, they tum to an
image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of
their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and proce-
dures'.38 One of the modem poets who most concerns him is Eliot,
and, in analysing the second movement of Little Gidding, Heaney makes
a pertinent point:
The language of the 'Little Gidding' passage seeks for things which
'men of various races and lands could think together'; it tends to
eschew the local. the intimate, the word which reeks of particular
cultural attachments, and opts instead for words like 'unappeased
and peregrine', 'impelled', 'expiring', 'conscious impotence', 1acera-
tion', 're-enactment', 'exercise of virtue', 'exasperated', 'valediction'.
Indeed at its most primitive and dialect moment, the moment in the
animal heat of the byre at milking time, it interposes the smooth
and decorous monosyllabic noun, 'pail', as if to distance us from the
raucous and parochial energies of the usual 'bucket'.
[It is] a language which gives the illusion of absolute authority, of a

purity beyond dialect and tribe, an imperial lexicon, in fact, a Roman
vocabulary which is socially and historically patrician . . . a hypnotic
deployment of perfected latinate words. 39
Heaney has in mind Eliot's praise of the international flavour of Dante's

Tuscan speech. The languages in which Shakespeare and Racine had
to express themselves strike Eliot as having something much more
local about them than Dante's language has. This observation, reinforced
by the resemblance between the Italian vernacular and medieval Latin,
leads Eliot to make a sweeping conclusion:
Modem languages tend to separate abstract thought (mathematics is

now the only universal language); but medieval Latin tended to
concentrate on what men of various races and lands could think
together. Some of the character of this universal language seems to
me to inhere in Dante's Florentine speech; and the localization
('Florentine' speech) seems if anything to emphasize the universality,
because it cuts across the modem division of nationality.40
Heaney maintains that Eliot's emphasis on the universal tongue almost

leads one to forget that Dante's great literary contribution was to
write in the vernacular. Eliot was more aware of this aspect of Dante's
language in the ending of 'The Burial of the Dead', where an infernal
London is depicted in a symbolist manner and 'the language is more
allied to the Shakespearean-local-associative than to the latinate-
classical--canonical'.41 As such it provides a striking contrast to Little
Gidding, where the colloquial idiom of the Londoners whom the poet
has been observing during his 'dead patrol' is ignored in favour of
Eliot's idea of Dante's language. The juxtaposition of these passages
indicates to Heaney that Eliot was recreating Dante to suit his own
linguistic needs.
In considering Latin a literary Esperanto, Eliot is remembering
Dante's self-appointed task in De Vulgari Eloquentia of purifying the
dialect of the tribe, of locating that ideal vernacular which is 'simulta-
neously everywhere and nowhere'.42 Since Dante's Italian cuts across
national boundaries, it is, according to Eliot, less self-conscious than
other modem languages and therefore impersonal, the language of
Europe. 43 It is, in short, 'the perfection of a common language'.44 If,
through the pronouncement of the familiar ghost, Eliot creates the

illusion of an oracular authority, it is particularly apt in the context.
The ghost most resembles Yeats, whose own grand manner and
patrician proclivities are well known. But Eliot also displays a homely
directness of diction and statement in reproducing Dante's, What! are
you here?' We must not overlook the fact that it was this kind of
modem colloquial idiom Eliot had been developing since 'Prufrock'. If
Eliot's language, then, seems to be taken from a 'Roman vocabulary',
it is inspired in a special sense that is related to his idea of a 'Roman
Empire'. In What is a Classic?' Eliot elucidates his position: 'We need
to remind ourselves that, as Europe is a whole (and still, in its
progressive mutilation and disAgurement, the organism out of which
any greater world harmony must develop), so European literature is a
whole, the several members of which cannot flourish, if the same
blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole body. The
blood-stream of European literature is Latin and Greek - not as two
systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our
parentage in Greece must be traced: 45 By returning to their roots 'the
great languages of Europe can be kept alive; and if they can be kept
alive, then Europe is not Anished'.46 In Little Gidding Eliot attempts to
preserve this cultural heritage by employing English words that are
derived from Latin. He expresses the mind of Europe in the language
of Europe, a pentecostal universality of tongues. Nor is Eliot alone
among the modems to acknowledge the global character of Latin.
Dante's alternation between a high language and the vo/gare gave
Pound, for instance, the impetus for writing the Cantos. In that poem
he laments the removal of Latin from the school curriculum.47 Glauco
Cambon has incisively pointed out that 'the polyglot trait of medieval
writing constitutes a generally overlooked precedent for Dante-inspired
modems like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce'.48
It is interesting that in his own Dante-inspired work, Station Island,
published in 1984, Heaney employs the terza rima frequently, and
recreates a linguistic Dante in his own image through the use of
colloquial rhythms and 10cal-associative flavoured' words such as
'flenge', 'loaming', 'slub silk', 'scutch', and 'tundish'. Heaney calls up the
Agure of Osip Mandelstam, who made Dante a precursor of the
experimental poetry of Rimbaud, and asserts, 'Language is the poet's
faith~] ... he has to bring [it] to the point of arrogance and
triumphalism: 49 Rather than the mouthpiece of orthodoxy, Mandel-
stam's Dante is a 'woodcutter singing at his work in the dark wood of
the larynx'.50 Heaney acknowledges that the choice of Lough Dergh
as a site for the poem represents a solidarity with orthodox attitudes

which none the less need to be challenged: 'And who better to offer
the challenge than the shade of Joyce himself? He speaks here to the
pilgrim as he leaves the island, in an encounter reminiscent of "Little
Gidding" but with advice that Mandelstam might have given; yet the
obvious shaping influence is the Commedia':51
Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes .

You've listened long enough. Now strike your note. 52
In Little Gidding the poet advises the pilgrirn-reader
You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid
In a similar moment at Station Island, a priest~onfessor advises the

pilgrim-poet to read poems as prayers and to translate a poem of St
John of the Cross for his penance, as a way of purifying both his soul
and his style. Joyce, however, counters this earnest advice in his
capacity as priest of eternal imagination by repeating the spiritual and
linguistic non serviam of his persona Stephen Dedalus.
In this respect Dublin's Dante - as Joyce was known in his university
days - resembles Ulysses more than Dante himself. When Ulysses
says 'dei remi facemmo ali' ('we made wings of our oars') in Inferno
XXVI, he associates himself with Daedalus whose flight the Neoplaton-
ists had interpreted as a figure of the soul's journey towards its
heavenly patria: 'il faut que l'arne prenne son vol pour regagner sa
patrie'.53 Dante undercuts this tradition by making Ulysses end his
mad flight in a fatal sea. Joyce reinterprets the metaphor of flight by
having his Ulyssean Dedalus fly over the nets of nationality, language,
and religion and reach the true country of his art through exile.
Stephen, as W. B. Stanford remarks, is a rebel, a 'centrifugal' or home-
abandoning wanderer.54
It would be illuminating at this juncture, I think, to distinguish Eliot's
Dante from Joyce's by seeing them as representatives of what Irving
Babbitt called the 'concentric' and the 'eccentric' imaginations. The
concentric imagination is directed to 'the supernatural perfect Centre
that Dante glimpses at the end of the "Divine Comedy" " while the
eccentric imagination 'owes allegiance to nothing above itself' and
moves in a decentred universe.55 These types of imagination are
reflected in the remarkable linguistic achievements of the two writers.
Eliot aims for a perfect order of speech whose words whirl 'about the
centre of the silent Word'. His language moves metaphorically in
concentric circles. This linguistic epistemology does not exclude exper-
imentation. As Eliot himself indicated with reference to the poetry of
Harry Crosby, 'except in directions in which we can go too far there
is no interest in going at all: and only those who will risk going too
far can possibly And out just how far one can go'.56 The statement
recalls Paradiso XXVI, where Dante recounts the fall of Adam in terms
of the fall of language, 'il trapessar del segno', a trespassing beyond
the limits set by God's Word re-enacted by analogy when Ulysses
disregards Hercules' markers and the injunction of ne plus ultra repre-
sented by them. In this canto God's Word is referred to as 'Alfa ed
Omega', the boundaries of the letters of the alphabet which can be
combined in and produce all possible words. Dante defers to this
linguistic fact in explaining his own 'trespassing': 'Trasumanar significar
per verba / non sl poria; pero l'esemplo basti / a cui esperienza grazia
serba' (Par. I. 7(}-2). Dante acknowledges that while the language of
grace redeems the language of 'original sin', it remains ineffable. Human
words cannot convey the pilgrim's vision and consequently he seeks
refuge in muteness (Par. x. 73-5). As he draws nearer to the beatific
vision, Dante compares the poverty of his art to the inarticulate
babbling of an unweaned child (Par. XXXIII. 106-8), and is ultimately
forced to fall silent. As George Steiner observes,
It is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers

which gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the
world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so
marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine
meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man's
word is eloquent of God. 57
Eliot for his part contemplates the Christ Child's inarticulateness in A

Song for Simeon and then his own inarticulateness in Four Quartets. Eliot
reinforces this view of language in The Elder Statesman when he has
Charles tell his future bride, 'I love you to the limits of speech, and
beyond. / It's strange that words are so inadequate:58 Eliot's aim in
the Four Quartets is also to 'transhumanize':
1 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. S9
Eliot's excursions beyond the frontiers of language have an external

reference point which acts as the alpha and omega of style.
To strike the individual note means for Joyce to trace what might
be called metaphorically the eccentric circles of language. Joyce signals
his view of language in A Portrait of the Artist when he has Stephen
detemporalise and displace the Incarnation in a timeless present: 'in the
virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh'. The Word
is not transcendent yet historical, but self-referential. The result of
making the Word his own is found particularly in Finnegans Wake
where Joyce presents himself as a Ulysses of style who, in the journey
of writing, pushes language to the limits and turns it on end. Samuel
Beckett once claimed that Joyce wanted to forge a literary Esperanto
in Finnegans Wake just as Dante tried to do in De Vulgari Eloquentia,
and added hopefully, 1t is reasonable to admit that an international
phenomenon might be capable of speaking it [the language of Finnegans
Wake], just as in 1300 none but an inter-regional phenomenon could
have spoken the language of the Divine Comedy.'60 Joyce's ambition to
construct a universal language, however, is haunted by the effects of
Babel. He told a collaborator that in his Italian translation of Finnegans
Wake he took Dante's technique of deformation in the opening line of
Inferno VII, 'Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe', as his point of departure in
trying to achieve a linguistic harmony.61 This strange utterance by
Pluto yields to the unintelligible language of Nimrod and his fellow
Titans in Inferno XXXI. Joyce conducts the reader in fact on what he
calls a 'tour of biber, a glimpse of the Bible from the Tower of Babel.
In Harry Levin's view,62 Humpty Dumpty, who makes words mean
what he chooses them to mean, acts as the official guide to Joyce's
vocabulary. Rather than perfecting a common language, like Dante,
Joyce fabricates one of his own. Mary Reynolds has pointed out that
the falling leaves in Anna Livia's final soliloquy, her 1eafy speafing',
are the words of the great book referred to in the closing lines of the
Divine Comedy.63 Joyce aims in effect to fill all possible words, whether
human or divine, with his own signature and to bind them in one
volume which acts as the alpha and omega of language. As he confided
to a friend, 1 have discovered that I can do anything with language I
want'.64 Linguistic epistemology becomes synonymous with mastery.
Eliot, who had previously championed the linguistic experiments of
Ulysses, registered his reservations about 'that monstrous masterpiece'
as he called Finnegans Wake: 1arge stretches of it are, without elaborate

explanation, merely beautiful nonsense. . . . Perhaps Joyce did not
realize how obscure his book is'.65 This is another way of saying that
Joyce, like Ulysses, went too far without returning to the real. The
writer's duty, in Eliot's view, is first to preserve the language of his
country and then to develop it, 'to bring it up to date, to investigate
its unexplored possibilities'.66 One duty cannot be performed without
the other. A common style, such as can be found in Dante or Racine,
is one, according to Eliot, which 'makes us exclaim, not "this is a man
of genius using the language" but "this realizes the genius of the
language" '.67 Humility, Eliot says, is the first lesson he learned from
Dante, 'that the great master of a language should be the great servant
of it'.68 It is a point he reiterated in an address to the Concord
Academy in 1947:
I am sure that for a poet humility is the most essential virtue. That
means, not to be influenced by the desire for applause, not to be
influenced by what your readers expect of you, not to write
something merely because it is high time you wrote something, but
to wait patiently, not caring how you compare with other poets,
for the impulse which you cannot resist. 69
The humility of the linguistic enterprise is captured in the familiar

compound ghost's characterisation of the poet as a 'spirit unappeased
and peregrine'. Although the word 'peregrine' initially suggests a
restless wanderer like Ulysses, it is used by Dante primarily to
designate a pilgrim seeking his true home in the eternal city (Purg. II.
63). And Eliot once applied to himself the epithet used for a character
in the Divine Comedy: 'persona umile e peregrina' ('a man of humble
birth and a pilgrim').70
The different readings of Dante which the works of Eliot and Joyce
evoke help us to understand the conflicting claims which beset Heaney
in Station Island. Joyce's challenge to orthodoxy carries weight with
this Northern Irish Dante, but it does not constitute the final affirmation
of the sequence. In the final poem, 'On the Road', the poet-pilgrim
sees all roads as one, including 'the seraph-haunted, Tuscan / footpath'.
Posing the same question as the rich young man in the Gospel,
'Master, what must I do to be saved7', he has to decide whether the
answer lies in secular or sacred scripture. Heaney ends inconclusively
by focusing on the image of a deer etched in stone which attempts to
drink from a font whose source is exhausted. Unlike earlier times when
the 'deer of poetry stood / in pools of lucent sound',71 the well of
Irish religious culture has run dry, suggesting that the 'spill of syllables'
in the bucket of literary tradition has dried up too. As Heaney separates
from Joyce, after having identified with him, we are reminded of
Dante's separation from Virgil. like Mandelstam's Dante, Heaney - to
modify his metaphysical conceit - is a stone-cutter in the dark wood
of the larynx and unwittingly finds himself in Eliot's linguistic and
spiritual waste land. If to read the Divine Comedy 'is to go through a
refining element, to be steadied and reminded of the possible dimen-
sions of life',12 as Heaney says, one waits with anticipation to see what
further regions this contemporary Dante will explore.
(iii) '1HE TRUE DANTESCAN VOICE'
Dante cast his shadow over the imagination of the major modernists
as no other writer had; his full impact is only now beginning to be
assessed. 73 From one perspective the issue of Dante's influence may
well be, as John Freccero notes, a screen for contemporary rivalry: 'To
trace one's poetic lineage to Dante is tantamount to claiming the poet's
laurels against all contenders, at least in the case of Eliot.'74 Witness
Eliot's championing of Dante over Pound's Cavalcanti. Even if the
literary tastes of il miglior fabbro left something to be desired, Eliot's
stance towards Dante involves more than a strategy for outdoing
poetic rivals. For him there is no competition. At stake, however, is
the relevance of the poet's transactions with the past as he embarks on
a thoroughly modem enterprise.
In his review of Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot credited Yeats with adumbrating
the mythical method which the other modems were developing in
their landmark achievements. In 1898 Yeats had in fact predicted a
new Odyssey would be written at the tum of the century, but he failed
to predict that this would be done in conjunction with the attempt to
write a new Commedia as well. The yoking together of a secular
odyssey with a Christian comedy in the modem period did not result,
however, in a traditional Western synthesis. Yeats, Pound, and Joyce
used, often ironically, fragments of what they considered a no longer
vital tradition in order to forge a modem ethos. Their works show no
mediation between the rational/aesthetic and the theological/spiritual
as is found in the Divine Comedy, where the Christian imagination

reconciles itself to the classical world while still preserving its own
distinctness. For these 'post-Christian' early moderns, Homer and his
unchristened heart, to paraphrase Yeats, served as example.
Although Eliot admired the Odyssey, he preferred 'the world of Virgil
to the world of Homer - because it was a more civilized world of
dignity, reason and order'.15 Virgil's prediction of the Incarnation in
the fourth eclogue made him a mediator between the classical and
Christian eras. As Eliot puts it, Virgil 100ks both ways: he makes a
liaison between the old and the new'76 that ultimately leads to Dante's
synthesis. Eliot's contact with the medieval world did not arise out of
nostalgia, or from a felt need for purely technical assistance: 'The most
fruitful kind of interest in the Middle Ages is not the interest in a
remote or obscure "period", but the interest which finds lessons for
the present time from particular traditions of art, of philosophy and
theology, or of social organization'.77 The Middle Ages represented
the unity of European culture as reflected in the work of Aquinas, and
Eliot believed an examination of that culture to be the best possible
training for the contemporary mind. 78
By contrast, Pound declared, 'I don't have an Aquinas map; Aquinas
not valid now.'79 Accordingly, he presents his Cantos as a not so
orderly Dantescan journey which can go no further than the paradiso
terrestre because it is 'spezzato': 'it exists only in fragments'.so At this
level, Pound beginS and ends his work in Eliot's waste land. His lament
in Canto 116, 1 cannot make it cohere', recalls that of Eliot, 1 can
connect / Nothing with nothing'. In failing to achieve Dante's binding
principle of Love, Pound, as well as Laforgue, nurtured an innate
craving for order.
While Eliot agreed with Pound that We cannot, of course, go back
to the universe of Aristotle or of St.Thomas Aquinas',81 he cautioned
that excursions beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness are
perilous 'if not guided by sound theology'.82 As Eliot expresses it in
The Rock, 'the world turns and the world changes . . . / However
you disguise it, this thing does not change: / The perpetual struggle
of Good and Evil'.83 Pound's neglect of this unchanging law constitutes
Eliot's chief stricture against the Cantos. The theological deviation of
the modern mind results in vapid characterisation in literature: 'with
the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance
of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to
us both in poetry and prose fiction today, and more patently among
the serious writers than in the underworld of letters, tend to become
less and less real'.84 Pound's hell consequently lacks dignity and
profundity:
A Hell altogether without dignity implies a Heaven without

