I was at the Little Gidding Annual T S Eliot festival last July, and listened to A.N.Wilson's talk entitled “T.S.Eliot and Dante”. Seeing his review on Substack recently, I thought I would look into the themes and conclusions he explored with the group. Here is the outcome.
Wilson wrote later as he recalled his presentation, about the setting of his lecture: the small village made famous by Little Gidding, the last of Eliot’s Four
Quartets. For Wilson, Eliot’s poem stands as the
culmination of a long spiritual journey, the final major work of a poet he had
always counted among his most cherished.
Yet, as he prepared his talk for the Summer Festival,
Wilson found himself unexpectedly unsettled. Returning to Four Quartets with
fresh eyes, he sensed — to his own surprise — that something in the poems no
longer spoke to him as it once had.
That question, that unease, became the
starting point for the reflections which I explore in the two essays that follow. In the second essay Wilson's talk pivoted towards a focus on Eliot's "After Strange Gods", where he uses the thesis of that publication, to examine the well-documented shift in Eliot's poetic sensibilities from the 1930s.
Much of this material is suggested from Wilson's own Substack review of his talk.
1. Eliot, Dante, and the Fire That Changes
There is a moment in A. N. Wilson’s talk when his admiration
for Eliot’s early work and his unease about the later poetry come into sharp
focus. It is the moment when he turns to Little Gidding and the encounter with
the “familiar compound ghost,” a passage Eliot himself described as “the
nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as
well as content.” Wilson seizes on this, for it is here that Eliot most openly
acknowledges his debt to Dante, and here that the question of influence becomes
a question of inheritance.
In an early draft of the poem, Eliot made the Dantean
allusion explicit:
So I assumed a double part and
cried,
And heard my voice, “Are you here,
Ser Brunetto?”
The echo of Inferno XV — Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto? — is
unmistakable. Dante meets Brunetto Latini among the Violent against Nature,
though Wilson is careful to say that this particular detail is irrelevant to
Eliot’s purpose. What matters is the relationship: Brunetto as mentor, as the
writer of Il Tesoretto, as the teacher whose presence in Hell is both shocking
and tender. Wilson notes that Dante’s choice to place him there may be “a very
glaring example of what has been called the Anxiety of Influence.” The beloved
master must be surpassed, even judged.
Eliot’s own ghost appears in the same ambiguous light:
....some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half
recalled
Both one and many; in the brown
baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound
ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
This doubleness — “both one and many” — is what has kept the
debate alive. The ghost is recognisable and yet beyond naming. Wilson nails his
colours to the mast and declares: the ghost is Yeats. And he brings evidence.
Eliot himself admitted: “There is in the end of the section an allusion to a
late poem of Yeats.” The poem is the fierce, self‑mocking epigram:
You think it horrible that lust
and rage
Should dance attendance upon my
old age…
What else have I to spur me into
song.
Eliot’s comment — “The tragedy of Yeats’s epigram is all in
the last line” — reveals how deeply he felt the pathos of Yeats’s late style.
And in 1959, writing to Donald Hall, he recalled Yeats with real affection:
“Yeats was always very generous when one met him and had the art of treating
younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.”
Wilson adds a final, mischievous detail: Yeats’s remark upon
hearing of Swinburne’s death — “Now I’m the King of the Cats.” Eliot, Wilson
suggests, must have felt something of the same when Yeats died and “left
[his]/my body on a distant shore.” With Yeats gone, Eliot becomes the chief of
the tribe, the inheritor of the poetic mantle. And the mantle is expressed in
the lines:
Since our concern was speech, and
speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the
tribe.
It is a modest claim and an immense one. The work of
purification — of language, of tradition, of the self — is what the ghost
bequeaths.
Yet the identity of the ghost remains, and should remain, a
mystery. Yeats is there, certainly, but so is Brunetto, so is Dante, so is the
whole lineage of poetic fathers. The compound nature of the ghost is not a
puzzle to be solved but a truth to be inhabited: the poet meets not one
predecessor but the whole tradition that has shaped him.
