T. S. Eliot and Dante

221 Pages·1989·18.565 MB·English

by  Dominic Manganiello (auth.)

T. S. ELIOT AND DANTE
T. S. Eliot and Dante
DOMINIC MANGANIELLO
Associate Professor of English Literature
University of Ottawa, Canada
Palgrave Macmillan
© Dominic Manganiello 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989
All rights reserved. For infonnation, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-1-349-20261-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20259-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20259-1
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manganiello, Dominic.
T. S. Eliot and Dante.
Includes index.
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965-
Knowledge--Uterature. 2. Dante A1ighieri, 1265-1321-
InfIuence---Eliot. 3. English poetry-Italian influences.
I. Title.
PS3509. L43Z72 1989 821'.912 88-15871
ISBN 978-0-312-02104-7
alia dolce memoria di mio padre,
ai miei cari Angelina, Francesco Giuseppe, Lucia Carla, Miriam Elisa,
e Sofia Cristina
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Dante according to Eliot 1
(i) The Modem Element in Dante 1
(ii) Dante, the Touchstone Poet 5
(iii) Eliot's Dante and his Critics 11
2 Death by Water and Dante's Ulysses 17
(i) Prufrock's Love Song 18
(ii) Phlebas Redivivus1 25
(iii) Old Men Ought to be Explorers 31
(iv) Marina: Memory and the Art of Sea-Change 35
3 The Poetics of the Desert 40
(i) The Desert in the City 40
(ii) Voices Crying in the Wilderness 53
(iii) The Cactus Land 59
(iv) The Garden in the Desert 65
(v) The Word in the Desert 75
4 Eliot's Book of Memory 84
(i) Memory and Desire 84
(ii) MaUer and Memory, or the Soul's Progress 92
(iii) Memoria sui/Memoria Dei 98
(iv) Memory and the Word 115
vii
viii Contents
5 The Aesthetics and Politics of Order 124
(i) Style and Order 124
(ii) The Ethics and Politics of Order 132
(iii) Church and State: Murder in the Cathedral 137
6 Eliot's Dante and the Moderns 147
(i) Little Gidding: Eliot and Yeats's Ghost 147
(ii) Little Gidding Revisited: Heaney and Joyce's Ghost 155
(iii) 'The True Dantescan Voice' 162
Notes 166
Index 206
Acknowledgements
One who writes a book on T. S. Eliot and Dante cannot help but
record his indebtedness to a number of scholarly works that have dealt
with various aspects of the subject; namely, the seminal essay by
Mario Praz, and the unpublished doctoral dissertations by Audrey T.
Rodgers, James S. Torrens, Donald George Sheehan, and Kristin Rae
Woolever. Books by Philip R. Headings, Lyndall Gordon, A. D.
Moody, Edward Lobb, Eloise Hay, and Ronald Bush have also been
helpful. Other acknowledgements appear in the notes.
In a more personal way, I wish to express my thanks to David L.
Jeffrey, Camille R. La Bossiere, and George Thomson, my colleagues
at the University of Ottawa, for helpful discussion of my manuscript
and for valuable suggestions; to Ronald Bush for some practical
suggestions; to Mrs Valerie Eliot for kindly responding to a query,
and for allowing me to consult the Clark Lectures and the Turnbull
Lectures; to Seamus Heaney for an interesting conversation at his
station in Cambridge, Massachusetts; to John Spencer Hill, Joseph
Ronsley, Donald Theall, and the late Richard Ellmann for their kind
encouragement and support of this project at various stages; to Reed
Way Dasenbrock, Irene Makaryk, and Carla de Petris for the gift of
articles; to the staffs at Harvard's Houghton Library, at the Biblioteca
Marucelliana and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence; to
Dorothy Thomson and Frank Di Trolio of the University of Ottawa
Library; and to the School of Graduate Studies at the University of
Ottawa for a grant which made a research trip to Florence possible.
And, not least, there is the debt of gratitude to my wife, Angelina,
and to my children, Francesco Giuseppe, Lucia Carla, Miriam Elisa, and
Sofia Cristina. Only they know how much they have meant. With joy
I dedicate this book to them, and to the sweet memory of my father.
The author and publishers wish to thank the follOwing who have
kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:
ix
x Acknowledgements
Mrs Valerie Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd, for the extracts from early
drafts of 'Ode', 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service', 'Little Gidding',
'The Rock', 'Morning at the Window' and Murder in the Cathedral by
T. S. Eliot, © Valerie Eliot 1989; the extracts from The Clark Lectures
©
and the Turnbull Lectures Valerie Eliot 1989; and the extracts from
uncollected writings © Valerie Eliot 1989;
Faber and Faber Ltd, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc., for the extracts
from The Elder Statesman, To Criticise the Critic, On Poetry and Poets and
Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley by T. S. Eliot;
Faber and Faber Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for the
extracts from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Murder in the Cathedral, The
Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, Selected Essays, Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, The Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods,
Essays Ancient and Modern, For Lancelot Andrewes by T. S. Eliot, and
the extracts from The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript by T. S.
Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot;
Faber and Faber Ltd, and Harvard University Press, for the extracts
from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism by T. S. Eliot;
Methuen and Co., for the extracts from The Sacred Wood by T. S.
Eliot.
1
Dante according to Eliot
(i) THE MODERN ELEMENT IN DANTE
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 proceedings11
Or why did Ezra Pound, who first championed Dante as the Muse
presiding over the modem revolution in poetry, belatedly concede,
'[Eliot's1 was the true Dantescan voice' of the modem world72
That the distinction of delivering the keynote address in Florence
had been accorded to Eliot came as no surprise to followers of his
career. When he was asked by an interviewer in 1949 what his
favourite period in Italian literature was, Eliot replied, 'Dante, and then
Dante, and then Dante. No one has had a greater influence on me
than Dante. There is always something to discover in the Divine
Comedy. As a young man I had other poetic loves, but I betrayed
these with the passing of years. I have always returned to Dante, to
his poetry.'J Reviewing his career in 1961, Eliot confessed, 'There is
one poet . . . who impressed me profoundly when I was twenty
two . . . one poet who remains the comfort and amazement of my
age.'4 This long-standing admiration for Dante did not go unnoticed.s
On awarding him the 1948 Nobel Prize for Uterature, the Swedish
Academy described Eliot as 'one of Dante's latest born successors'.6
And when the Dante gold medal was conferred on Eliot in 1959, the
Italian ambassador commended him for restoring Dante to our contem
porary consciousness and to the European tradition.7 For in his literary
and social criticism as well as in his verse, Eliot had paid Dante perhaps
1