dignity also. If you do not distinguish between individual responsi-
bility and circumstances in Hell, between essential Evil and social
accidents, then the Heaven (if any) implied will be equally trivial
and accidental. Mr. Pound's Hell, for all its horrors, is a perfectly
comfortable one for the modem mind to contemplate, and disturbing
to no one's complacency: it is a Hell for the other people, the people
we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one's friends. 8s
The existence of hell became a literal truth that Eliot expressed as

early as 1917 in the dialogue 'Eeldrop and Appleplex':
With the decline of orthodox theology and its admirable theory

of the soul, the unique importance of events has vanished . . . a
man murders his mistress. The important fact is that for the man
the act is eternal. . . . For the 'enlightened public' the case is merely
evidence for the Drink question or Unemployment or some other
category of things to be reformed. But the mediaeval world, insisting
on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the
truth. 86
It should not surprise us, then, that Eliot found Yeats as deficient as
Pound in his depiction of the supernatural world: 1t was not a world
of spiritual significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holiness
or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a
physician, to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient
stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words.'87 Yeats
might have recognised in Dante a poet who 'sawall things set in
order',88 but both he and Pound, Eliot implies, lack a 'central and
universal philosophy'.89 Although one might object strenuously to this
charge of an arbitrarily asserted moral order, Eliot's remarks reveal
how he differs radically from his contemporaries in retaining Dante's
orthodox moral sensibility as a relevant authority for the modem
world.
It is curious in this respect that Eliot hailed Joyce as 'the most
ethically orthodox' of modem writers.9O Eliot's creative misreading
underestimated Joyce's moral anarchism emblematised by his struggle
to go, like Nietzsche, beyond good and evil.91 If Ulysses provides a
self-imposed structural framework for the chaos of the modem world,

it must not be forgotten that Joyce, like Balzac, preferred to wander
amid his own 'shapeless hells and heavens a Dante without the
unfortunate prejudices of Dante'.92 Despite the Catholic scaffolding in
its medieval elaborateness, Joyce's attempt to incarnate the totality of
civilisation remains, as Eugene Goodheart concludes, 'a parody of the
integration and coherence that one discovers in; Dante'.93 Joyce invokes
Dante's moral hierarchy only to invert it, as when, in Molly's soliloquy,
he 'corrects' Dante, in Richard Ellmann's view, 'by placing sexual love
above all other kinds of love'.94 Joyce's 'classical' temper allows him
to fix his gaze on 'these present things' as the ultimate goal of
humanity, 1e presenti cose' with their ephemeral pleasure which Dante
claimed in Purgatorio XXXI distracted him from the divine vision. 95
These differences among contemporaries serve to highlight the
uniqueness of Eliot's literary achievement. Eliot, more than any other
modem writer, understands Dante's total vision as relevant for the
present time. The lessons of Dante's craft that are genuinely medieval,
Eliot has made genuinely modem too. He insists with humility, for
instance, that human love can lead to divine, or that present things
can lead to the eternal:
The critical moment

That is always now and here. Even now, in sordid particulars
The eternal design may appear. 96
In .making more real to us the old verities of the Commedia, Eliot

validates Dante's vision both as fiction and as 'metafiction'. As a result,
Eliot in his own work becomes a kind of Virgil looking both ways,
making a liaison between the old and the new worlds for the reader
who is a kind of Dante. Sounded in this key, Pound's affirmation about
Eliot - 'His was the true Dantescan voice - not honoured enough, and
deserving more than I ever gave him'97 - continues to resonate.
Notes
Notes to Chapter 1: Dante according to Eliot

1. Pier Francesco Listri, 'A Firenze da tutto il mondo per Dante', La Fiera
Letteraria, 2 May 1965, p. 2.
2. Ezra Pound, 'For T. S. E:, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed.
Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 89.
3. Quoted by Giorgio Zampa, 'Eliot e Dante', La Stampa, 6 January
1965, p. 11 (my translation).
4. T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic', in To Criticize the Critic (London:
Faber and Faber, 1965) p. 23. The volume will be hereafter abbreviated
as TCTe. In 'What Dante Means ToMe', Eliot stated that he started
reading Dante in 1910 with only a prose translation beside the text:
'when I thought I had grasped the meaning of a passage which
especially delighted me, I committed it to memory; so that for some
years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to
myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey' (TCTC, p. 125).
5. Allen Tate, for instance, acknowledged Eliot as 'il maestro di color
che scrivono' ('the master of those who write') in T. S. Eliot: The Man
and His Work, p. 389. Hugo Manning saluted Eliot on his seventieth
birthday with the words the poets in Dante's limbo saluted Virgil:
'Onorate altissimo poeta' ('Honour the great poet' - Inf N. 80). See
T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Neville
Braybrooke (Barlavington, W. Sussex: Gamstone Press, 1970) p. 183.
Even casual observations about Eliot reinforced the connection. Frank
Morley, for instance, said the operative phrase when sharing a room
with Eliot was 'il sovran li denti all'altro pose I la 've il cervel si
giunge con la nuca' ('the uppermost put his teeth into the other there
.where the brain joins with the nape' - Inf. XXXII, 128-9). See 'A Few
Recollections of Eliot', in Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Tate, p.
103.
6. Les Prix Nobel En 1948 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1949) p. 51.
7. The London Times, 29 May 1959, p. 16. In his acceptance speech Eliot
praised Dante as 'the greatest poet who ever lived'.
166
Notes 167
8. Genesius Jones, Approach to the Purpose (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1965) pp. 70-1. I am not suggesting, of course, that no work on
Eliot and Dante has been done since 1965. A number- of unpublished
doctoral dissertations, published articles and sections of books, have
all added significantly to our understanding of the relationship
between the two poets. The fact remains, however, that this is the
first book to deal exclusively with the subject and in terms that try
to show how Dante's total vision, including his philosophy and
theology, impinge on Eliot's craft and thought.
9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry', in Prose of the Romantic
Period, ed. Carl R. Woodring (Boston, Mass.: Riverside, 1961) pp. 503,
504.
10. This was on 29 March 1862. An article entitled 'Dante and Beatrice'
published in 1863 is an abbreviated version of that lecture. See
Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1960) vol. III, p. 406.
11. T. S. Eliot, 'The Music of Poetry', in On Poetry and Poets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1957) p. 31. The volume will hereafter be abbreviated
as OP&P.
12. Ibid., p. 38.
13. Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry', p. 505.
14. T. S. Eliot, 'Second Thoughts about Humanism', in Selected Essays
(London: Faber and Faber, 1972) p. 485. The volume will hereafter
be abbreviated as SE.
15. T. S. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 268.
16. This is not to say that Eliot did not believe that Dante's other worlds
literally existed. The inscription over Dante's hell-gate, for instance,
inspired Eliot to write a prayer before he left America, imploring the
Lord's patience as he tried to accept religious belief (see Lyndall
Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (London: Oxford University Press, 1978)
p. 57). Later, in an exchange of letters with Paul Elmer More in 1930,
Eliot maintained that the inscription over the hell-gate indicated that
God created hell as part of his eternal design (see Arthur Hazard
Dakin, Paul Elmer More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1960) pp. 289-91).
17. T. S. Eliot, 'The Modem Dilemma', Christian Register, c11/41 (19
October 1933) p. 675.
18. T. S. Eliot, 'Three Provincialities', Essays in Criticism, I Oanuary 1951)
p.40.
19. In a public lecture Eliot delivered in 1936 at University College,
Dublin, provisionally entitled 'Tradition and the Practice of Poetry'
(The Southern Review, XXI (October 1985) p. 876), Eliot asserted, 'the
perpetual task of poetry is to make all things new'. Eliot's statement
recalls Pound's 'make it new' but is, in fact, a reference to Revelation
168 Notes
21:5. In this same lecture Eliot argues that a literature may be renewed
by 'cross-fertilisation' or contad with a foreign literature. Dante
doubtless ads as one such agent of renewal in Eliot's poetry.
20. 'To purify the dialed of the tribe' is taken from Little Gidding m.
21. T. S. Eliot, 'Dante', in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1976) pp.
170-1. The volume will be hereafter abbreviated as SW.
22. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, pp. 239, 242-3.
23. Ibid., p. 243.
24. T. S. Eliot, 'Matthew Arnold', in The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) pp. 118-19. The volume
will hereafter be abbreviated as UPUc.
25. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 238. Pointed out by F. O. Matthiessen, The
Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972) p. 81.
26. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 252.
27. Ibid., p. 273.
28. T. S. Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1929) p. 12.
29. Eliot, 'To Criticize the Critic', TCTe, p. 23.
30. Eliot, 'Arnold and Pater' SE, p. 433.
31. Eliot, 'Lancelot Andrewes', SE, p. 347.
32. Eliot, What Dante Means to Me', TCTC, pp. 125-35.
33. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (Chicago and New York: Bedford,
Clarke, 1851) vol. m, p. 158.
35. Eliot, 'Shelley and Keats', UPUC, p. 96.
36. T. S. Eliot, 'The Social Function of Poetry', in Critiques and Essays in
Criticism, ed. Robert Wooster Stallmann (New York: Ronald Press,
1949) p. 107. This version is different in some respeds from the
essay with the same title printed in OP&P; T. S. Eliot, 'Poetry and
Propaganda' (1930) in Literary Opinion in America, ed. Morton D.
Zabel (New York: Harper, 1951) p. 105.
37. Eliot, 'Poetry and Propaganda', p. 106.
38. Eliot, 'Blake', Sw, pp. 156, 158.
39. Eliot, 'Poetry and Propaganda', p. 104.
40. Eliot, 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', SE, pp. 136-7.
41. T. S. Eliot, 'Introduction' to G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire
(London: Methuen, 1962) p. xiii. Eliot makes a similar point in 'Shelley
and Keats', UPUC, pp. 98-9.
42. Eliot, 1ntrodudion', The Wheel of Fire, p. xv.
43. Eliot, 'Preface', Sw, p. x. See Gabrielle Barfoot, 'Dante in T. S. Eliot's
Criticism', English Miscellany 23 (1972) pp. 235-6.
44. Eliot, 1ntrodudion', The Wheel of Fire, p. xvi.
45. Eliot, 'Second Thoughts about Humanism', SE, p. 488.
Notes 169
47. Ibid., pp. 250-1.

48. T. S. Eliot, 'A Sceptical Patrician', Athenaeum, 4647 (23 May 1919) p.
361. For a discussion of the 'Boston doubt' see Ronald Bush, T. S.
Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984) pp. 8-10.
49. The JournRls and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
W. H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960-82) vol.
x, p. 56.
50. Eliot, 'Shelley and Keats', UPUC, pp. 89-98.
51. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Ma1cing of 'Ulysses' (London: Oxford
University Press, 1972) p. 13.
52. Eliot, What Dante Means to Me', TCTe, pp. 130-2.
53. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) p.
45.
54. Eliot 'To Criticize the Critic', TCTe, p. 25.
56. Mario Praz, T. S. Eliot and Dante', in The Flaming Heart (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958) pp. 360-1.
57. Eliot, What Dante Means to Me', TCTC, p. 129.
59. Ibid., p. 250.
60. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original
Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London:
Faber and Faber, 1971) pp. 57, 61. The volume will hereafter be
abbreviated to TWL Facsimile. As pointed out by David Ward, T. S.
Eliot: Between Two Worlds (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
p. 115. For a discussion of this manuscript version see below in
'Phlebas Redivivus7', p. 28.
61. Graham Hough, 'Dante and Eliot', Critical Quarterly, 16 (1974) p. 302.
I disagree with Mr Hough when he says Eliot was in search of an
'elevated style'.
62. 'From the Lectures', Italian Poets and English Critics 175~1859, ed.
Beatrice Corrigan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) p. 72.
63. Quoted by William J. De Sua, Dante into English (Chapel Hill, N. c.:
University of Carolina Press, 1964) p. 34. Coleridge was commenting
on Cary's translation of the Commedia.
64. Eliot, 'Milton I', OP&P, pp. 139, 145.
65. Eliot, 'Milton II', OP&P, p. 160.
66. Ibid., pp. 154, 155.
67. Eliot, 'Dante', Sw, p. 170.
68. Eliot, 'Blake', SE, p. 321.
69. Ibid., p. 321.
70. Eliot, 'Baudelaire', SE, p. 428.
71. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', SE, p. 18.
170 Notes

73. The dark Lectures were delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge,
early in 1926. Two copies of the lectures exist - a typescript at
King's College, Cambridge, and a carbon copy at Houghton Library,
Harvard University. At the time of this writing. Mrs Eliot is preparing
the lectures for publication. The lectures subsequently will be referred
to by means of the initials CL, a Roman numeral for the lecture
number and an Arabic numeral for the page within the lecture. Thus,
the passage referred to in the text is taken from CL m: 1.
74. Eliot, 'Bauderlaire', SE, pp. 429, 430.
75. T. S. Eliot, 'A Note on Richard Crashaw', in For Lancelot Andrewes
(London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928) p. 125.
76. T. S. Eliot, 'Donne in our Time', in A Garland for John Donne, ed.
Theodore Spencer (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958) p. 8.
77. Roger Scruton, 'Dante at a Distance', Times Literary Supplement, 26
September, 1980, p. 1051.
78. Eliot, 'What is a Classic1', OP&P, pp. 60-1. This is pointed out by
Barfoot, 'Dante in T. S. Eliot's Criticism', p. 243.
79. Eliot, 'The Social Function of Poetry', OP&P, p. 25.
80. Eliot, 'What is a dassic1', OP&P, p. 60.
82. See, for example, Aldo Scaglione, 'Imagery and Thematic Patterns in
Paradiso XXIII', in From Time to Eternity: Essays on Dante's 'Divine
Comedy', ed. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven, Conn., and London:
Yale University Press, 1967) pp. 141, 143, 159, 163; see also Robin
Kirkpatrick, Dante's 'Paradiso' and the Limitations of Modern Criticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) passim. For a more
positive view of Eliot's contribution to Dante studies see John V.
Falconieri, 'll Saggio di T. S. Eliot su Dante', !talica, XIV (1957) p. 80.
84. Bush, Study in Character and Style, p. 85. Ronald Bush mentions
specifically Singleton's description of the Vita Nuova as a movement
'from love to caritas'. In subsequent chapters I will suggest other
areas of agreement between Eliot and Singleton.
85. Ibid., pp. 237-8.
86. Eliot, 'Preface', to Dante (London: Faber, 1929) p. 13.
87. Walter Savage Landor, Complete Works (London: Chapman and Hall,
1931) vol. IX, pp. 192, 239, 168.
90. Eliot, 'Dante', Sw, pp. 163, 167, 169.
93. Egidio Guidubaldi, 'Riempire gli uomini vuoti: un'intervista della
Notes 171
"Fiera" con Thomas Steams Eliot', La Fiera Letteraria, 30 December

1951, p. 1. Guidubaldi's article, entitled 'Eliot contro Croce a proposito
di Dante', had been published on 15 October 1950 in La Fiera
Letteraria. He later expanded the article and published it with the title
T. S. Eliot e B. Croce: Due opposti attegiamenti critici di fronte a
Dante', in Aevum, 31 (1957) pp. 147-85.
94. It is interesting to note that some affinities between Eliot's position
and that of Croce, as well as his predecessor Giovanni Gentile, have
also been found. See Antonino Russo, 11 Contributo di T. S. Eliot alIa
Critica Dantesca', Annali del Liceo Classico 'G. Garibaldi' di Palermo, 2
(1965) pp. 201-32.
96. 'Preface' to Anabasis: A Poem by St. John Perse, trans. T. S. Eliot
(London: Faber and Faber, 1930) p. 8.
97. Eliot, 'Dante', SW, p. 161.
98. Eliot, 'Shelley and Keats', UPUC, p. 99; 'Dante', SW, pp. 162-3.
99. CL I: 8.
100. Angelina La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1948) pp. 70--1.
101. See Eliot, UPUC, pp. 13-15.
102. La Piana, Danle's American Pilgrimage, p. 119.
103. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, pp. 262, 273. In the third Clark Lecture Eliot
contests Remy de Gourmont's Dante, Beatrice et Ia poesie amoureuse on
the same point (CL ill: 4-5).
104. Praz, T. S. Eliot and Dante', pp. 358-9.
105. Charles Grandgent, Dante (New York: Duffield, 1916) pp. 290--1.
106. Eliot, 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', SE, p. 137. Eliot
described the paradox of personality and impersonality by referring
to the passage in Paradiso 1.67-72 he quotes in the 1929 Dante essay
(SE, p. 265) in 'Notes on the Way': 'to be free we must be stripped,
like the sea-god Glaucus, of any number of incrustations of education
and frequentation' (see Time and Tide, XVI, 3 (19 January 1935) p. 89).
107. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, pp. 272-3.
108. Grandgent, Danle, p. 272.
110. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: Peter Owen, 1970) p. 9.
This and the follOwing connections have been traced by Mario Praz,
T. S. Eliot and Dante', pp. 350-6.
111. Eliot 'Dante', SE, p. 267.
112. Pound, Spirit of Romance, p. 126.
114. Pound, Spirit of Romance, p. 128; Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 258.
115. Pound, Spirit of Romance, p. 157; Eliot, 'Dante', SW, p. 167.
116. Pound, Spirit of Romance, pp. 157-8.
172 Notes
117. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, pp. 238-9, 265.