Wilson then turns to the historical fire that surrounds
Little Gidding. “The fire which flickers around the edges of the poem,” he
writes, “is the fire for which Londoners were waiting each night during the
Blitz.” Eliot was on the rooftops as a firewatcher. John Hayward’s gloss makes
the Dantean parallel explicit: the setting is a bombed London street before
dawn, the narrator an air‑raid warden. Eliot himself
confirmed that he drew on Dante’s encounters
with Brunetto and Arnaut Daniel, intending the ghost to be “a figure who is in
Purgatory… and therefore by no means condemned or rejected.”
By the time we reach the end of Little Gidding, Eliot bows
toward Dante’s final vision. Wilson quotes Paradiso XXXIII — “O abbondante
grazia…” — and then lets Eliot’s own lines stand:
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than
everything)…
When the tongues of flame are in‑folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Wilson sees in this a movement from Bradley’s metaphysics to
Dante’s “ingathered rose,” from philosophical abstraction to the fire of divine
love. Helen Gardner’s judgment — that Eliot’s distinction lies in the balance
between vision and art — is invoked to show that Eliot’s master is not an
English poet but Dante.
Yet Wilson cannot resist the tension. Dante’s Commedia is a
fiction, a visionary architecture. Eliot, he insists, is not a mystic. Four
Quartets are poems about religious experience, but they are not visionary in
the way The Prelude becomes visionary. Eliot hesitates to express himself
directly, preferring obliquity: “Oh, do not ask what is it?” or “That was a way
of putting it — not very satisfactory.” And then the line that Wilson reads as
a renunciation:
A periphrastic study in a worn‑out poetical fashion…
Wilson wants the fire of The Waste Land; Eliot has become a
poet of stillness. Wilson wants pilgrimage; Eliot offers contemplation. Wilson
wants the drama of faith; Eliot offers the condition of simplicity.
And yet the tension is fruitful. Eliot’s late poetry is not
a falling‑off but a transformation. The fire is still there — but it burns differently. It is no longer the infernal blaze of
1922 but the quiet flame of someone who has learned that the deepest truths
cannot be shouted, only borne.
The poet says “the poetry does not matter.” The critic
insists that it does. And perhaps both are right.
2. Eliot, After Strange Gods, and the Question of Devotional
Poetry
When Wilson turns from Dante to After Strange Gods, the tone
of his talk shifts. He moves from the poetic lineage to the ideological terrain
that shaped Eliot’s thinking in the 1930s — a terrain of cultural order,
orthodoxy, and the uneasy relationship between faith and art. It is here that
Wilson begins to explore the Eliot who emerges after Ash‑Wednesday,
the Eliot whose conversion unsettles his poetic instincts and complicates his
critical judgments.
He begins with Charles Maurras, the monarchist who defended
Catholicism not as a faith but as a cultural adhesive. Eliot’s decision to
dedicate his 1929 Dante book to Maurras is, for Wilson, a revealing gesture.
Eliot “did not do things without deliberation,” and so the dedication must be
read as a statement of alignment. Maurras shared Dante’s belief in Catholicism
“as the social glue which held Europe together.” Belloc’s cry — “The Faith is
Europe, and Europe is the Faith” — hovers behind the choice.
Yet Dante’s own Catholicism was not merely cultural. He
could see the violent arrest of Boniface VIII as a reenactment of the Passion:
I saw the fleur‑de‑lys
enter Alagna…
and in his vicar made captive,
A second time I see him mocked…
Maurras could never have said such a thing. His Catholicism
was a matter of order, not grace. And this leads Wilson to his central
distinction: in the fourteenth century, faith, metaphysics, and social order
were one fabric. In the twentieth, they had come apart. Kierkegaard had exposed
the hollowness of Christendom; Maurras chose tradition without faith. Eliot,
caught between them, was drawn to the beauty of the old order yet compelled
toward the purgatorial struggle of belief.
