Thursday, September 20, 2012

Dante and Eliot


In choosing to take this class and study Dante’s Divine Comedy, I hoped that I could gain some historical, literary, and social access to other works that have come after Dante. T.S. Eliot is, by far, my favorite poet and I still remember the first time I read “The Wasteland”. Right before my senior year of high school, I went on a camping trip with a few friends and we decided that our goal for the night was to try to read “The Wasteland” and get as much out of it as we could. None of us had been formally introduced to the poem in a class so it all seemed really dense and heavy in references for us. I remember how many of Eliot’s notes explained how his lines were in reference to this classic work by Dante. Coming into this class, I’ve thought a lot about how re-reading “The Wasteland” will be after finishing Inferno.

While waiting to finish Inferno, I’ve found others who have taken an interest in Dante and Eliot as well. There are multitude of articles on the connection between Dante’s Inferno and Eliot’s famous poem. Eliot provided his own notes to go along with his dense and allusive work, providing clear, indisputable references to Dante.

In some articles, the focus was on parsing out the individual references. A commonly found reference to Dante comes from Eliot’s first book “The Burial of the Dead” where he echoes Dante’s line “death had undone so many” (Eliot, line 63; Dante, Canto III, line 57). Another reference comes in the very next line comes from Eliot’s mention of the “Sighs, short and infrequent” (line 64) which relates to the sighs mentioned in Canto IV of Inferno that come from the unbaptized men in Limbo (line 26).

In others, articles focus on the social context of the two writers. Dante wrote during a time in history where he felt that society was not living up to the moral and Christian standards that he believed in. The Divine Comedy was really his chance to talk about all of these different people in society and give his opinion as to their place in the eternal world. Eliot, on the other hand, was facing post-World War II Europe, which he compares to Dante’s hellish world. He was responding to the moral crisis of how to analyze death and destruction on such a large scale and what to do after. It’s interesting to see how each author responds to society during troubled times. I think what is most interesting is to see that each chooses to look to the past, seeing if older wisdom holds true during these great changes in their world. I think Dante would be pleased to know that, in a way, he is being looked to for advice in a more modern time.

Hopefully I will have more to say about the connection between Eliot and Dante as we finish the Inferno, but for now I will just leave you with a passage from “The Wasteland” that draws heavily on Dante:

“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 short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”
(Eliot, lines 60-65).

Articles:

Allusions to Dante's Inferno in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Dante's Influence on T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"

Canto XXII and The Waste Land as Modern Infernos

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