118. Ibid., p. 244.
119. Pound, Spirit of Romance, p. 153; Eliot. 'Dante', Sw, p. 165.
120. Pound, Spirit of Romance, pp. 128, 143.
121. 'The Study of Poetry', in The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed.
R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1960)
vol. IX, pp. 169, 176, 184-5. Eliot praised Dickens for the same
concision of images: 'Dickens' figures belong to poetry, like figures
of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or
about them, may be enough to get them wholly before us' (see
Wilkie Collins and Dickens', in SE, p. 462).
122. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 243. In 'A Cooking Egg', though, Eliot has Pipit
mock Piccarda's hope of heaven and peace (CP&P, p. 44).
123. Eliot, CL I: 15-16.
124. Leonard Unger, Eliot's Compound Ghost: Influence and Confluence
(University Park. Penn.: Pennsylvania State University, 1981).
125. Eliot, What Dante Means to Me', Tcrc, p. 128.
126. See, for example, Douglas Bush, 'T. S. Eliot', in Engaged and Disengaged
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966) p. 98.
127. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: r. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1965)
p. 219. In 1930 or 1931 G. Wilson Knight suggested to Eliot that he
crown his poetry with a new 'Paradiso'. Eliot's response was 'charac-
teristically diffident; but this was, as the colourings of Ash-Wednesday
suggest, his instinctive aim' (see 'T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impres-
sions', in r. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Tate, p. 250).
128. Eliot. What Dante means to Me', rCrc, p. 132.
Notes to Chapter 2: Death by Water and Dante's Ulysses

1. Eliot. What Dante Means to Me', rCTc, p. 134.
2. Inf. XXVII. 61-6. All quotations are taken from the three-volume Temple
Classics edition, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, The Paradiso (London:
J. M. Dent and Sons, 1899-1901) unless otherwise indicated. Future
quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in
the text.
3. The full quotation from Matthew Arnold is as follows: 'the dialogue
of the mind with itself has commenced; modem problems have
presented themselves; we have already the doubts, we witness the d
iscouragements, of Hamlet and of Faust' (see 'Preface' to Poems (1853)
cited in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) p. 445). I realise Eliot identified the
interlocutor as someone outside, but this was many years later, and
not given as a definite interpretation. See Kristian Smidt, Poetry and
Belief in the Work of r. s. Eliot (London: Routledge, 1961) p. 85.
Notes 173
4. T. K. Seung, 'Bonaventure's Figural Exemplarism in Dante', in Italian

Literature: Roots and Branches, ed. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth John
Atchity (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1976)
p.144.
5. Eliot. 'The Metaphysical Poets', SE, p. 290.
6. Ibid., p. 250.
7. Frederick W. Locke, 'Dante and T. S. Eliot's Prufrock', MLN, LXXVIIT
(1963) p. 59.
8. Uttered by the poet Amaut Daniel. another figure enclosed in flame.
Amaut's metaphorical purification of his tongue finely counterpoints
Guido's punishment in the tongue of flame for his sinful speech as evil
counsellor; but Eliot decided to save the initial idea for the episode
with the familiar compound ghost. See below, pp. 147-55.
9. Glauco Cambon, Dante's Craft (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of
Minnesota Press, 1969) p. 77.
10. Eugene Arden, 'The Echo of Hell in Prufrock', Notes and Queries, n.s. 5,
no. 8 (August 1958) pp. 363-4.
11. Prufrock impatiently implores the reader, 'Oh, do not ask. What is itf
in the same way Dante admonishes the reader when he reaches the
centre of hell, 'How icy chill and hoarse I then became, ask not, 0
Reader! for I write it not' (Inf. XXXIV. 22-3).
12. See, for example, Inf. x. 82.
13. Eliot, What Dante Means to Me', TCTe. p. 128.
14. See John Freccero, 'Dante's Ulysses: from Epic to Novel', in Concepts
of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Nonnan T. Burns
and Christopher J. Reagan (Albany, N.Y.: State University of York
Press, 1975) p. 106.
15. Barbara Everett, 'In Search of Prufrock', Critical Quarterly, 16 (Summer
1974) pp. 116-17.
16. Robert White, 'Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Epigraph',
&plicator, xx, no. 3 (November 1961) item 19.
17. Eliot. 'Bandelaire', SE, p. 423.
18. James Truscott, 'Ulysses and Guido (lnf. XXVI-XXVII)'. Dante Studies, xc
(1973) p. 52.
19. Purg. XIX. 22; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) p. 105.
20. We can see in Prufrock's behaviour an ironic response to Ulysses'
exhortation: 'Consider your origin: ye were not formed to live like
brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge' (Inf. XXVI. 118-20).
21. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber,
1973) p. 31. The volume will be hereafter abbreviated as CP&P.
22. Eliot, CL VIII: 6.
24. 'Ode' focuses on sexual frustration from another angle of the aqueous
174 Notes
mirror, that experienced by a bridegroom on his wedding night. (The

poem's full title is 'Ode on Independence Day, July 4th. 1918'. It was
published once only in Ara Vas Prec (1920); the full text of the poem
can be found in James E. Miller Jr, T. S. Eliot's PmonRl Waste Land:
Exorcism of the Demons (University Park. Penn., and London: Pennsyl-
vania University Press, 1977) pp. 48-9.) This frustration is sounded in
each section of the poem by a key word - 'Tired', 'Misunderstood',
'Tortured', 'Tortuous' - the total effect of which replicates the anguished
cry (sovegna vos) of Arnaut Daniel. The consummation of the marriage
evokes the boredom and horror of sex for the bridegroom who
smoothes his hair, remembering only 'There was blood upon the bed',
and sustains this memory of his spouse as 'Succuba eviscerate', a female
demon who emasculates her victim. 'Sailing before the wind at dawn',
the groom's horrifying experience shipwrecks him: 'Now lies he there
/ Tip to tip beneath Charles' Wagon' or the constellation of Ursa
Major. Like Phlebas, he needs a painful cleansing.
25. Eliot, Wordsworth and Coleridge', UPUC, p. 69. This reference is
generally regarded as providing the source for the dramatic situation
in 'Dans Ie Restaurant'.
26. Eliot, TWL Facsimile, p. 115. Eliot later cancelled 'blind man' and added
'deaf mute'.
27. Eliot, CP&P, p. 167. In a draft version of this passage Eliot wrote,
'Light through water shOwing the / sea gods the passing shadow of
Argo' (in E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 25). Eliot appropriates this image
from Paradiso xxxm. 96. Eliot commented on this passage in his 1929
essay on Dante: 'I do not know anywhere in poetry more authentic
sign of greatness than the power of association which could in the last
line, when the poet is speaking of the Divine vision. yet introduce the
Argo passing over the head of wondering Neptune. It is the real right
thing. the power of establishing relations between beauty of the most
diverse sorts; it is the utmost power of the poet' (SE, p. 268).
28. The epithet is used by W. B. Stanford in his The Ulysses Theme, 2nd
edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969) pp. be, 181.
29. The passage is usually taken as alluding to Chapman, but Genesius
Jones in Approach to the Purpose (New York Barnes and Noble, 1965)
p. 100, convincingly connects it to Inf. XXVI. 127-9.
30. Daniel R Schwarz, 'The Unity of Eliot's Gerontion: the Failure of
Meditation', Bucknell Review, 19 (1971) p. 73.
31. Eliot, TWL Facsimile, pp. 55-61.
32. The verses imitate the cadence of Dante's line, 10 credo ch'ei credette
ch'io credesse' (1 think he thought that I was thinking' - Inf. XIII. 25).
33. Eliot, TWL Facsimile, pp. 122-3. Eliot imitates the brutal realism of
Dante in the Inferno where Ugolino, for example, gnaws Archbishop
Notes 175
Ruggieri (xxxm. 1-7).

34. Convivio. IV. xxviii. 3, 2, trans. William W. Jackson, Dante's Convivio
(Oxford, 1909) p. 291.
35. Convivio IV. xxviii. 3, 7-8, trans. Jackson, pp. 291-3. Quoted by
Richard Kay, 'Two Pairs of Tricks: Ulysses and Guido in Dante's
Inferno XXVI-XXVII', Quaderni d'italianistica, I (1980) p. 110.
36. St Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984) Bk XIII. 7, p. 315; see Charles Singleton, Dante's
'Commedia': Elements of Structure (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977) p. 7. The passage from St Augustine
continues: 'The weight of concupiscence drags us down into the sheer
depths and . . . the love of God raises us up'.
37. I am not, of course, suggesting that the pattern in Eliot's poetry is as
deliberately conceived ab initio as Dante's is. But we can see in
retrospect a pattern similar to Dante's gradually emerging. With Eliot's
reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary we come full circle in another
respect as well. Guido was damned, but his brother, Buonconte,
manages to save his soul by ending his words 'upon the name of
Mary' before dying in the stream called Archiano. The episode is
recounted in one of Eliot's favourite cantos, Purg. v. 79-108. Eleanor
Cook reads the title, The Dry Salvages, as an echo of Dante's word-
play, selva ... selva selvaggia, in Inferno, I. 1-5. See her 'Riddles,
Charms, and Fictions in Wallace Stevens', in Centre and Labyrinth:
Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1983) p. 232.
38. 'The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word He
always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence must It be heard by my
soul' ('Maxims of Love' no. 21, in The Collected Works of St. John of the
Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanagh and Otilio Rodriguez (London: Thomas
Nelson, 1964) p. 675. Or, as Eliot puts it in East Coker Ill: 1 said to
my soul, be still . . . / . . . the faith and the hope and the love are
all in the waiting'.
39. Eliot, 'The Music of Poetry', OP&P, p. 30.
41. Eliot would have agreed with Auden's assessment of the romantic
Edens of Tennyson and Baudelaire: 'Both felt themselves to be exiles
from a lost paradise . . . both shared the same nostalgia for the Happy
Isles, Ie vert paradis des amours enfantines, to be reached only after long
voyages over water; both image Eden in the same Rousseauistic terms;
i.e. as a place of natural innocence rather than supernatural illumination'.
See W. H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords (New York: Random
House, 1973) p. 231.
42. See Kay, 'Two Pairs of Tricks', p. 114.
43. Eliot wrote two short stories about whalers and adventures on the
176 Notes
high seas when he was sixteen. See Neville Braybrook. 'T. S. Eliot in
the South Seas', in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate
(New York: Dell, 1966) pp. 382-8; Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years
(London: Oxford University Press, 1978) pp. 6-8.
44. David Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys (Baltimore, Md. and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) p. 40.
45. Eliot, 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', SE, p. 137.
46. Eliot, Wordsworth and Coleridge', UPUC, p. 79.
47. Eliot, 'Conclusion', UPUC, pp. 146-7. Eliot's return from the depths
calls to mind what the people of Verona used to say when they saw
Dante on the streets: 'Eccovi l'uom ch'e stato all'Infernol' ('See, there
is the man who was in HelIn.
Notes to Chapter 3: The Poetics of the Desert

1. Conrad Aiken, 'An Anatomy of Melancholy', in A Collection of Critical
Essays on 'The Waste Land', ed. Jay Martin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1968) p. 52.
2. Charles Singleton, 'In Exitu Israel de Aegypto', in Dante: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1965) pp. 102-21.
3. Nancy Duvall Hargrove relates the landscapes in Eliot's poetry to
those in the poetry of Tennyson and Baudelaire but does not focus
on Dante as I do here. See Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S.
Eliot (Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1978).
4. See Eleanor Cook's perceptive article, 'T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian
Peace', ELH, 46 (1979) pp. 341-55.
5. This represents only a temporary despair, however, which Eliot
overcomes. It does not imply, as Eloise Hay suggests, that there is
no escape from the dark wood (see T. S. Eliot's Negative Way
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) pp. 172-3, and
also 'T. S. Eliot's Virgil: Dante', Journal of English and Germanic
Philology, LXXXII (January 1983) p. 64). This would mean that Eliot
could not get out of the modem inferno. But the journey from the
circumference to the centre of the wheel - Eliot's persistent image of
salvation based on Dante - indicates otherwise.
6. Eliot's vision can be related to Dante's description of the golden age
of Crete, now rendered a waste land ('un paese guasto' - Inf. XIV. 94),
an image designed to suggest the loss of the garden of Eden (see
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979) p. 26). When Renato Poggioli confronted
Eliot with the parallels, the poet pointed out that it was nothing
more than a coincidence, but added with a smile, 'So they mistrans-
lated my title' (the Italian version bears the title La Terra Desolata).
Notes 177
See 'Notarella Anneddotica su un Titolo', Letteratura, 3 (1955) p. 153.

Eliot's elusive response demonstrates, if not the provenance of the
central image of the poem, at least how closely attuned he was to
Dante's world.
7. Eliot, CL III: 3.
8. T. S. Eliot. 'A Commentary: That Poetry is Made with Words', New
English Weekly, 15 (27 April. 1939) p. 27.
9. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, second series, Nature, Man
and the Moral Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901) p. 3. Quoted by
Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical
Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachu-
setts Press, 1982) p. 34.
10. Weinstein, Wilderness and the City, pp. 5, 35, 34, 3.
11. Exodus 17:1-7. Quotations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966) and will be incorporated
into the text.
12. Eliot, CP&P, p. 275.
13. See Louis Martz, 'T. S. Eliot: the Wheel and the Point', in Twentieth-
Century Interpretations of 'Murder in the Cathedral', ed. David R. Clark
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) pp. 23-4, who points out
that there are also suggestions in the passage of an Egyptian plague
and the land of Polydorus.
14. Quoted by John Freccero, 'Dante's Prologue Scene', Dante Studies,
l.XXIV (1966) p. 12. Eliot praised Richard of St Vidor's mysticism in
the third Clark Lecture.
15. St Augustine, Confessions, Bk II. 10, p. 53; E. J. H. Greene, Eliot et la
France (paris: Boivin, 1951) p. 123, points out that this phrase precedes
'To Carthage then I came' which Eliot employs in 'The Fire Sermon'.
16. Eliot, CP&P, p. 149.
18. T. S. Eliot, 'Introduction' to Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry (New York:
Vintage, 1958) p. xxiii. Earlier, in 'The Function of Criticism', Eliot
described those who identify God with themselves as 'palpitating
Narcissi' (SE, pp. 27-8).
19. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, 2nd edn (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974) p. 35.
23. Ibid., p. 13 and 126n.
24. Eliot, 'Dante', SW, pp. 165-6.
25. Quoted in Weinstein, Wilderness and the City, p. 7.
26. Eliot. TWL Facsimile, p. 113.
27. Psalms 27:13. A further irony appears in the context of death and
178 Notes
resurrection when the verse from Luke 20:38 is remembered: 'Now

he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are
in fact alive: In The Waste Land the promise of resurrection is denied,
and to the poet all men appear dead.
28. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984) pp. 172-5.
29. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971)
pp. 17,60,49,25,72.
30. Eliot, TWL Facsimile, p. 31.
31. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) p. 86.
32. Ibid., p. 88.
33. Eliot, CP&P, p. 80.
34. Richard Wolheim, 'Eliot and F. H. Bradley: An Account', in Eliot in
Perspective: A Symposium, ed. Graham Martin (London: Humanities
Press, 1972) p. 187. For Bradley the soul, the self and the finite centre
or what Eliot called a 'point of view' are virtually indistinguishable.
The philosophical implications of Eliot's stance have been well
documented. See, for example, Mowbray Allen, T. S. Eliot's Impersonal
Theory of Poetry (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1974)
pp. 129-33; Anne C. Bolgan, What the Thunder Really Said (Montreal
and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973) pp. 90-104;
Lewis Freed, T. S. Eliot: Aesthetics and History (La Salle, ill.: Open
Court, 1962) pp. 133--6.
35. T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
(New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964) p. 203. Eliot also changes here the
focus of the idealist dictum captured in Pater's well-known phrase
from the conclusion to The Renaissance: 'each mind keep[s] as a solitary
prisoner its own dream of a world' (Walter Pater, The Renaissance
(New York: Mentor, 1959) p. 157). In The Waste Land the mind itself
becomes a solitary prisoner of the dream.
36. Eliot considers this point in his plays as well. In The Family Reunion,
for instance, Harry talks of being wounded in 'a war of phantoms':
'The things I thought were real are shadows, and the real / Are what
I thought were private shadows' (CP&P, p. 334). In The Cocktail Party
Reilly cites a passage from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound which
suggests that man seems to be at once a substance and a shadow
existing in different worlds united only at death:
For know there are two worlds of life and death:

