Abstract
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 proceedings?1 Or why did Ezra Pound, who first championed Dante as the Muse presiding over the modern revolution in poetry, belatedly concede, ‘[Eliot’s] was the true Dantescan voice’ of the modern world?2
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Notes
Pier Francesco Listri, ‘A Firenze da tutto il mondo per Dante’, La Fiera Letteraria, 2 May 1965, p. 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.
Quoted by Giorgio Zampa, ‘Eliot e Dante’, La Stampa, 6 January 1965, p. 11 (my translation).
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 TCTC. In ‘What Dante Means To Me’, 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).
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 A number of unpublished doctoral dissertations, published articles and sections of books, have all added significantly to our understanding of the relationship between the two poets.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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Prose of the Romantic Period, ed. Carl R. Woodring (Boston, Mass.: Riverside, 1961) pp. 503, 504.
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.
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.
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).
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Modern Dilemma’, Christian Register, c11/41 (19 October 1933) p. 675.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Three Provincialities’, Essays in Criticism, 1(January 1951) p. 40.
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 21:5. In this same lecture Eliot argues that a literature may be renewed by ‘cross-fertilisation’ or contact with a foreign literature. Dante doubtless acts as one such agent of renewal in Eliot’s poetry.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Dante’, in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1976) pp. 170–1. The volume will be hereafter abbreviated as SW.
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.
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.
T. S. Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1929) p. 12.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (Chicago and New York: Bedford, Clarke, 1851) vol. III, p. 158.
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.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Propaganda’ (1930) in Literary Opinion in America, ed. Morton D. Zabel (New York: Harper, 1951) p. 105.
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.
See Gabrielle Barfoot, ‘Dante in T. S. Eliot’s Criticism’, English Miscellany 23 (1972) pp. 235–6.
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.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 13.
T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) p. 45.
Mario Praz, ‘T. S. Eliot and Dante’, in The Flaming Heart (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958) pp. 360–1.
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 Redivivus?’, p. 28.
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’.
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.
T. S. Eliot, ‘A Note on Richard Crashaw’, in For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928) p. 125.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Donne in our Time’, in A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spencer (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958) p. 8.
Roger Scruton, ‘Dante at a Distance’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 September, 1980, p. 1051.
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, ‘Il Saggio di T. S. Eliot su Dante’, Italica, XIV (1957) p. 80.
Eliot ‘Preface’, to Dante (London: Faber, 1929) p. 13.
Walter Savage Landor, Complete Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931) vol. IX, pp. 192, 239, 168.
Egidio Guidubaldi, ‘Riempire gli uomini vuoti: un’intervista della “Fiera” con Thomas Stearns 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.
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, ‘Il Contributo di T. S. Eliot alla Critica Dantesca’, Annali del Liceo Classico ‘G. Garibaldi’ di Palermo, 2 (1965) pp. 201–32.
Angelina La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948) pp. 70–1.
Charles Grandgent, Dante (New York: Duffield, 1916) pp. 290–1.
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.
Leonard Unger, Eliot’s Compound Ghost: Influence and Confluence (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University, 1981).
See, for example, Douglas Bush, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in Engaged and Disengaged (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966) p. 98.
Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. 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 ‘characteristically diffident; but this was, as the colourings of Ash-Wednesday suggest, his instinctive aim’ (see ‘T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Tate, p. 250).
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Manganiello, D. (1989). Dante according to Eliot. In: T. S. Eliot and Dante. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20259-1_1
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