Abstract
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’.1But 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.
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Notes
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.
Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1978) pp. 64–5.
A. Walton Litz, From Burnt Norton to Little Gidding: the Making of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’, Review, 2 (1980) p. 18.
See Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) p. 239.
W. B. Yeats, ‘William Blake and the Imagination’, in Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968) p. 111.
T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) p. 48.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Preface’ to The King of the Great Clock Tower (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1934) no page number.
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.
Roger Scruton, ‘Dante at a Distance’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1980, p. 1051.
D. J. Gordon, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Use of Dante in Little Gidding’, Cambridge Review, 13 February 1943, p. 199.
Cf. A. D. Moody, T. S. Eliot, Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 252–3.
Mario Praz, ‘T. S. Eliot and Dante’, in The Flaming Heart (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958) p. 373.
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.
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.
Eloise Hay, T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 185.
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.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’, Irish University Review, 15 (Spring 1985) p. 5.
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. 178–9.
Eliot, ‘La Leçon de Valéry’, in Paul Valéry Vivant (Marseille: Cahiers du Sud, 1946) p. 80.
See George Gugelberger, ‘By No Means an Orderly Dantescan Rising’, Italian Quarterly, 16 (Spring 1973) pp. 36–8.
Glauco Cambon, Dante’s Craft (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1969) p. 199, n. 17.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Faith, Hope and Poetry: Osip Mandelstam’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980) p. 217.
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 flight in order to regain its homeland’.
W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969) p. 215.
Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, Mass., and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), p. 259.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931) p. ix.
George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967) p. 39.
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.
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.
Ettore Settani, James Joyce e la prima versione italiana di Finnegans Wake (Venice: Cavallino, 1955) p. 30.
Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New Directions, 1960) p. 187.
Mary Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) p. 207.
Eugène 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.
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.
Seamas Heaney, ‘Treely and Rurally’, Quarto, 9 (August 1980) p. 14.
See, for example, Thomas Werge, ‘Dante and Modem Literature: a Review of Scholarship 1960–1981’, Studies in Medievalism, II (Summer 1983) pp. 115–58;
Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
T. S. Eliot, ‘Review of The Twelfth Century’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 1927, p. 542.
See Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984) p. 155.
See Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Dante’s Hell and Pound’s Paradiso: “tutto spezzato”’, Paideuma, 9 (Winter 1980) pp. 501–4.
Cf. Eliot’s earlier statement in the Criterion, 6 (1927) pp. 346–7:
T. S. Eliot, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’, Little Review 4, no. 1 (1917) p. 9.
W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier, 1966) p. 144.
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 Artist’, 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.
Eugene Goodheart, The Failure of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 171.
Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 174.
Ezra Pound, ‘For T. S. E.’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Dell, 1966) p. 89.
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Manganiello, D. (1989). Eliot’s Dante and the Moderns. In: T. S. Eliot and Dante. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20259-1_6
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