One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Notes 179
Till death unite them and they part no morel

(CP&P, p. 437)
37. See Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 35.
38. The French may be translated as follows: 1 doubt, therefore, I am, or
what is the same thing: I think, therefore I am:
39. Eliot, CL ll: 15.
41. The woman in 'A Game of Chess', for instance, pleads desperately
with her lover to 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.' It
is reported of the typist who remains hardly aware of her departed
lover, 'Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / 'Well
now that's done: and I'm glad it's over" , (II. 251-2).
42. See TWL Facsimile, p. 113, for variations of this passage. John J. Soldo
points out that 'the violet air' is an echo of l'aere bruno' {'the brown
air') of Inferno ll. 1 (see 'Eliot's Dantean Vision, and his Markings in
his Copy of the Divina Commedia', Yeats Eliot Review, 7 (1982) p. 11).
43. Eliot brilliantly imitates the winding road by connecting the last and
first words of verses 331-5 in the completed version.
45. Cf. Inf. YD. 67, xv. 91--6; Par. XVI. 79-84.
46. Eliot, CP&P, p. 294. In this play Eliot gently mocks the ascetic ideal,
even while underwriting it, by having Harry depart for the wilderness
in a chauffeur-driven motor-car.
47. This is, in fact, the common medieval definition of God to which
Dante alludes in the Vita Nuova, ch. XII.
49. Mazzotta, Dante, pp. 124-7 with reference to Par. xv. 97, XVI 67-9,
125.
SO. For a discussion of the biblical story of the tower of Babel (Genesis
11:1-9) and its etymological and psychological connection with the
story of Babylon see David L. Jeffrey, 'Babel', Christianity and
Literature, XXXIII (Summer 1984) pp. 58--63. For a perspective different
from the one I propose here, see Balachandra Rajan, The Ovenohelming
Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976) p. 28, who
argues that The Waste Land is 'east of Babel as well as east of Eden'.
51. A. C. Charity, T. S. Eliot: the Dantean Recognitions', in 'The Waste
Land' in Different Voices, ed. A. D. Moody (London: Edward Arnold,
1974) p. ISS.
52. Eliot quotes this phrase from Samuel Johnson's essay on Milton: 'Of
him at last, may be said what Johnson said of Spenser, that he wrote
no language, but has formed what Butler called a Babylonish dialect: in
itself harsh and barbarous' (see 'Milton ll', in OP&P, p. 154). Milton
180 Notes
Miller argues that the confusion of tongues is really a metaphor for

the pentecostal gift of tongues (see 'What the Thunder Meant', ELH,
36 (1969) pp. 447-52). Charles Altieri responds that it is equally
possible to see it as a version of Babel ('Steps of the Mind in T. S.
Eliot's Poetry', in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Fiction, Theory, ed. Harry
R. Garvin (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1977) p. 198).
See also Cook. 'Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace', p. 353. Most of
what I say here is a revised version of a paper entitled 'T. S. Eliot's
Dante and the Fourth World', read before the Canadian Comparative
Literature Association meeting held at the University of British
Columbia in June 1983. I also draw on the perceptive chapter entitled
'Eliot/Language' by Michael Edwards in his Towards a Christian Poetics
(London: Macmillan, 1984) pp. 99-128.
53. Edwards offers a different view in Towards a Christian Poetics, p. 113.
He suggests that Sanskrit is a metaphor for a prelapsarian single
speech.
54. From Dante's letter to Can Grande (see Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The
Letters of Dante, trans. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966) p. 199).
55. Eliot wrote in his 'London Letter' for the Dial, LXX (6 June, 1921) p.
691: 'This present writer passes his days in this City of London
("quand'io sentii chiavar rusdo di sotto")'. Eliot repeated these words
from Inf. xxxm. 46-7 in his note to line 411 of The Waste Land.
56. Eliot contrasted the statements of Francesca and Ugolino in a well-
known rebuttal to Middleton Murry's argument that we apprehend
truth 'intuitively'. Murry had dted Inferno v. 121-3 in support of his
view. Eliot responded by referring to the passage as 'a dramatic
statement; Francesca believed it, but there is no conclusive evidence
that Dante believed it; it has great value in its place as heightening
the connexion and contrast of Francesca's past and present. It is just
the sort of thing that Francesca would believe; and fits in with the
whole passage to show how far Francesca is from a state of grace.
As a universal statement, it is simply not true: Eliot then cited
Ugolino's speech as proof. See 'Mr. Middleton Murry's Synthesis',
Criterion, VI (October 1927) pp. 341-2.
57. In the completed version the report of Amaut's purgation is altered,
a.
'Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affind 427).
58. This reference to Gerard de Nerval's literary output is found in Arthur
Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1958) p. 15, a book which brought the French writers to
Eliot's attention in 1908. Symons's discussion centres on the roots of
de Nerval's madness. He dtes lack of spiritual discipline as a possible
cause, and states that de Nerval cannot, like Dante, 'Pass through hell
unsinged' (p. 14).
Notes 181
59. T. S. Eliot, 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth', Dial, LXXV (1923) pp. 480-3;
reprinted in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles
Fiedelson Jr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965) pp. 679-81.
60. Eliot, CL m: 5.
62. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent', SE, p. 14.
63. Auerbach, Dante, pp. 142-4.
65. William V. Spanos, 'Repetition in The Waste Land: Phenomenological
De-strudion', &undary 2, 7 (1979) p. 245.
67. Eliot's well-known pronouncement on 'a dissociation of sensibility
from which we have never recovered' (The Metaphysical Poets', in
SE, p. 288).
68. Edward Lobb calls Eliot's claim 'the story of Eden applied to the
secular history of literature'. For the merits and demerits of Eliot's
point of view see his T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition
(London and Boston, Mass.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Lobb's
quote is found on p. 5.
69. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. John Warrington, ed. Louis Lafuma
(London: Dent, 1960) p. 18. It is interesting that Eliot also admired
Heraclitus, who wrote down his thoughts in fragments. But then
again, as Charles H. Kahn points out, 'the literary art of Heraclitus'
composition was comparable in technical cunning and density of
content to that of Dante's masterpiece'. See The Art and Thought of
Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. x.
70. John Freccero, 'Infernal Irony: the Gates of Hell', MLN, 99 (1984) p.
783.
71. Helen McAfee, The Literature of Disillusion', in T. S. Eliot: The Critical
Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982) vol. J, p. 183.
73. Eliot, CL N: 12. Eliot is referring to Donne's The Blossome'.
74. Eliot, CL N: 17.
75. Eliot's remark about Donne's achievement in CL VI: 14.
76. In 'Dante' (1929) Eliot said, The majority of poems one outgrows
and outlives . . . Dante's is one of those which one can only just
hope to grow up to at the end of life' (SE, p. 251). In What Dante
Means to Me' Eliot further explained, 'the influence of Dante, where
it is really powerful, is a cumulative influence: that is, the older you
grow, the stronger the domination becomes' (TCTC, p. 130).
78. Ibid., p. 256.
79. Eliot, 'Dante', Sw. p. 166.
182 Notes
80. Eliot, 'Baudelaire', SE, p. 426. In After Strange Gods (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1934) Eliot says, 'most people are only very little
alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsi-
bility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of
real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of
Evil' (p. 65).
81. Eliot, CP&P, p. 272. See Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 225.
82. Everett A Gillis, 'The Spiritual Status of T. S. Eliot's Hollow Men',
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, n (Winter 1961) p. 465.
83. In Litlle Gidding I Eliot describes midwinter spring as being 'sempi-
ternal', which recalls Dante's 'primavera sempitema' (Par. xxvm. 115-
16). See Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante's 'Paradiso' and the Limitations of
Modern Criticism, p. 203, n. 28.
84. Eliot's verse recalls the psalmist's exhortation for the divine judgement
to exert itself upon the unjust: 'My God, break their cruel fangs:
Lord, shatter their jaws, strong as the jaws of lions' (psalms 57:7-8,
Knox version).
85. Eliot revealed that he had made up the title of his poem by combining
'The Hollow Land' by William Morris and 'The Broken Men', a poem
by Kipling.
86. Eliot, CP&P, p. 134. For a history of the fragments that led to The
Hollow Men consult the bibliography in Bush, Study in Character and
Style, pp. 252-3, n. 17.
87. The other blackened river is the Styx in canto Vll. 103. The camp fire
is the fiery city of Dis, Vll. 2-26. See Genesius Jones, Approach to the
Purpose (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965) pp. 19-20.
88. Eliot, CP&P, p. 133.
89. Bush, Study in Character and Style, p. 88. Bush also suggests an
interesting source for Dante's tears in the fourth canzone of the Vita
Nuova that begins 'The eyes that weep that their grief languisheth, /
And they have no more tears to weep'. Although Dante weeps in
the Vita Nuova for his betrayal of Beatrice, it is only in the Commedia
that we learn also of Beatrice's tears. The present scene, I suggest,
provides a more immediate context for Eliot's poems.
90. See John Freccero, 'The River of Death: Inferno n. 108', in The World
of Dante, ed. S. Bernard Chandler and J. A Molinaro (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1966) pp. 25-42.
91. The capital in 'Kingdom' indicates paradise, whereas the lower case
elsewhere in the poem indicates purgatory or hell.
92. See Leo Shapiro, 'The Medievalism of T. S. Eliot', Poetry: A Magazine
of Verse, 56 Guly 1940) pp. 209-12. Francis Fergusson points out that
the shadowy beings are for Dante figures of the risen Christ. See
Dante's Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the 'Purgatorio'
Notes 183
(princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953) p. 132.

93. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (New York: Cooper Square
Publishers, 1970) p. 133. See Henry Wasser, 'A Note on Eliot and
Santayana', Boston University Studies in English, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1960)
p.125.
94. Frank Kennode, 'A Babylonish Dialect', in T. S. Eliot: The Man and
His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 242. Kennode
errs, I think, in attributing the saying to Arnold. The words are
Arthur Hugh Clough's, to Emerson, about Carlyle. See the introduc-
tion to The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater
(New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1964) p. 43.
95. Eliot, 'Thoughts after Lambeth', SE, p. 368.
96. This is from Burnt Norton v. As Mazzotta observes, 'just as Adam
was driven into the desert by his fall, so also the second Adam has
to begin his work of redemption in the desert, overcoming there the
various temptations of the devil' (Dante, p. 38).
97. Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante, p. 199. My italics.
98. Eliot's verse in an early draft of Ash-Wednesday cited by A D.
Moody, T. S. Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979) p. 148.
99. T. S. Eliot, 'Three Provincialities', in Essays in Criticism, I (January
1951) p. 40.
100. Eliot CP&P, p. 333.
101. Ibid., p. 350.
102. Eliot, 'Baudelaire', Sf. p. 427.
103. Quoted by B. A Harries, 'The Rare Contact: a Correspondence
between T. S. Eliot and P. E. More', Theology, LXXV (March 1972) p.
141.
106. Eliot, CL ill: 22.
109. T. S. Eliot, 'A Note on Richard Crashaw', in For Lancelot Andrewes
(London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928) p. 125.
110. Eliot, CL VI: 6.
111. Letter to Paul Elmer More dated 2 June 1930, published in Harries,
'The Rare Contact', p. 141.
113. Eliot, CL II: 15.
114. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets', SE, p. 290.
115. In The Confidential Clerk Colby tells Lucasta,
If I were religious, God would walk in my garden
And that would make the world outside it real
184 Notes
And acceptable, I think.

(CP&P, p. 474)
116. Eliot, UPUc, pp. 126-7.
118. This is Amaut Daniel's sin. As Guido Guinicelli explains, 'Our sin
was hermaphrodite . . . we observed not human law, and followed
our lusts like brute beasts' (Purg. XXVI. 82-4).
119. St Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 95, 15. Quoted by Hans Urs
Von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London and
Sydney: Sheed and Ward, 1968) p. 30.
120. Sister M. Cleophas, 'Ash-Wednesday: the Purgatorio in a Modem
Mode', Comparative Literature, IX (1959) p. 335.
121. Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 217.
122. Peter Annour, The Door of Purgatory: A Study of Multiple Symbolism
In Dante's 'Purgatorio' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 32.
123. Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 216.
124. See pp. 84-7 for a discussion of 'La Figlia Che Piange' in terms of an
aesthetic snare for the poet.
125. This is Charles Singleton'S translation of Purg. XXIV. 50-4. Purgatorio
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 261.
126. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, 277.
127. Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmond-
sworth, Middx: Penguin, 1969) p. 29.
128. Quoted by Charles Singleton, Paradiso: Commentary (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975) p. 176.
129. Eliot, CL I: 14.
130. Eliot, CL I: 16.
131. In a published essay Eliot stated, 'Poetry ... is the creation of a
sensuous embodiment. It is the making of the Word Flesh' (see
'Poetry and Propaganda' (1930), in Literary Opinion in America, ed.
Morton D. Zabel (New York: Harper, 1951) p. 106).
132. Eliot, CL I: 21.
134. Giuseppe Mazzotta. The Language of Poetry in the Vita Nuova',
Rivista di studi italiani, IOune 1983) p. 11.
135. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent', SE, p. 15.
136. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism' (1923) in SE, p. 24. I realise that I
am quoting Eliot out of context from his earlier essays, but the point
is the continuity of Eliot's critical perspective even as he renews it.
137. William Blake, 'A Vision of the Last Judgement', in Blake: Complete
Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press,
1969) p. 605.
139. See Peter S. Hawkins, 'Resurrecting the Word: Dante and the Bible',
Notes 185
Religion and Literature, 16 (Autumn 1984) pp. 59--71.

141. Ibid., pp. 262-3.
142. Thomas Vance, 'New Verse, Ancient Rhyme: T. S. Eliot and Dante',
Parnassus, 5 (FalllWinter 1976) p. 145.
143. What he strives for ultimately is a union of the active and contempla-
tive life symbolised by Dante's dream of Leah and Rachel as
expressed in the plea to the Lady, 'Teach us to care and not to care:
See Audrey T. Rodgers, 'T. S. Eliot's "Purgatorio": the Structure of
Ash-Wednesday', Comparative Literature Studies, 7 (1970) pp. 109--10.
144. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Bollingen,
1949) p. 19.
146. lowe this suggestion to my colleague David L. Jeffrey. These
tapestries from the Cluny Museum, Paris, entitled 'A Mon seul Desir'
depict a lady choosing a necklace from a coffret of jewels held by
her maid. Another entitled 'The Unicorn in Captivity' may be
interpreted as the risen Christ in the midst of a paradisal garden. See
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XXXII, no. 1 (197311974) pp.
173-228, especially p. 176. Neville Braybrooke suggests that 'some
parts of Ash-Wednesday can be linked with an engraving of Murillo's
"Immaculate Conception" which hung in Eliot's parents' bedroom at
2635 Locust Street' in St Louis. See 'T. S. Eliot in the South Seas', in
Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Tate p. 382. The boundary of the
garden in Ash-Wednesday is marked by two yew trees, perhaps taken
from Purg. XXXII. 47-51 where the griffin grafts the tree of Adam to
the cross of Christ, thereby transforming the instrument of death into
one of new life.
148. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd edn (London:
Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 116.
149. Eliot, UPUc, p. 147.
150. T. S. Eliot, 'The Post-Georgians', Athenaeum, 4641 (11 April 1919) p.
171. See Bush, Study in Character and Style, p. 240, n. 10.
151. T. S. Eliot, 'Note sur Mallarme et Poe', La Nouvelle Revue Frarlfaise,
xxvm (1926) pp. 525, 526. In the ninth chorus of The Rock, Eliot
writes that out of 'Approximate thoughts and feelings ... / There
spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation'
(CP&P, p. 164). Donald George Sheehan observes that the syntax in
this chorus of Th~ Rock resembles the syntax in the passage from
Purgatorio XVI that Eliot quotes in 'Animula' (see 'The Poetics of
Influence: a Study of T. S. Eliot's Uses of Dante', unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Ann Arbor, Mich., pp. 214-24).
152. Eliot, 'Johnson as Critic and Poet', OP&P, p. 169.
186 Notes
153. See Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1937) pp. 180, 186. St John states in his gospel that Christ 'was in
the world, and the world knew him not'. This statement can be
related to the observation of Heraclitus used by Eliot as an epigraph
for Burnt Norton: 'Although the Word is universal the majority of
men live as if they had a private wisdom of their own:
154. The veiled sister is related to the soeur in Baudelaire's 'L'Invitation au
Voyage', where, according to Eliot, the word has associations of 'that
sublimation of passion toward which Baudelaire was always striving'
(see 'Baudelaire in our Time', in For Lancelot Andrewes, p. 95).
155. Cf. Purg. XXXIII. 21. As opposed to the disorderly mass of souls which
Dante finds in the Inferno, a well-ordered community greets him in
the Purgatorio. See Helmut Hatzfeld, 'The Art of Dante's Purgatorio',
in American Critical Essays on 'The Divine Comedy', ed. Robert J.
Clements (New York and London: New York University Press, 1967)
p.74.
156. See Mazzotta, Dante, pp. 225·-0. Mazzotta comments on Purg. XXII.
142-54.
157. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1932) p. 132.
159. T. S. Eliot, 'The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry', m: 14. This is from
the third of the Turnbull Lectures which Eliot delivered at Johns
Hopkins University in 1933. The original typescript can be found in
the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
160. John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1969)
p.31.
161. T. S. Eliot, 'Books at the Quarter', Criterion,S (1927) p. 255.
162. Literary Modernism, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Fawcett Publications,
1967) p. 14.
163. Quoted by Nevil Coghill in his edition of The Family Reunion (London:
Faber and Faber, 1969) p. 44. By civilisation Eliot did not mean
'material progress, or cleanliness' but 'a spiritual co-ordination on a
high level'. Understood in this sense, civilisation. Eliot believed, could
not endure 'without religion. and religion without a church' (The
Humanism of Irving Babbitt', SE, p. 479). Eliot also approved of
Baudelaire's definition of civilisation: 'La vraie civilisation ... est
dans la diminution des traces du peche originel' (True civilisation is
found where the traces of original sin have diminished'). See 'Baude-
laire', SE, p. 430.
164. M. L. Rosenthal, American British Poetry since World War II (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 7.
165. Eliot, 'Thoughts after Lambeth', SE, p. 387.
Notes 187
Notes to Chapter 4: Eliot's Book of Memory

