Mysticism and Myth - II: The Dantean Parallel

Abstract

Speaking about Dante in an address delivered at the Italian Institute, London, on 4 July 1950, Eliot remarked: ‘I… regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse’.¹ And again, later in the same talk, he declared:

Twenty years after writing The Waste Land, I wrote, in Little Gidding, a passage which is intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content, that I could achieve. The intention, of course, was the same as with my allusions to Dante in The Waste Land: to present to the mind of the reader a parallel, by means of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio, which Dante visited and a hallucinated scene after an air-raid.²

My purpose has been to persuade the reader first of the importance of Dante as a master — I may even say, the master for a poet writing today in any language.

(T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to Dante, 1929)

His was the true Dantescan voice.

(Ezra Pound, ‘For T. S. E.’, 1966)