T.S. Eliot, Dante. London: Faber & Faber, 1929.
Call number: PQ 4390 .E5 1929 (Special Collections)
Case 2: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy and its Legacy Throughout the Centuries”
The book consists of a commentary on Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy, the latter divided into two sections: “A Reading of the Inferno” and “A Reading of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.” T.S. Eliot considered Dante to be his stylistic and existential model and his Divine Comedy a fundamental reading for the appreciation of modern poetry in any language. He maintained that Dante appealed to universal concepts, which is the aspect that made his poem successful throughout the centuries and across the world. Moreover, he praised Dante’s depiction of the complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotions, including spiritual ones. A close friend of Eliot, Ezra Pound, who saw Dante as the muse presiding over the modern revolution in poetry, wrote that Eliot “was the true Dantean voice” of the modern world (Ezra Pound, “For T. S. E.,” in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate. New York: Dell, 1966, p. 89).
On page 23, Eliot comments on Dante’s allegories, which he examines as products of the poet’s “visual” imagination. According to Eliot, the power of Dante’s narration rests on his ability to express visual aspects through allegories and to speak to people who were still accustomed to ideas being communicated through visions. In other words, his imagination enabled everyone to see what he experienced.