1. Eliot, 'Virgil and the Christian World', OP&P, p. 129.
2. Eliot, CP&P, p. 34.
3. See Mario Praz, 'T. S. Eliot and Dante', in The Flaming Hearl (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958) pp. 365-0; and Ron. D. K. Banerjee,
'Dante Through the Looking Glass: Rossetti, Pound and Eliot',
Comparative Literature, 24 (1972) pp. 136-49.
6. Eliot, CP&P, p. 397. Further page references will be incorporated into
the text. E. Martin Browne records how, during a dress rehearsal,
Eliot turned to him as Edward spoke these lines and whispered,
'Contra Sartre' (see The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 233).
7. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (London: Faber and Faber,
1943) pp. 7-8.
8. As Kenelm Foster comments, 'such desire was his fall, for in willing a
freedom unchecked by reason or the nature of things or the will of
God, Adam in effect willed Simply to will; he desired simply and
endlessly to desire (Paradiso VII. 25-27)'. See 'Dante's Idea of Love',
in From Time to Eternity, ed. Thomas G. Bergirt (New Haven, Conn.,
and London: Yale University Press, 1967) p. 100.
9. Given the recent emphasis on Eliot's negative way, it is perhaps
worthwhile to point out Eliot's affirmative way in this typical passage
from Murder in the Cathedral:
They affirm Thee in living; all things affirm Thee in living;

the bird in the air, both the hawk and the finch; the beast on the
earth both the wolf and the Iamb; the worm in the soil and the
worm in the belly. . . . Even in us the voices of the season, the
snuffle of winter, the song of spring, the drone of summer, the
voices of beasts and of birds, praise Thee.
(CP&P, p. 281)
See Brother George Every, 'The Way of Rejections', in T. S. Eliot: A

Symposium, ed. Richard March and Tambimuttu (London: PL Editions
1948) pp. 181-8.
lD. Leonard Unger, T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns (Minneapolis, Minn.:
University of Minnesota, 1966) p. 139.
11. Eliot, CP&P, p. 519.
12. Eliot, CP&P, p. 568.
13. Carl Gustav jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1933) p. 31.
14. R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word: Money,
188 Notes
Images and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Okl.: Pilgrim

Books, 1983) p. 21.
15. Cf. Carol Smith, T. S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice (princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963) pp. 157-62, to whose discussion
I am indebted in this section.
16. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911; rept. 1962) p. 92.
17. Ibid., p. 294.
18. Something similar occurs in 'Morning at the Window' where the
speaker observes, 'I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids /
Sprouting despondently at area gates' (CP&P, p. 27).
19. Genesius Jones, Approach to the Purpose (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1965) pp. 170-1.
20. T. S. Eliot. 'Eeldrop and Appleplex', Little Review, 4, no. 1 (1917) p.
9.
22. It has been argued, for example, that the images of the compass and
alchemy point to a reconciliation of body and soul based on the
analogy of the Incarnation, and that Donne's poem as a whole marks
a return to Dante's understanding of Love in the Vita Nuova (see
John Freccero, 'Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" " ELR,
30 (1963) pp. 335-76).
24. Eliot cited the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies as also typical of its
age. Davies was 'more concerned to prove that the soul is distinct
from the body than to explain how such distinct entities can be
united'; accordingly, Dante's exposition of the nature of the soul in
the middle cantos of the Purgatorio is 'infinitely more substantial and
whole' (see 'Sir John Davies', in OP&P, pp. 133, 137).
25. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974) p. 7.
26. Eliot. CL ill: 19
28. Convivio N. xii, 14-18. Quoted by Charles S. Singleton, Purgatorio:
Commentary (princeton, N.j.: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 361.
29. Eliot, CP&P, p. 107.
30. T. S. Eliot, 'Notes on the Way', Time and Tide, 16 (19 January 1935)
p. 89; quoted by Mowbray Allen, T.S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of
Poetry (Lewisburg. Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1974) p. 133.
31. Eliot, CP&P, p. 111.
32. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumus, ed. Samuel French Morse (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) p. xv.
33. Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1978) p. 29.
Notes 189
34. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) p. 142.
35. Charles Singleton, Dante's Commedia: Elements of Structure (Baltimore,
Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) p. 4.
36. William T. Moynihan, 'Character and Action in Four Quartets', in
T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1974) pp. 75-6.
37. Ibid., p. 77.
38. See, for example, Jones, Approach to the Purpose, p. 20.
39. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Balti-
more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956) p. 356. For a
different view which links Eliot's understanding of memory with the
associationist tradition, see Cairns Craig, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the
Politics of Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
40. Eliot, CP&P, pp. 171-98.
41. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 94. The original reads 'il faut
s'abstraire de I'action presente' (Matiere et Mhnoire (Paris, 1959) p.
87). The English version is as follows: 'To call up the past in the
fonn of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the
action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless,
we must have the will to dream'.
42. St Augustine, Confessions xvm (Loeb Library translation). Quoted by
Louis Martz, 1. S. Eliot: the Wheel and the Point', in Twentieth-
Century Interpretations of 'Murder in the Cathedral', ed. David R. dark
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) p. 19.
43. St Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth,
Middx: Penguin, 1984) pp. 216-17. My italics.
44. Ibid., XI. 28-9, pp. 277-9.
45. Ibid., x. 13, p. 220.
46. The mind discovers itself when the soul remembers, understands and
loves itself, a trinitarian process Augustine calls memoria sui. See The
Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C, 1963) XIV. 11, p.
14; and Luis Cilleruelo, 'La memoria sui', Giornale di metajisica, IX
(1954) pp. 478-92. I am grateful to Riccardo Ambrosini for drawing
my attention to these works.
47. St Augustine, Confessions XI. 11, p. 262.
48. Ibid., X. 40., p. 249.
49. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Structure and Thought in the 'Paradiso' (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968) p. 108.
50. Luis Cillerueio, 'La memoria dei segUn San Augustin', in Augustinus
Magister (paris: Congres International Augustinien, 1954) vol. I, pp.
499-510. Eliot was aware of St Augustine's influence on Dante. When
he reviewed Founders of the Middle Ages, Eliot singled out
E. K. Rand's chapter on 'St. Augustine and Dante' for special praise.
190 Notes
See Times Literary Supplement, 1415 (14 March 1929) p. 200.

51. St Augustine, Confessions x. 20, p. 226.
52. Cf. Burnt Norton I: 'Human kind cannot bear much reality'; Burnt
Norton IT: 'from heaven and damnation / which flesh cannot endure'.
53. G. L. Stenger, 'Notes on "Burnt Norton" " Notes and Queries, 217
(September 1972) pp. 34(}-1. The phrase 'heart of light' reverses
Conrad's infernal 'heart of darkness' and has been taken by a number
of commentators as an echo of Par. XII. 28, 'del cor dell'una delli luci
nuove' ('from out of the heart of one of the new lights'). Cf. also
Psalms 36:9, 'By your light we see the light'. Raymond Preston
suggests that the delicate effect of the verse, 'And the lotos rose,
quietly, quietly', may be a recollection of Dante's 'Si, soprastando al
lume intorno intorno' (Par. xxx. 112). See 'Four Quartets' Rehearsed
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1946) p. 13, n. 1.
54. Wayne H. Hoffmann-Ogier, 'Dantean Parallels in T. S. Eliot's Descrip-
tion of a Mystical Experience in ''Burnt Norton 1" " Studia Mystica, 2
(Fall 1979) p. 53.
55. Ibid., p. 35.
56. The lotos, as Stenger points out, appears in a vision to Arjuna in the
Bhagavad-Gita as the throne of the Lord Brahma, creator deity of
Hinduism. The lotos has also been taken as a sexual symbol by
Leonard Unger, who relates the rose-garden scene to Dante's youthful
experience of love for Beatrice. See 'The Rose Garden', in Moments
and Patterns, pp. 69-72.
57. Staffan Bergsten, Time and Eternity: A Study in the Structure and
Symbolism of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Stockholm: Berlingska
Boktryckeriet, 1960) pp. 115-16.
58. St Bonaventura, Mind's Road to God, trans. George Boas (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1953) p. 22.
59. Ibid., p. 23. For Dante and Bonaventura see T. K. Seung. 'Bonaven-
ture's Figural Exemplarism in Dante', in Italian Literature: Roots and
Branches, ed. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth John Atchity (New Haven,
Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1976), and his The Fragile
Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante's Master Plan (Westminster, Md: The
Newman Press, 1962).
60. St Bonaventura, Mind's Road to God, p. 20.
61. Ibid., p. 34
62. T. S. Eliot, The Rock: A Pageant Play (London: Faber and Faber, 1934)
p.52.
63. The first epigraph to Burnt Norton from Heraclitus can be translated
as follows: 'Although there is but one Centre most men live in
centres of their own'.
64. Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1960) p. 171.
Notes 191
65. Kristin Rae Woolever, 'The Approach to the Still Point: the Parallel
Journeys of T. S. Eliot and Dante', unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980, pp. 130-31.
66. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic
(princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 118.
67. Poulet, Studies in Human Time, p. 159.
Minnesota Press, 1969) pp. 59-66.
70. Eliot, CL m: 7.
71. The passage is taken from Bk 1, ch. iii. A translation in English can
be found in Richard of St Vidor: Seleded Writings on Contemplation,
trans. Clare Kirchberger (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) pp. 136-7.
72. Eliot, CL m: 10.
73. Eliot, 'The Perfect Critic', SW, pp. 14-15.
74. The distinction is one made by Pope John Paul II in describing the
work of Aquinas and that of Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and
mystics such as St John of the Cross. Andre Frossard, Be Not Afraid,
trans. J. R. Foster (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1985) p. 93.
75. Eliot 'Dante', SE, p. 252.
76. Hoffmann-Ogier, 'Dantean Parallels', p. 44.
77. David Spurr, Conflids in Consciousness: T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Criticism
(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984) p. 84.
78. A. D. Moody, T. S. Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) p. 188.
79. Spurr, Conflids in Consciousness, p. 90.
80. Woolever, 'Approach to the Still Point', p. 136.
81. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Gouvernor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg
(London: Dent, 1962) vol. I. i, p. 3.
82. East Coker I foreshadows the sea world of The Dry Salvages:
Dawn points, and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides.
The breaking of the day recalls the moment when Dante, having left
behind the 'dark air' of hell (In! XVI. 130), begins to climb the mount
of purgatory: 'The dawn was vanquishing the breath of mom which
fled before her, and that from afar I recognised the troubling of the
sea' (Purg. I. 115-17). See Jones, Approach to the Purpose, p. 211. Eliot
incorporates other reminiscences from Dante, this time at sunset
before he passes through the gate of purgatory:
'Twas now the hour that turns the desire of those who sail the
192 Notes
seas and melts their heart, that day when they have said to their
sweet friends adieu,
and that pierces the new pilgrim with love, if from afar he hears
the chimes which seem to mourn for the dying day.
(Purg. VIII. 1-7; Woolever, 'Approach to the Still Point', p. 154)
Eliot retains in The Dry Salvages the images of the river, the sea, and
the tolling bell but alters and enriches the perspective. Rather than
highlighting, as Dante does, the homesickness which the land- and
sea-travellers experience as the first night falls on their outward
journey, Eliot concentrates on 'the anxious worried women' who stay
behind and lie awake counting time until the return of their loved
ones. This scene affords him the opportunity for a more general
meditation on the nature of time.
83. Charles Mauron, 'On Reading Einstein', trans. T. S. Eliot, Criterion, x
(1930--1) pp. 23-31. Reprinted in Aspects of Time, ed. C. A. Patrides
(Manchester and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976) pp.
75-80.
84. Aspects of Time, ed. Patrides, p. 162.
85. Ole Bay-Peterson, 'T. S. Eliot and Einstein: the Fourth Dimension in
the Four Quartets', English Studies, 66 (April 1985) pp. 143-55. See
also Sister M. Cleophas, 'Notes on Levels of Meaning in Four
Quartets', Renascence, 2 (Spring 1950) pp. 102-16, who suggests that
Eliot selected the titles of the Quartets to represent space in the
space-time continuum.
86. Bonamy Dobree, 'T. S. Eliot: a Personal Reminiscence', in T. S. Eliot:
The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 75.
Cf. Eliot's statement in the Criterion, 6 (1927) p. 342, What bothers
me especially in Mr. Murry's fluid world is that Truth itself seems to
change. . . . That I cannot simply understand'.
87. St Augustine, Confessions XI, 8, pp. 259-60. O. the Heraclitus fragment
(LXX), whose words refer to a point on the circumference of a circle,
'The beginning and the end are common'. O. also Pascal's Pensees,
trans. John Warrington, ed. Louis Lafuma (London: Dent, 1960) p. 13:
'Jesus Christ is the end of all, the centre to which every thing tends'.
88. William V. Spanos, 'Hermeneutics and Memory: Destroying T. S.
Eliot's Four Quartets', Genre, XI (Winter 1978) p. 527.
89. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) p. 319.
90. Quoted in Woolever, 'Approach to the SHll Point: p. 83.
91. Quoted in Spanos, 'Hermeneutics and Memory', p. 529.
92. This is Eliot's phrase from an early draft. See Gardner, Composition of
Four Quartets, p. 197.
Notes 193
93. Quoted by H. Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell

and Sons, 1954) p. 66.
94. Spanos, 'Hermeneutics and Memory', p. 526.
95. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
96. Augustine, Confessions N. 10-11, pp. 80-1. Cited by Eloise Hay, T.
S. Eliot's Negative Way (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1982) p. 170.
98. Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York:
Pantheon, 1956) p. xiv.
99. Jacques Maritain, Approaches to God, trans. Peter O'Reilly (New York:
Macmillan, 1954) p. 82.
100. Compare Carlyle's statement, 'Speech is of time, silence is of eternity',
(see Sartor Resartu5 (London: Dent, 1975) p. 164).
101. T. S. Eliot, 'A Commentary', Criterion, XII, 47 (January 1933) p. 248.
103. Eliot, UPUc, pp. 118-19.
104. T. S. Eliot, 'Lec;on de Valery', in Paul Valery Vivant (Marseille: Cahiers
du Sud, 1946) pp. 78, 80.
105. St Augustine, Confessions N. xii, pp. 82-3.
106. In this context Eliot could have related his philosophy in East Coker m
to both St John of the Cross and St Bonaventura who explains that
when the eye of the mind 'looks upon the light of the highest Being,
it seems to see nothing, not understanding that darkness itself is the
fullest illumination of the mind (Ps 138, 11), just as when eye sees
pure light it seems to itself to be seeing nothing' (St Bonaventura,
Mind's Road to God, p. 36). Cf. the famous failure of vision registered
in The Waste Land, lines 39-41, and the effect of the sun shining on
ice in Little Gidding I: 'A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon'.
107. Charles Singleton, 'In Exitu Israel de Aegypto', in Dante: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1965) pp. 109-10.
108. St Augustine, Confessions XIII. 7 and 9, pp. 315-16, 317. This image
is appropriated by St John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul,
trans. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, N.J.: Image, 1959) p. 175: 10ve
is like fire, which ever rises upward with the desire to be absorbed in
the centre of its sphere'. In East Coker N fire is a purgative element:
If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Or, as Eliot put it in Little Gidding, 'The one discharge from sin and
error' is to be redeemed from the fire of vice by the fire of purgation.
194 Notes
Eliot's frigid purgatorial fires reverse those of Dante who, before he

crosses the flame leading to Eden, says, 'And I, being in, would have
been glad to throw myself for coolness into molten glass, with such
unmeasured heat did that fire glow' (Purg. XXVII. 49-51; see also Philip
R. Headings, T. S. Eliot (Boston: Twayne, 1964) p. 129). It is an image
he returns to in The Family Reunion (CP&P, p. 333), where Agatha
describes Harry 'Moving alone through flames of ice', recalling
Dante's hell whose centre is fire and ice. There, as Milton translates
the medieval oxymoron in Paradise Lost, 'cold performs th' effect of
fire' (II. 295).
109. In The Dry Salvages v Eliot characterises contemporary times as
offering a number of pastimes, such as communicating with Mars,
spiritual seances, reading palms or the horoscope, all of which he
considers violation of the Word in and out of time. To these Eliot
opposes the saint who interprets the Word of God faithfully in the
pattern of his own life. Perhaps Eliot felt he was taking a stand
against the great stream in his time just as Dante opposed the use of
astrology in the medieval world (see Inferno, translated with the
commentary of John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971) p. 257).
110. Eliot, 'The Music of Poetry', OP&P, pp. 32-3.
III. Dante's Lyric Poetry, ed. K. Foster and P. Boyde (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967) vol. I, pp. xvi-xvii.
112. Eliot, 'The Three Voices of Poetry', OP&P, p. 97.
113. Mazzotta, Dante, p. 260.
114. St Augustine, Confessions x. 11, pp. 218-19.
115. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', SE, p. 19. In 'The
Metaphysical Poets', Eliot said, 'When a poet's mind is fully equipped
for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience' (SE,
p.287).
116. Donald Hall, 1. S. Eliot' in Writers and their Work: The Paris Review
Interviews, ed. VanWyck Brooks, second series (New York: Viking,
1964) pp. 99-101.
117. John F. Danby, 'Language and Manner in the Four Quartets', in Critics
on T. S. Eliot, ed. Sheila Sullivan (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973) p.
80.
118. See Bergsten, Time and Eternity, pp. 141-52; Cleophas, 'Notes on
Levels of Meaning in Four Quartets', pp. 102-16; Helen Gardner, The
Art of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber 1972) pp. 163-84.
119. Bonamy Dobrt!e, 'T. S. Eliot: A Personal Reminiscence', p. 86.
120. See E. J. Storman, S. J., 'Time and Mr. T. S. Eliot', in T. S. Eliot: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1982) vol. II, p. 590. Hay (Eliot's Negative Way, p. 187) suggests
that 'the crowned knot of fire' also refers to what appears on the
Notes 195
head of the Buddha in Theravada sculpture. George L. Musacchio, 'A

