Chapter 18 - Dante

This chapter was commissioned for the CUP “In Context” series by the editor of the T. S. Eliot volume. While providing an overview of T. S. Eliot’s creative and critical responses to Dante, it highlights Eliot’s background reading in Dante scholarship and his contacts with scholars like Mario Praz. The 1929 Dante pamphlet is placed in the conext of the Rappel à l’Ordre, as suggested by its original epigraph from Charles Maurras. A comparison of the use of Dante in Little Gidding and in Ezra Pound’s nearly contemporary Canto 72 reveals Eliot’s "detachment from current events" even at the height of World War II. Eliot’s work can be read as a Dantesque pilgrimage that never reaches a Paradiso. But in Four Quartets he "present[s] the sober wisdom of age in a language that aspires to the universality of Dante’s Italian" (p. 188). See also on this subject, Massimo Bacigalupo, “Types of Ecstasy--Paradise Regained in Eliot and American Modernism”, T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe, ed. Paul Douglass (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2011), pp. 111-120.