This tension is everywhere in After Strange Gods. Eliot
treats “Orthodoxy” not only as theology but as cultural cohesion, and he links
this cohesion to exclusions that he later regretted. He refused to reprint the
book in his lifetime. But Wilson is interested less in the controversy than in
what the book reveals about Eliot’s understanding of religious poetry.
Eliot dismisses Hopkins as a “devotional” poet and elevates
Baudelaire as a “religious” one. Hopkins, he says, is “merely the author of
some very beautiful devotional verse.” The “deadly word ‘important’,” which
Eliot reserves for major writers, is withheld. Wilson hears the chill in this
judgment. Hopkins risks everything — form, syntax, emotional exposure. Eliot,
after his conversion, becomes wary of such risks.
Wilson reminds us that Eliot had already shown this instinct
in his review of Blake: “The poet knows it is no good in writing poetry, to try
to be anything but a poet.” Blake’s prophetic ambition is dismissed; “Blake was
not even a first‑rate visionary.” Eliot
distrusts visionary excess. After baptism, this distrust hardens into a
question: “Is it not possible, in 1934, to be Orthodox
and a Good Poet?” Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence — all on the “wrong” side
theologically — seem to have “the best
tunes.” Eliot wants an orthodox equivalent but
cannot quite find one.
Wilson’s Goethe quotation returns here:
Sitz ihr nur immer! Leimt zusammen
Braut ein Ragout von anderen
Schmaus.
- Just sit there all the time! Glue together a ragout of other people's feast/flowers.
Eliot, “a gatherer of other men’s flowers,” makes a
triumphant ragout in The Waste Land. But after Ash‑Wednesday,
Wilson feels the flavour changes. The gathering continues, but the daring
diminishes. Hopkins invents; Eliot refines. Dante risks vision; Eliot prefers
mystery and the equivocal.
And so Wilson returns to the contrast that has haunted his
talk. The Waste Land is a ship that “has indeed set out to sea,” a poem of
fracture, fire, and risk. Four Quartets, by contrast, he sees as a poem of
caution. “There is a difference between tourism and pilgrimage,” he says. “One
reader at least… finds the journey made in Little Gidding to be tourism and not
pilgrimage.” He wants Eliot to dare the leap that Hopkins dared, to entrust
himself to the “choppy seas” of creative risk.
His final flourish is deliberately provocative:
“They are the beautiful musings of a religious tourist in a
suit.”
It is a line crafted to amuse and to sting. But it also
reveals Wilson’s own preference: he wants tension, not transcendence; fire, not
stillness; the possibility of beatitude held at arm’s length, not embraced. He
wants the Eliot of 1922 to remain the Eliot of 1942.
Yet can we really say that the late Eliot is a diminished poet? He is a
transformed one, for sure. In this reformed Eliot, he fire has not gone out; it has become inward. We can judge him on that. The drama of
faith has not vanished; it has become the quiet labour of surrender. The poet
who once wrote The Waste Land has learned that the deepest truths are carried along best by meditation, not loud declaration.
Wilson ends by lamenting that Eliot had come to believe “the
poetry does not matter.” But perhaps Eliot meant something subtler: that the
poem is not the end but the means, a gesture toward a reality that cannot be
contained in words. Wilson insists that the poetry does matter. And he is
right. But Eliot’s late work suggests that poetry matters most when it points
beyond itself.
Postscript
Taken together, these essays trace Wilson’s
unease and fascination as he returns to Eliot with the double vision of
affection and scrutiny. They follow him through the landscapes of influence,
faith, and poetic inheritance, and linger over the tensions that shaped Eliot’s
late work — tensions that remain as alive for readers now as they were for
Eliot himself. If Wilson finds himself questioning what once seemed certain,
that uncertainty becomes part of the conversation: a reminder that great poems
continue to shift under our gaze, asking us to meet them again with whatever
clarity, doubt, or longing we bring.