Note on the Fire-Rose Synthesis in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets', English
Studies, 45, no. 3 Oune 1964) p. 238, suggests Tennyson's union of a
rose and purging fire in the denouement of Maud as another source.
Moody, Eliot, Poet, pp. 258-9, finally suggests that the knot of fire is
the soul itself, burning like that of Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI.
In Paradiso xxxm. 115-20, I might add, the fire of the sun, symbol of
the Trinity, shines on the eternal rose of the blessed. These various
sources accumulate to evoke what I have called an 'accretion of
meaning'. In the moral sense fire suggests love, human or divine.
Thus, 'God is a consuming fire' (Deuteronomy N: 24) or 'He is like a
refiner's fire' (Malachi IT: 2) according to Scripture. Hence the poet
can say, We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire'
(Little Gidding N). The word 'suspire', as Elizabeth Drew observes (T.
S. Eliot: The Pattern of His Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner's 1949)
pp. 196-7), recalls the sighs or 'sospiri' of the inhabitants of the
Inferno. The phrase echoes the 'burning burning burning' of The Waste
Land. 'The intolerable shirt of flame' alludes to Hercules, who literally
burnt to death as a result of his love for Iole. 'The choice of pyre'
alludes to Dido's suicide by fire on account of her love for Aeneas.
Folquet in Paradiso x uses these classical exempla to express the
transformation of carnal passion into a more ennobling form of love.
Eliot seems to have this pattern in mind as a reflection of Dante's
own 'conversion' prompted by Love in the Vita Nuova. This sensual
passion is also transfigured into Christ's Passion, since Love devised
the torment. Suffering becomes the touchstone of love, to which the
song of the suffering servant Eliot alludes to in East Coker N attests.
The fire and the rose come together in this way to suggest Eliot's
polysemous method.
121. T. S. Eliot. 'Preface' to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (paris:
Black Sun Press, 1931) pp. viii-ix. Unlike Carlyle, Eliot does not
imply that literature is an alternative Scripture. Rather, he understands
the poet's word as participating in, not rivalling. the Eternal Word,
the incarnation of meaning in fact.
122. John Donne, 'Meditation XVI!', in The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 4th edn (New York: W. W. Norton.
1979) vol. I, p. 1108.
123. Sir Gilbert Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Meridian, 1968)
p.195.
Notes to Chapter 5: The Aesthetics and Politics of Order

2. Bernard 8ergonzi, T. S. Eliot, 2nd edn (New York: Macmillan, 1978)
196 Notes
pp.63-4.
4. Eliot, 'Dante', Sw, p. 168. In 'The Hero as Poet', Carlyle had registered
a similar point about the Divine Comedy: 'A true inward symmetry,
what one calls an architectural hannony, reigns in it, proportionates
it all: architectural: which also partakes of the character of music'
(Sartor Resartus: On Heroes and Hero-Worship (London: J. M. Dent,
1975) p. 324).
6. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism', SE, p. 26.
7. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (New York: Cooper
Square, 1970) p. 8.
8. Eliot, UPUC, p. 99.
9. Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, pp. 10-11.
10. Eliot, 'Poetry and Drama', OP&P, p. 87.
11. Eliot, CL I: 11.
12. Eliot, CL VUI: 12.
15. Eliot, CL ill: 3-4.
16. Eliot, CL N: 2.
17. Ibid.
18. Eliot, CL N: 3.
19. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets', SE, p. 286.
21. Eliot, CL v: 17.
24. Eliot, CL VI: 8-9, 12.
25. Eliot, CL VII: 3.
26. Ibid.
27. Eliot, CL N: 13-14.
28. Ibid.
29. Eliot, CL N: 15-16.
30. Eliot, 'From Poe to Valery', TCTC, p. 32.
31. Eliot, 'Swinburne as Poet', SE, pp. 325-6.
32. Eliot, 'Swinburne as Poet', SE, p. 327.
33. Eliot, 'Donne in our Time', p. 11.
34. Eliot, CL N: 14. Eliot found a successful application of this view of
language in the prose of Joyce and the early Conrad.
35. Eliot, SE, p. 327. If he berated the vagueness of Swinburne's language,
in the Tumball Lectures Eliot praised the symbolist practice of
Mallarme which mixed the elements of rationality, precision and
vagueness. See Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style
Notes 197
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 176.

36. Eliot, SE, pp. 344-5.
37. Ibid., pp. 346-7.
38. Ibid., pp. 349-50.
39. Eliot. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry', Turnbull Lecture ill: 7.
40. Eliot. CL ill: 9.
41. The quest for order even pervades his nonsense verse. See Marion
C. Hodge, 'The Sane, the Mad, the Good, the Bad: T. S. Eliot's Old
Possum's &ok of Practical Cats', in Reflections on Literature for Children,
ed. Francelia Butler and Richard Rotert (Hamden, Conn.: Library
Professional Publicating 1984) pp. 99-112.
42. Quoted by James Torrens, 'Charles Maurras and Eliot's "New Life" "
PMLA, 89, no. 2 (1974) p. 315.
43. Eliot, 'Baudelaire', SE, p 430.
44. Eliot, 'Second Thoughts about Humanism', SE, p. 490.
45. Eliot, 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt', SE, p. 477.
46. Eliot. 'The Function of Criticism', SE, p. 26.
47. Eliot, 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt', SE, p. 478.
48. Eliot, 'Francis Herbert Bradley', SE, p. 452.
49. Eliot, 'Niccolo Machiavelli', in For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber
and Gwyer, 1928) pp. 63-4, 51, 55.
50. T. E. Hulme, 'A Tory Philosophy', in Alun R. Jones, The Life and
Opinions of T. E. Hulme (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960) pp. 189-90.
51. Eliot, 'Niccolo Machiavelli', p. 66.
52. T. S. Eliot. 'Catholicism and International Order', in Essays Ancient and
Modern (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936) p. 122.
53. T. S. Eliot, 'The Literature of Fascism', Criterion, 8 (December 1928)
pp.282-3.
54. T. S. Eliot. 'A Commentary', Criterion 12 (April 1933) p. 472.
55. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) p.
48.
56. Eliot, 'Modem Education and the Classics', SE, p. 514.
57. Eliot, 'Catholicism and International Order', pp. 126-7.
58. Ibid., pp. 133-4.
59. Ibid., p. 135.
60. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings (London:
Faber and Faber, 1982) p. 77.
61. Robert Giroux. 'A Personal Memoir', in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His
Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 341.
62. William Turner Levy and Victor Scherle, Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The
Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965 (London: J. B. Lippincott, 1968) p. 81.
63. Eliot, CP&P, p. 151.
64. T. S. Eliot, ' "An American Critic", a review of Paul Elmer More,
Aristocracy and Justice'. New Statesman, VII, 24 June 1916, p. 284.
198 Notes
65. Ibid.
66. Dante Alighieri, On World-Government (De Monarchia), trans. Herbert
W. Schneider (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957) m. 4, p. 59.
67. Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 26l.
68. Eliot, CP&P, pp. 240-1. Further page references will be incorporated
into the text.
69. E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 49.
70. Ibid., p. 49. This verse also appears in an early draft of the play.
71. Eliot, CP&P, p. 261. The section in parentheses appears in an early
draft of the play. See Browne, Eliot's Plays p. 79.
72. John Sinclair, Paradiso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) p.
490. Psalms 95:10, Knox version.
73. For treatment of this image see Louis Martz, 'T. S. Eliot: the Wheel
and the Point' in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of 'Murder in the
Cathedral', ed. David R. Clark (Englewood diffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1971); Leo Shapiro, 'The Medievalism of T. S. Eliot', Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse, 56 auly 1940); Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry
and Plays 2nd edn (Chicago: 1974) pp. 180-95 on whose discussions
I draw.
74. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Socief)l, p. 82.
75. Ibid., p. 82.
76. 'T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime', Common Sense, XI, 10 (October
1942) p. 35l.
77. See Nunzio Cossu, 'Dantismo Politico-Religioso di Eliot', Nuova
Antologia, 495 (September-December 1965) pp. 181:-91. I am indebted
to his article for a number of points I subsequently make.
78. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Socief)l, pp. 62, 77.
79, Dante, On World-Government, m. 16, p. 78.
81. From the broadcast talk, 'Church, Community and State', delivered in
February 1937. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Socief)l, p. 100.
82. T. S. Eliot, 'A Commentary', Criterion, xm auly 1934) pp. 62&-30.
83. Ibid.
85. Ibid., pp. 75-76.
86. Eliot, CP&P, pp. 151-2.
87. Eliot, 'Catholicism and International Order', p. 117.
89. Dante, On World-Government, m. 16, p. 79.
90. It is a vice he finds the simoniacal popes guilty of as well. See Inf.
XIX. 97, 100-5.
91. CP&P, p. 54. The presbyters are compared to the angels who swarm
about the white heavenly rose of the blessed spirits in Canto xxm of
Notes 199
the Paradiso like bees around an earthly flower. In Eliot's ironical

satire, these celibate priests, neutered by their vows, are busy, hairy-
bellied bees rather than the seraphim of Dante (see David Ward,
T. S. Eliot: Between Two Worlds (London and Boston, Mass.: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. 34-5). Eliot's description of the seraphim
as 'staring' may owe something to the lines in Paradiso XXI. 91-2, in
which the seraph is described as having 'his eye most fixed on God'
(see Ernest Schanzer, 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service', Essays in
Criticism, v (1955) pp. 153-8).
92. T. S. Eliot, Criterion, xvm Oanuary 1939) p. 272.
93. See Eliot, 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt', SE, p. 480. Eliot records
a deep respect and love for the Roman Catholic Church but declines
to pin his hopes on one institution as Irving Babbitt was prepared to
do. Eliot once described himself in 'Goethe as the Sage' as combining
'a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical
temperament' (OP&P, p. 209). For Eliot and Roman Catholicism see
John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development 1922-1939
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) pp. 113-15, 133-5; and
Adrian Cunningham, 'Continuity and Coherence in Eliot's Religious
Thought', in Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, ed. Graham Martin
(Trowbridge: Humanities Press, 1972) pp. 211-31.
94. Frank Kermode, 'A Babylonish Dialed' in T. S. Eliot: The Man and
His Work (New York: Dell, 1966) pp. 237-9.
95. Eliot, 'A Commentary', Criterion, N (April 1926) p. 222.
96. A. D. Moody, T. S. Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) p. 320. See also Gareth Edward Reeves, 'T. S. Eliot and
Virgil', unpublished dodoral dissertation, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981,
pp.79-137.
97. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and
Faber, 1948) p. 122.
98. John Middleton Murry, 'Romanticism and Tradition', Criterion, 1
(1924) p. 283.
99. Donald Davie, 'The modernist malgre lui', Times Literary Supplement,
21 September 1984, p. 1044.
100. Eliot, 'Commentary', Criterion, 2 (1924) pp. 231-2.
101. Eliot, 'The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry', Turnbull Lecture m: 8.
102. T. S. Eliot, George Herbert (London: British Council and the National
Book League, 1962) pp. 26, 34.
103. Eliot, 'What is a Classic?' in OP&P, p. 70.
104. Charles Singleton, Commedia: Elements of Structure (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1954) vol. I, p. 62.
105. Eliot, 'Virgil and the Christian World', OP&P, p. 131. In Dante, as
Joseph Mazzeo explains, 'Love . . . is the principle which establishes
order and also the principle through which men transcend any finite
200 Notes
vision of order, for love both creates order and mediates the passage
through successive degrees of it' ('Dante's Three Communities: Media-
tion and Order', in The World of Dante: Six Studies in Language and
Thought, ed. S. Bernard Chandler and J. A. Molinaro (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1966) p. 63). As Eliot himself noted,
order points to the vision of Love towards which creation strives
(1ntroduction' to Charles Williams, All Hallows' Eve (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982) p. xvii).
Notes to Chapter 6: Eliot's Dante and the Modems

2. A. C. Charity, 'T. S. Eliot:' 'The Dantean Recognitions', in The Waste
Land in Different Voices, ed. A. D. Moody (London: Edward Arnold,
1974), pp. 146-7.
3. Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1978) pp. 64-5.
4. A. Walton Litz, 'From Burnt Norton to Little Gidding: the Making of
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets', Review, 2 (1980) p. 18.
5. Eliot, 'A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry', SE, p. 47.
6. Eliot, 'Yeats', OP&P, p. 262.
7. Ibid., p. 258.
8. Ibid., p. 260.
9. See Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964) p. 239.
10. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Collier 1969) p.
77.
11. W. B. Yeats, William Blake and the Imagination', in Essays and
Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968) p. 111.
12. This phrase is from the poem 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough'. d.
Myself must I remake' in 'An Acre of Grass'.
13. W. B. Yeats, 'Speaking to the Psaltery', in Essays and Introductions, p.
18.
14. W. B. Yeats, 'Discoveries', in Essays and Introductions, p. 286.
15. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) p. 48.
This was also the basis of Eliot's bewildennent with I. A. Richards'
observation about The Waste Land, that 'poetry is capable of saving
us'. In response, Eliot cited Jacques Maritain's 'equally strong conviction
that poetry will not save us':
By showing us where the moral truth and the genuine supernatural

are situate, religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing
itself destined to transfonn ethics and life: saves it from overweening
arrogance.
Notes 201
As for Yeats's interest in occultism and its effect on his verse, Eliot
remarked 'you cannot take heaven by magic, especially if you are, like
Mr Yeats, a very sane person'. See 'The Modem Mind', UPUC, pp.
130-7,140.
16. W. B. Yeats, 'Preface' to The King of the Great Clock Tower (Dublin:
Cuala Press, 1934) no page number.
17. Yeats, 'Discoveries', p. 287.
18. C. A. Patrides, .'T. S. Eliot and the Pattern of Time', in Aspects of Time,
ed. C. A. Patrides (Manchester and Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1976) p. 163.
19. LeIters of W B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis,
1954) p. 80S.
20. See Gardner, Composition of Four Quartets, p. 168.
21. It is interesting to note that in an early draft of Little Gidding Eliot, as
Gardner points out, concentrated on Yeats as the 'fighter of language',
who says that 'alien people . . . with an unknown tongue claimed me'
(Composition of Four Quartets, pp. 186-9).
22. See Ch. m, n. 146.
23. See Eliot, 'Dante', SE, p. 247. In CL IV: 5 Eliot stated, 1 know not why,
the notion of this sinning soul running off '1ike a victor" is very
poignant to me'.
24. Eliot, 'Yeats', OP&P, p. 257.
25. Ibid., p. 258.
26. Roger Scruton, 'Dante at a Distance', Times Literary Supplement, 26
September 1980, p. 1051.
27. D. J. Gordon, 'T. S. Eliot's Use of Dante in Little Gidding', Cambridge
Review, 13 February 1943, p. 199.
28. O. A. D. Moody, T. S. Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) pp. 252-3.
29. Ibid., p. 260.
30. Mario Praz, 'T. S. Eliot and Dante', in The Flaming Heart (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958) p. 373.
31. The echo has been pointed out by, among others, Helen Gardner,
'Four Quartets: a Commentary', in T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings
by Several Hands, ed. B. Rajan (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947) p. 74.
A. D. Moody quotes Dante's metaphor from Inf. xv. 72-3 as source
(Eliot, Poet, pp. 249-50).
32. Inf. xv. 17-21. It seems an uncanny coincidence that Yeats employed
this same image of the tailor from Dante in 'Cuchulain Comforted', a
poem written in terza rima just two weeks before his death, as a
positive activity for Cuchulain to imitate. See George Bomstein,
'Yeats's Romantic Dante', in Dante Among the Moderns, ed. Stuart Y.
McDougal. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985) p. 33.
202 Notes
33. Eloise Hay, T. S. Eliot's Negative Way (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

34. Charles Williams, 'A Dialogue on Mr. Eliot's Poem', in T. S. Eliot: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1982) vol. II, p. 599.
36. Cf. Gordon, 'Eliot's Use of Dante', p. 196.
38. Seamus Heaney, 'Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modem
Poet', Irish University Review, 15 (Spring 1985) p. 5.
39. Ibid., p. 9.
41. Heaney, 'Envies and Identifications', p. 13.
42. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval
Theory of Knowledge (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1983) revised edition, pp. 17&-9.
44. Ibid., p. 252.
45. Eliot, What is a dassicf, OP&P, pp. 69-70.
46. Eliot, 'La LelOon de Valery', in Paul Valery Vivant (Marseille: Cahiers du
Sud, 1946) p. 80.
47. See George Gugelberger, 'By No Means an Orderly Dantescan Rising',
Italian Quarterly, 16 (Spring 1973) pp. 36-8.
Minnesota Press, 1969) p. 199, n. 17.
49. Seamus Heaney, 'Faith, Hope and Poetry: Osip Mandelstam', in Preoc-
cupations: Seleded Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980) p.
217.
50. Heaney, 'Envies and Identifications', pp. 14, 18.
51. Ibid., p. 19.
52. Station Island (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985) XII, p. 93. The
original version of this passage which appeared in James Joyce and
Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack and Alistair Steed (London
and Boston, Mass: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) pp. 74-7, is
slightly different. Station Island is situated in County Donegal in the
north-west of Ireland. It is also known as St Patrick's Purgatory because
there is a tradition that the saint established the pilgrimage (which was
probably known to Dante) in the form of a penitential vigil of fasting
and praying.
53. See John Freccero, 'Dante's Prologue Scene', Dante Studies, LXXIV (1966)
pp. 12-19. The French may be translated into English as 'The soul
must take Right in order to regain its homeland'.
54. W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969) p.
215.
Notes 203
55. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, Mass., and New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), p. 259.
56. T. S. Eliot, 'Preface' to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (paris:
Black Sun Press, 1931) p. ix.
57. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967) p.
39.
58. Eliot, CP&P, p. 583.
59. T. S. Eliot, 'English Poets as Letter Writers', Yale Daily News, LVI (24
Feb. 1933) p. 3, quoted in F. O. Matthiesssen, The Achievement of
T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 90.
60. Samuel Beckett, 'Dante . . . Bruno . . . Vico . . . Joyce', in Our
Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
(London: Faber and Faber, 1929; rept. 1972) pp. 18-19.
61. EUore Settani, James Joyce e la prima versione italiana di Finnegans Wake
(Venice: Cavallino, 1955) p. 30.
62. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New
Directions, 1960) p. 187.
63. Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) p. 207.
64. Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce', in James Joyce: The Critical
Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1970) vol. I, p. 384. For further commentary on Joyce's egoarchic use
of language see Dominic Manganiello, 'Anarch, Heresiarch, Egoarch',
in Joyce in Rome, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984) pp. 98-
115.
65. Eliot, 'The Frontiers of Criticism', OP&P, p. 109.
66. T. S. Eliot, 'The Social Function of Poetry', in Critiques and Essays in
Criticism, selected by Robert Wooster Stallman (New York: Ronald
Press, 1949) p. 114.
67. Eliot, 'What is a dassic7', OP&P, p. 63.
68. Eliot, 'What Dante Means to Me', TCTC, p. 133.
69. On Poetry: An Address by T. S. Eliot on the occasion of the Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary of Concord Academy, Concord, Mass., 3 June, 1947, pp. 9-
10.
70. Par. VI. 135. Eliot used this phrase in his acceptance speech for an
honorary degree he received at Aix-en-Provence in December 1947.
The typescript is in the Hayward collection. See Moody, Eliot, Poet pp.
251, 347n. Moody also points out that Brunetto Latini was the first to
use 'peregrine' to describe the migrant falcon in his Tresor. This is all
the more apt in the context of this movement of Little Gidding.
71. Heaney, Station Island, p. 26.
72. Seamas Heaney, Treelyand Rurally', Quarto, 9 (August 1980) p. 14.
73. See, for example, Thomas Werge, 'Dante and Modem Literature: a
Review of Scholarship 1960-1981', Studies in Medievalism, II (Summer
204 Notes
1983) pp. 115-58; Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Dante Among the Moderns, ed.
Stuart Y. McDougal (Chapel Hill, N. c.: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985).
74. John Freccero, 'Virgil, Sweet Father', in Dante Among the Moderns, ed.
McDougal, p. 4.
75. Eliot, 'Virgil and the Christian World', OP&P, p. 124.
76. Ibid., p. 125.
77. T. S. Eliot, 'Review of The Twelfth Century', Times Literary Supplement,
II August 1927, p. 542.
78. Letter to Herbert Read, II December 1925; See Peter Ackroyd, T. S.
Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984) p. 155. As a result of his
contact with the medieval mind, Eliot defined philosophy in its older
sense as both 'insight and wisdom': 'The root cause of the vagaries of
modern philosophy - and perhaps, though I was unconscious of it, the
reason for my dissatisfaction with philosophy as a profession - I now
believe to lie in the divorce of philosophy from theology'. (1ntroduc-
tion' to Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: New
American Library, 1963) pp. ll, 13.)
79. Selected Letters 1907-1941 of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1950) p. 323.
80. Canto 74. See Reed Way Dasenbrock, 'Dante's Hell and Pound's
Paradiso: "tutto spezzato" " Paideuma, 9 (Winter 1980) pp. 501-4.
81. Eliot, 'The Frontiers of Criticism', OP&P, p. 106. O. Eliot's earlier
statement in the Criterion, 6 (1927) pp. 346--7: We cannot return to
St. Thomas', [Middleton Murry] says, 1 do not see why not'.
82. Eliot, UPUC, p. 150.
83. Eliot, CP&P, p. 148.
84. Eliot, After Strange Gods, pp. 45-6.
85. Ibid., p. 47.
86. T. S. Eliot, 'Eeldrop and Appleplex', Little Review 4, no. 1 (1917) p. 9.
87. Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 51.
88. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier, 1966) p. 144.
89. Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 51.
90. Ibid., p. 41.
91. For Joyce's moral anarchism see Dominic Manganiello, Joyce's Politics
(London and Boston, Mass.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Dominic
Manganiello, 'Joyce's "Third Gospel": the Earthbound Vision of A
Portrait of the Artisr, Renascence, XXXV (Summer 1983) pp. 219-34. For
a brief discussion of the difference in moral vision of Eliot and Joyce
see Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber,
1972) pp. 85-6. Eliot would have argued that only a Christian culture
could have produced a Joyce as it had produced a Voltaire or a
Nietzsche.
Notes 205
92. The Critical Writings of James Joyce, 00. Ellsworth Mason and Richard
Eihnann (New York: Viking, 1959) p. 101.
93. Eugene Goodheart, The Failure of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
94. Richard Eihnann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972) p. 174.
95. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, pp. 4-5.
96. Eliot, CP&P, p. 265.
97. Ezra Pound, 'For T. S. E:, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed.
Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 89.
Index
~~, 1~23,28, 47 Beckett, Samuel, 160
Aeneas and Dido, 85, 86, 195n Bergson, Henri, 95, 99,109, 110; Matter
Aiken, Conrad, 40 and Memory, 84, 93, 94, 100,
Alcaemon of Crotona, 123 189n
A1ighieri, Dante, see Dante Bernard, St, 34, 69
allegory, 3, 11-15, 56, 120, 122, 195n Bhagavad-Gita, 33, 120, 1900
Alonso, 30, 38 Bible, 48, 55, 75, 79, 82, 160, 161;
Altieri, Charles, 1800 sections quoted and referred to: I
Ambrosini, Riccardo, 189n Corinthians, 45; Deuteronomy,
Aquinas, St Thomas, 6, 7, 49, 75, 95, 67, 195n; Ecclesiastes, 96, 113,
110, 163, 191n 114; Exodus, 43, 44, 67; Ezekiel,
Aristotle, 96, 107, lIO, lIS, 163; 44, 54, 55, 59, 62, 72, 73, 75, 76;
Metaphysics, 109 Hebrews, 139; Isaiah, 43-4, 54,
Armour, Peter, cited, 74 55, 67; Jeremiah, 71; John, St, 81,
Arnold, Matthew, 2, 4, IS, 65, 133, 135, 186n; Lamentations, 66; Luke, St,
150, 1730, 183n; Culture and 178n; Malachi, 195n; Mark, St,
Anarchy, 133; The Modem 55; Micah. 82; Psalms, 48, 62,
Element in Dante', 2; The Scholar 139-40, 183n, 190n
Gypsy', 130 Blake, William,S, 6, 10, 77, 98, 99, 149,
Auden, W. H., 175n 150; Jerusalem, 134
Auerbach, Erich, 49 Bonaventura, St, Mind's Road to God,
Augustine, St, lI8, 136, 137, 139, 191n; 105,193n
Confessions, 33, 45, 96, 100-1, Boniface VIII, Pope, 19
102, lIS, lI6, lI7, lI8, lI9, Bradley, F. H., 42, 49, 52, 57, 93, 107,
121, 175n; Ena"ationes in Psalmos, 178n
quoted, 73; The Trinity, 189n Browne, E. Martin, 187n
Bus~Ronald,64, 1820
Babbitt, Irving, 47, 133, 158, 1990
Babel, 53--9 passim, 66, 80, 126, 152, Cacciaguida, 98
153, 160, 179n Cambon, Glauco, 108, 157
Balzac, Honore de, 165 Campbell, Josep~ The Hero with a
Barfoot, Gabrielle, 7 Thousand Faces, quoted, 78
Baudelaire, Charles, 9--10, 38; 'Bohemiens Carlyle, Thomas, 182n, 195n; The Hero
en Voyage', 69; 'Fourmillante cite, as Poet', 6, 196n; Sartor Resartus,
cite pleine de reves', 48; Journaux 193n
a
intimes, 9, 10; Mon coeur mis nu, Casella, 74
9,38 Cavalcanti, Guido, 7, 8, 66, 162;
beatitude, poetry and, 3, 9, 38 'Perch'io non spero', 66, 68
Beatrice, 25, 26, 38, 54, 60, 61, 64, 70, Chapman, George, 128, 1740
76, 79, 86, 87, 89, 107, 182n, Charity, A. c., 147
1900 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 'Chaucers Wordes
Becket, St Thomas, 43, 138, 139, 140, unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn',
142 80
206
Index 207
circle, 27, 47, 49, 50, 51-3, 58, 67-8, 59-60; quoted, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23,
112, 113, 159, 160; and the still 27, 29, 35, 38, 47, 48, 50, 53, 59,
point, 106-7, 108, 115, 150 61, 62, 63, 64, 75, 94, 107-8,
deophas, Sister M., 192n 124-5, 130, 154, 155, 158, 166n,
Cloud of Unknowing, The, 122 173n, 175n, 180n
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, &-9, 11,39 Purgatorio, 26, 40, 51, 62, 64, 66, 67,
Conrad, Joseph, 197n; Heart of Darkness, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 99, 125,
4&-9, 50, 55, 59, 63, 190n 141, 161, 165, 185n, 188n; Eliot
conversion, poetry and, 66, 145, 146 on, 72; quoted, 19, 22, 30, 37, 49,
Cossu, Nunzio, 142 53, 57, 59, 61, 62, 75, 77, 92, 95-
Cowley, Abraham, 76 6, 108, 136, 137, 141-2, 146,
Crashaw, Richard, 10, 129 148, 153, 184n, 191n, 193n
Croce, Benedetto, 12-13, 171n; The Paradiso, 61, 65, 102, 104, 108, 122,
Poetry of Dante, 12 159, 171n, 174n, 182n; Eliot on,
12, 128; quoted, 21, 34, 35, 36-7,
Da Montefeltro, Guido, 18-24, 32, 48, 38, 47, 64, 69, 77, 103, 104, 105,
173n, 175n 106, 109, 111, 112-13, 120, 121,
Danby, John, 122 127-8, 131, 137, 141, 159
Daniel, Amaut, 16, 19, 55, 60, 71-2, 73, Rime Petrose, 87
98, 153, 173n, 174n, 18Dn, 195n La Vita Nuova, 10, 13, 25, 26, 71, 75,
Dante: his depiction of human emotions, 76, 83, 87, 95, 182n, 188n, 195n;
2, 5, 69, 125, 127; Eliot discusses Eliot on, 14, 70
influence of. 1, 4-5, 16, 181n; Dante gold medal, Eliot receives, 1, 166n
Eliot on imitating. 4, 7, 8, 154-5; Davie, Donald, 145
his gift of exposition, 15; his gift Davies, Sir John, Nosce Teipsum, 188n
of incarnation, 15, 76, 81; his gift Dedalus, Stephen, 158
of magnificent sentences, 15; the De Gourmont, Remy, Dante, Beatrice et la
great exemplar, 15; the greatest poesie amoureuse, 171n
poet, 166n; his modernity, 1-5, De Nerval, Gerard, 18Dn
15; modem poet as, 17,41, 127; De Sanetis, Francesco, 12
the most European of poets,S; Descartes, Rene, 50, 51, 71, 131
the most universal of poets, 15; Dobree, Bonamy, 115, 135
reader as, 146, 165; his visual Donne, John, 10, 5&-9, 69-70, 94-5,
imagination, 3, 15 127-9, 131; The Anatomy of the
Works: World, 128; 'The Exstasie', 12&-9;
Convivio, 32, 96 'Meditation XVII', 123; 'A
De Monarchia, 5, 143; quoted, 137, Valediction: Forbidding
141, 144 Mourning', 128
De Vulgari Eloquentia, 156, 160 drowning man, 1~ 22, 2~ 25, 2~ 31, 38
Divine Comedy, 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, Dryden, John, 130
13, 16, 17, 19, 37, 40, 49, 56, 57,
58, 64, 65, 71, 76, 79, 89, 107, Edwards, Michael, 18Dn
115, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, Einstein, Albert, 114-15
153, 155, 158, 160, 161, 162, Eliot, T. S.,
163, 165, 182n; as classic, 11 Poetry and plays:
Epistolae, quoted, 55, 56, 66 'Animula', 94-7, 136, 185n
Inferno, 43, 45, 46, 48, 53, 59, 63, 64, Ash-Wednesday, 16, 26, 35, 40, 41, 55,
94, 140, 160, 176n, 186n, 191n, 66-83, 84, 110, 122, 131, 151,
195n, 199n, 202n; Eliot on, 4, 12, 153, 184n, 185n
208 Index
Burnt Norton, 52, 66, SO,99-100, 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales',
102-7, 11~11, 115, 117-18, 46
123, 185n, 190n 'Sweeney Erect', 46
The Cocktail Parly, 84, 87--92, 178n 'Triumphal March', 140
The Confidential Clerk, 91, 183n The Waste Land, 10, 16, 18, 25, 26,
'A Cooking Egg', 7, 172n 3~1, 4~59, 64, 65, 66, 72, 73,
'The Cultivation of Christmas Trees', 84, 109, 120, 122, 152, 156, 163,
98 177n, 178n, 179n, 193n, 195n,
'Dans Ie Restaurant', 25--6, 84 201n
'Difficulties of a Statesman', 54 The Waste Land drafts, 8, 18, 27, 46,
The Dry Salvages, 18, 31, 33-5, 106-7, 48,51, 52; 'Dirge', 31; 'Death by
120, 175n, 191n, 192n, 194n Water', 28--9; 'The Death of St
East Coker, 31-3, 36, 41, SO, 111-15, Narcissus', 43, 45, 46; 'Elegy', 49
119, 121, 143, 176n, 191n, 193n, 'The wind sprang up at four o'clock',
195n 63
The Elder Statesman, 91, 159 Prose:
'Eyes that I last saw in tears', 63 After Strange Gods, 148; quoted, 163-
'La Figlia Che Piange', 84-7 4,181n
The Family Reunion, 4, 52, 67-8, 178n, 'An American Critic', quoted, 13~7
179n, 194n 'Arnold and Pater', quoted, 4
Four Quarlets, 10, 40, 84, 148, 159; see 'Baudelaire', quoted, 9, 10,38, 46, 60,
also entries under titles of 86,186n
individual quartets 'Baudelaire in our Time', 185n
Gerontion, 25, 27--9, 32, 36, 38, 50, 'Blake', 6
51, 131 'Books at the Quarter' (Criterion), 83
'The Hippopotamus', 144 'Catholicism and International Order',
The Hollow Men, 16, 59-65, 73, 110, quoted, 134, 135, 143
182n dark Lectures ('Lectures on the
Little Gidding, 7, 8, 74, 99, 108, 109, Metaphysical Poetry of the
115, 116, 118-19, 125, 140, 147- Seventeenth Century', unpub-
62, 193n, 195n,202n, 203n lished), 15, SO, 94, 95, 17On,
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 171n; quoted, 13, 15, 25, 41, 5~
7, 18-25, 26, 28, 35, 38, 48, 51, 1, 58--9, 69-70, 71, 76, 95, 109,
59, 125, 157, 173n, 174n 12~7, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132
'Marina', 25, 35-8, 40, 87 'A Commentary: That Poetry is Made
'Morning at the Window', 36, 188n with Words', quoted, 41
'Mr Apollinax', 25, 36 'Commentaries' (in the Criterion),
'Mr Eliot's Sunday MOrning Service', quoted, 118, 135, 136, 142
4,144,199n 'Conclusion' (The Use of Poetry and the
Murder in the Cathedral, 43, 60, 138- Use of Criticism), quoted, 39
43, 165, 187n 'Dante' (1920), 11, 12, 15, 17On;
'Ode', 174n quoted, 3, 9-10, 12, 13,59-60,
'Preludes', 84, 93 96, 125, 156, 174-5n, 181n
'Rhapsody on a Windy Night', 84, 'Dante' (1929), 11, 15; quoted, 2, 3, 4,
93-4 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 26, 46, 56, 57,
The Rock, 27, 45, SO, 106, 128, 136, 59, 70, 72, 75, 77, 78, 125, 137,
143, 163, 185n 174n, l80n
'A Song for Simeon', 159 'A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry',
Sweeney Agonistes, 92 quoted,149
Index 209
'Donne in our Time', quoted, 10 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,

'Eeldrop and Appleplex', 164 quoted, 144-5
'English Poets as Letter Writers', On Poetry, quoted, 161
quoted, 159--60 'The Perfect Critic', quoted, 110
'Francis Herbert Bradley', quoted, 133 'Poetry and Drama', 146; quoted, 126
'The Frontiers of Criticism', quoted, 'Poetry and Propaganda', 108n;
161 quoted, 5, 184n
'The Function of Criticism', quoted, 'Preface'to Transit of Venus: Poems by
77,133 Harry Crosby, quoted, 122-3, 159
George Herbert, quoted, 146 The Sacred Wood, 7
'Goethe as the Sage', 202n 'A Sceptical Patrician', 169n
'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt', 'Second Thoughts about Humanism',
200n; quoted, 133, 186n quoted,2,7
The Idea of a Christian Society, quoted, 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of
136, 140-1, 142, 143 Seneca', quoted, 6, 13, 38, 57, 69
1ntroduction' to Charles Williams, All 'Shelley and Keats', 169n; quoted, 13
Hallows' Eve, 200n 'Sir John Davies', quoted, 188n
1ntroduction' to G. Wilson Knight, 'The Social Function of Poetry',
The Wheel of Fire, quoted, 6, 7 quoted, 5, 10-11, 161
'Introduction' to Josef Pieper, Leisure: 'Swinburne as Poet', quoted, 130-1
The Basis of Culture, quoted, 204n 'Thoughts after Lambeth', quoted, 65-
'Introduction' to Paul Valery, The Art 6,83
of Poetry, quoted, 45, 118 'Three Provincialities', quoted, 3
'Johnson as Critic and Poet', quoted, 'The Three Voices of Poetry', quoted,
81 120
Knowledge and Experience in the Philos- 'To Criticize the Critic', 169n; quoted,
ophy of F. H. Bradley, quoted, 50, 1
57 'Tradition and the Individual Talent',
'Lancelot Andrewes', quoted, 4, 131 quoted, 9, 42, 56, 76, 83, 121,
'La Le«;on de Valery', quoted, 157 124
Letters, quoted, 69, 70, 83, 115, 148 'Tradition and the Practice of Poetry',
'The Literature of Fascism', quoted, 167-8n
135 'T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime',
'London Letter' (for the Dian, 181n quoted,41
'Matthew Arnold', quoted, 3--4, 119 Turnbull Lectures (Varieties of
The Metaphysical Poets', quoted, 71, Metaphysical Poetry', unpub-
128, 18On, 194n lished), 188n, 196n; quoted, 83,
'Milton 1', 169n 132,145
'Milton II', quoted, 9, 179n Virgil and the Christian World',
'The Modem Dilemma', quoted, 2-3 quoted, 85, 146, 163
'The Modem Mind', quoted, 71-2, 'What Dante Means to Me', quoted,
200n 4-5, 7, 16, 17, 147, 154-5, 161,
'Mr. Middleton Murry's Synthesis', 166n
quoted, 180n 'What is a Classicr, quoted, 10, 11,
'The Music of Poetry', quoted, 120 146, 157, 161
'Niccolo Machiavelli', quoted, 134 Wilkie Collins and Dickens', quoted,
'A Note on Richard Crashaw', 170n 172n
'Note sur Mallarme et Poe', 185n Wordsworth and Coleridge', quoted,
'Notes on the Way', quoted, 97, 171n 38-9
210 Index
'Yeats', quoted, 149, 153 81, 104, 120, 122, 123, 188n,
EIlmann, Richard, 165 195n
Elyot, Sir Thomas, 111, 115; The Book
Named the Gouvenwr, 113, 114 Jeffrey, David L., 185n
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 182n John of the Cross, St, 36, 92, 119, 158,
Epicurus, 7 175-6n, 1900, 193n; The Dark
exodus, 23, 41, 53,55,64,66,69,74, Night of the Soul, quoted, 193n
82,122 John Paul It Pope, 191n
Johnson, Samuel, 130, 1790
Farinata, 94 John the Baptist, St, 25
Fergusson, Francis, 182n Joyce, James, 7, 157, 158, 160-1, 162,
Foerster, Norman, 133 164-5, 196n, 2040; Finnegans
Foster, Kenelm, 187n Wake, 160, 161; A Portrait of the
Freccero, John, 58, 162 Artist, 160; Ulysses, 56, 161, 162,
frontiersman, poet as, 37, 41-2, 76, 50, 165
127 Jung, Carl Gustav, Modern Man in Search
of a Soul, quoted, 91
Gardner, Helen, 203n
Gentile, Giovanni, 171n Kermode, Frank, 65, 66, 182n
Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 108 Kinsella, Thomas, 155
Gide, Andre, 26 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 116, 191n
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 6 Knight, G. Wilson, 172n
Goodheart, Eugene, 165 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, 56
Grandgent, Charles, 13, 14; quoted, 14
Greene, E. J. H., 178n 'Lady with the Unicorn, The' 78, 185n
Guidubaldi, Egidio, 12, 170-ln Laforgue, Jules, 7, 25, 69-70, 129, 163
Guinicelli, Guido, 148, 183n Landor, Walter Savage, 11, 12; The
Pentameron, 12
Hamlet, 20, 22 Latini, Brunetto, 98, 125, 148, 151, 152,
Hauvette, M., 11 153, 154, 203n
Hay, Eloise, 177n, 1940 Lawrence, D. H., Lady ChaHerley's Lover,
Heaney, Seamus, 155-8, 161-2; Station 8; 'The Ship of Death', 30
Island, 157-8, 161-2, 202n Lazarus, 22
hell, as state of mind, 14, 16, 22-3, 27, Leavis, F. R., 82
87-8; as place, 164, 167n Levin, Harry, 160
Heraclitus, 107, 120, 181n, 185n, 1900, limbo, 48, 59, 63
192n Lobb, Edward, 181n
Hill, Geoffrey, 155 Lombardo, Marco, 95, 141
Hitler, Adolf, 141 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 11, 13
Homer, 79, 163; Odyssey, 162, 163 Love, 10, 24-5, 26, 45-7, 55, 61, 70, 7l,
Hough, Graham, 1690 73, 74, 75, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95,
Howe, Irving, 83 9~ 107-9, 14~ 163, 165, 188n,
Hulme, T. E., 133, 134; 'A Tory Philos- 195n, 200n; see also order
ophy', quoted, 134; Speculations, Lowell, James Russell, 13
quoted,133 Lucretius, 5, 6, 13
humility, 32, 114, 120, 161, 165
Machiavelli, Niccoli>, 134, 138;
incantation, poetry and, so-I, 132 Discourses, 134
incarnation, poetry and, 35, 76, 78, 79, MacMurray, John, The Self as Agent,
Index 211
quoted, 83 ethics and politics of, 16, 132-45;

Mallarme, Stephane, 80, 149, 152, 153, and Love, 47, 69, 108, 146, 200n;
197n style and, 10, 80, 120, 124-32,
Mandelstam, Osip, 157, 158, 162 149-55, 159, 185n
Manning, Hugo, 166n
Marltain, Jacques, 118, 200n Paolo and Francesca, 47, 55, 62, 108,
Martz, Louis, 100 125, 151, lSOn
Marvell, Andrew, 'To His Coy Mistress', paradise,3,63,65, 10~ 164
24 Pascal, Blaise, 114, 192n; Pensks, quoted,
Mary, the Blessed Virgin, 34-5, 65, 68, 57-8, 192n
69, 79, 97, 175n Pater, Waiter, 120, 178n
Matilda, 79 Patrides, C. A, 114
Matthiessen, F. 0., 79 Pericles, 35-6, 38
Mauron, Charles, 'On Reading Einstein', Petrarch, 12
115 philosophy, poetry and, 3, 5--8, 11-15,
Maunas, Charles, 16, 132, 133, 137, 146 42, 70, 110, 125-6, 128-9, 130,
Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony, 101, 201n 164
Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 116, 121, 182n, Phiebas, 25-7, 30, 38, 174n
186n La Pia (de' Tolomei), 46, 57
memory, 16, 26, 27, 55, 56-7, 75, 78, Piccarda, 15, 137, 139, 172n
84-123, 189n; and desire, 89--90, Plato, 116; The Republic, 52; The
107--9; and sea-change, 35-9, 84; Symposium, 47, 50
and the soul, 93-7, 101-2; and Poe, Edgar Allan, 80
the still point, 105-8; and time, Poggioli, Renato, 177n
94,97,99-102, 104-7,110-15, Poulet, Georges, 99
116, 118, 120; and the Word, Pound, Ezra, 1, 7, 14, 15, 157, 162, 163,
115-23 164, 165; Cantos, 157, 163; 'Hugh
Middle Ages, Eliot and, 4, 5, 10, 11, Selwyn Mauberley', 77; The Spirit
126,163 of Romance, quoted, 14-15
Miller, Milton, 179n Praz, Mario, 8, 13, 14
Milton, John, 6, 8-9, 10, 14, 153; Proust, Marcel, 99
Paradise Lost, 14, 194n purgation, poetry and, 3, 66,149,152-
Moody, A D., 144, 153, 195n, 202n, 5,156,158
203n purgatory, 3, 22, 66
More, Paul Eimer, 136, 167n
More, Thomas, 142 Racine, Jean, 161
Morley, Frank, 166n Rand, E. K., 'St Augustine and Dante',
Moynihan, William T., 99 189n
Murry, Middleton, 133, 145, 18On, 192n Ranke, Otto, 116
Musacchio, George L., 194n resurrection, poetry and, 37-8, 76-7
Mussolini, Benito, 144 Reynolds, Mary, 160
Richard of St Vidor, 45; Benjamin Major,
Narcissus, 24, 45, 50, 88, 92 110
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145, 165, 204n Richards, I. A, 71, 202n; Principles of
Norton, Charles Eliot, 11, 13 Literary Criticism, 71
Rimbaud, Arthur, 157
Oderisi, 153 Rodgers, Audrey T., 184n
order, 16, 45, 55--9, 113, 120, 125-45, Rosenthal, M. L., 83
163, 197n; allegory and, 56; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Blessed
212 Index
Damozel, 13, 86 'Ulysses', 8, 28, 32, 33
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 133; Confes- Terence, 92
sions, 14, 83 Tolstoy, Leo, War and P/!IlCe, 153
Royce, Josiah, 50; The World and the Truscott, James, 23
Individual, quoted, 42
Ruskin, John, 5 Ugolino, 55, 181n
Ulysses (Dante's), 8, 12, 16, 17, 18, 22-
Santayana, George, Three Philosophical 5, 28, 29, 31-3, 37, 38, 127, 151,
Poets, 13, 65, 125~ 158, 161, 174n; modem poet as,
Same, Jean-Paul, Huis Clos, 87 17, 127, 15~1
Scruton, Roger, 10, 153 Unger, Leonard, 15, 190n
Shakespeare, William, 0-7, 8, 9, 10, 14,
15, 38, 39, 153; Pericles, 35; The Valery, Paul 9, 11,45
Tempest, 17, 30; The Winter's Tale, Vemon, W. W., Readings, 12
87 Virgil, 16, 20, 38, 40, 41, 55, 59, 60, 63,
Sheehan, Donald George, 185n 85, 107, 109, 124, 125, 126, 144,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 4, 7, 8; 'A 146, 162, 163; art as, 146, 165
Defence of Poetry', quoted, 2; Voltaire, 145, 200n
'Prometheus Unbound', 7, 179n;
'The Triumph of life', 7 Weston, Jessie, 40
shipwreck. 17, 22, 28, 38, 174n Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 115
Sidgwick. Henry Dwight, 11 Williams, Charles, 90; The Figure of
sin, 3, 68, 80, 130-7, 152, 159, 163 Beatrice, quoted, 89
Singleton, Charles, 11,41, 98, 120, 146, Word, The, poetry and, 28, 30-7, 55,
170n 66, 75, 76, 79, SO, 81, 115-23,
Smith, Grover, 95, 140 131, 152, 153, 159, 194n, 195n
Soldo, John J., 178n Wordsworth, William, 2
Soizhenitsyn, Alexander, 41
Sordello, 141 Yeats, William Butler, 148-55, 162, 164,
Spanos, wurnun V., 115, 116 201n
Spengler, Oswald, 41 'An Acre of Grass', 201n
Spurr, David, 111, 112 'The Blood and the Moon', 151
Stalin, Joseph, 141 Byzantium poems, 149
Stanford, W. B., 158 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931', 150
Statius, 49, 125, 146 'Cuchulain Comforted', 201n
Steiner, George, 159 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul', 152
Stenger, G. L., 190n Purgatory, 149
Stevens, Wallace, 98 To the Rose upon the Rood of Time',
still point. see entries under circle, and 152
memory 'Sailing to Byzantium', 150
Swift, Jonathan, 153 'The Song of the Happy Shepherd',
Swinburne, Algernon, 130-1, 197n; 152
'Hertha', 130 'The Spur', 152
Symons, PUthur, 180n 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough',
200n
Tate, Allen, 166n 'Under Ben Bulben', 150
Tennyson, Alfred, 70; Maud, 196n; Vacillation', 152

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T. S.

ELIOT AND DANTE

First published in the United States of America in 1989

1 Dante according to Eliot 1

2 Death by Water and Dante's Ulysses 17

3 The Poetics of the Desert 40

4 Eliot's Book of Memory 84

5 The Aesthetics and Politics of Order 124

6 Eliot's Dante and the Moderns 147

Dante according to Eliot

(i) THE MODERN ELEMENT IN DANTE

Why did a reviewer in Florence for the seventh-centenary celebrations

of it' since he had 'transhumanised' Italian by developing and enriching

(ii) DANTE, THE TOUCHSTONE POET

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

Dante weaves Thomist philosophy into the pattern of his personal

erudite notes and commentary to his edition of Guido Cavalcanti

connection, strength and energy' of Dante's style, Coleridge remarked,

Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valery's 'modem poet'

Milton suffers in this respect too. European culture, of which Dante is

suffers and the mind which creates?l by acknowledging the positive

In Donne . . . learning is just information suffused with emotion,

This goal of a unified sensibility with an underlying principle of order,

There was no question of returning to the Middle Ages Eliot made

(iii) ELIOT'S DANTE AND HIS CRITICS

The preceding remarks doubtless tell us as much, if not more, about

framework as irrelevant to an enjoyment of the poetry, he believes,

areas of divergence. Eliot's insistence on allegory and his criterion of

Eliot, of course, makes virtually the same claim:

Dante is . . . the most universal of poets in the modem languages.

Other similarities have escaped notice. Eliot, for instance, reiterates

on Eliot can sometimes be elusive, as Leonard Unger observes,124 but

(i) PRUFROCK'S LOVE SONG

Eliot's intriguing remarks, then, provide us with an unusual point of

Guido, the speaker, overcomes his initial reluctance to reveal his

walk through the streets of the modem citta dolente is to be reminded

But though 1 have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Nol 1 am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Having missed his opportunity for greatness, Prufrock resigns himself

'Ma io perche venirvt1 0 chi 'I concede?

('But I, why g07 or who permits it? I am not

There will be time, there will be time,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

The similarity ends here however. Dante's procrastination is momen-

Quando mi vidi giunto in quella parte

cia che pria mi piaceva allor m'increbbe,

(When I saw myself come to that period of my

that which before had pleased me, grieved me

an obvious foil to Ulysses, but it also paradoxically makes him his

And I have known the arms already, known them all -

Prufrock reifies persons into objects - eyes, arms, hair - of unfulfilled

(ii) PHLEBAS REDMVUS?

Before invoking that guide, Eliot reconsiders the implications of death

the type of sexual experience which Dante describes as occurring

Although the age of their sexual awakening might be virtually the

Prufrock, in a world of disillusion which is instead the ironic reversal

Like a blind man swimming deep below the surface

In the calm deep water where no stir nor surf is

The image recurs in The Rock:

Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward

Gazing into a bottomless self leads to a kind of hell. His inability to

hindsight which renders Gerontion one of the Inferno's 'backward

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

The sailor, attentive to the chart or to the sheets,