A.N.Wilson: T.S. Eliot and Dante - Lecture at the Little Gidding Festival July 7th 2025

 

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.

Virtue, Order, and the Confucian Imagination in an English Civil War Life

 

Here is a meditation around the role of Thomas Fairfax as a model of authority in a moment when England was searching for order. It is written following a talk at a recent meeting of my Local History Society.

There are moments in history when the fate of a nation seems to hinge not on constitutions or armies but on the character of a few individuals who, without seeking it, become the custodians of order. Thomas Fairfax belongs to that small company. He was a general of rare ability, yet his life after the Civil War suggests something deeper than military competence. It suggests a man who believed—instinctively, quietly, without philosophical flourish—that authority must rest on virtue if it is to endure.

This is not the language of seventeenth‑century England. It is, however, the language of Confucius, who taught that harmony begins with right relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. A society is not held together by force or cleverness but by the moral coherence of those who lead it. When that coherence fails, disorder follows, no matter how elaborate the machinery of the state.

Fairfax lived through precisely such a failure.

The Aftermath of Regicide: Power Without Moral Centre

The execution of Charles I in 1649 was, for many Parliamentarians, the necessary climax of a long struggle. For Fairfax, it was something else: a rupture in the moral fabric of the kingdom. He had fought the King’s armies, but he had not fought for the King’s death. When summoned to sit as a judge, he refused. Lady Anne’s cry from the gallery—“He is not here, and he will never be here”—was the public expression of a private conviction: that authority cannot be built on an act that violates the deeper order of things.

Confucius would have recognised the moment. When the ruler loses virtue, the state becomes a theatre of confusion. Ritual becomes empty form; words lose their meaning; power becomes self‑justifying. The Commonwealth, for all its talk of liberty, soon displayed these symptoms. Parliament dissolved and reassembled in bewildering combinations. Financial abstractions multiplied. Ideological noise drowned out the quieter claims of justice and moderation.

Fairfax watched this with a kind of sorrow. He had fought to restrain arbitrary power, not to replace it with a republic of abstractions. The regicides had removed the monarch but failed to cultivate the moral order that might have replaced him. They had, in Confucian terms, lost the Mandate of Heaven—not because they lacked legal right, but because they lacked moral right.

Fairfax  resigned his commission. It was a gesture Confucius would have recognised: the withdrawal of the junzi—the exemplary man—when the ruler no longer heeds the Way.

Fairfax and Cromwell: Two Models of Authority

The contrast with Oliver Cromwell is instructive. Cromwell was a man of immense gifts—decisive, visionary, unafraid of power. But his authority, for all its religious fervour, rested ultimately on force: the Army, the Protectorate, the machinery of the state. He governed through a kind of English Legalism, believing that order could be imposed if only the right structures were in place and the right men held the reins.

Fairfax’s authority was of a different kind. He governed by example, not decree. He listened more than he commanded. He refused to act when conscience forbade it. He stepped aside when power demanded what virtue could not supply. Cromwell believed in the transformative power of institutions; Fairfax believed in the transformative power of character.

The Collapse of the Protectorate: A Nation Without a Centre

When Cromwell died in 1658, the Protectorate began to crumble almost at once. Richard Cromwell lacked his father’s authority; the Army fractured; Parliament bickered. England drifted, weary of experiment and hungry for stability. It was a moment when the nation seemed to have lost not only its institutions but its moral grammar.

Into this vacuum stepped General George Monck, the military governor of Scotland. Monck was no ideologue. He understood power, but he also understood its limits. His instinct was for order, not upheaval. He marched south not as a conqueror but as a man attempting to restore coherence to a country that had forgotten how to govern itself.

Fairfax, watching from Yorkshire, recognised the moment. A rising in the north threatened to ignite wider disorder. He mounted his horse once more. The sight of him—this modest, battle‑worn figure—was enough to steady the county. Men followed him not because he commanded them, but because they trusted him.

This is the Confucian ideal of authority: not the authority of force, but the authority of character.

The Restoration as a Work of Moral Repair

Monck, recognising Fairfax’s influence, consulted him closely. Fairfax did not dictate terms; he did not seek office. Instead, he lent his name—still one of the most trusted in England—to the one solution that could end the cycle of coups, dissolutions, and military interventions: the Restoration of Charles II under conditions that would protect the liberties for which the Civil War had been fought.

Fairfax’s support reassured former Parliamentarians that the Restoration need not mean revenge, and reassured Royalists that reconciliation was possible. It was a gesture of national healing from a man who had once commanded the army that defeated the monarchy.

Virtue as the Ground of Authority

How far, then, can we say that Fairfax embodied the Confucian idea of authority grounded in virtue rather than power?

• He subordinated ambition to conscience.
• He refused to participate in acts he believed morally corrosive.
• He exercised power lightly and relinquished it easily.
• He believed that right relationships—between ruler and subject, army and Parliament, victory and mercy—were the true foundations of harmony.
• He acted not to dominate events but to steady them.

In a century of ideological noise, Fairfax’s life reads almost like a counterpoint: a reminder that the stability of a nation depends less on the brilliance of its institutions than on the character of the people who inhabit them. He was, in that sense, a kind of English junzi—an exemplary man whose authority flowed not from office or force but from the quiet coherence of his own conduct.

His memorial says it plainly:

“He might have been a King but that he understood
How much it is a meaner thing to be unjustly great
Than honourably good.”

In the end, Fairfax matters because he shows us that virtue, even when it refuses the stage, can still shape the fate of a nation.

More Ezra Pound Reflections

 I’ve been thinking about Ezra Pound again, and to that curious, lifelong entanglement he had with Confucius. It’s odd how these things resurface. Perhaps it’s the general unease in the air — today’s grim exchange between the USA and Iran being only the latest reminder that the world seems to be running on frayed nerves and brittle certainties. It has put me in mind of Pound’s own restlessness, and of those extraordinary wartime broadcasts from Rome in which he poured out his fury at America, convinced that the country of his birth had abandoned every civilisational principle he believed in. They make for uncomfortable listening now, but they also reveal a man who felt himself standing in the ruins of something he could no longer name.

And in all this, Pound’s fascination with Confucius feels strangely contemporary. China, having once tossed Confucius aside in the fervour of Maoist purification, now retrieves him selectively, polishing those aspects of his teaching that align with its own political ambitions. A civilisation reclaiming its ancient guide just as it asserts itself as the world’s manufacturing centre, promises a carefully managed glide toward Net Zero by the 2060s, and continues to refine its own brand of autocratic governance. One can almost imagine Pound peering across the decades, muttering that at last someone has restored order — though of course the reality is far more complicated, and far less benign, than his romantic imagination allowed.

What has always struck me is how Pound believed poetry might serve as a kind of moral architecture. In The Cantos, especially, he treats verse not as ornament but as scaffolding — fragments of governance, ethics, and historical example woven into a tapestry of cultural memory. He read Confucius not as a relic but as a physician diagnosing the ailments of societies adrift. There is something touching in that ambition, even if it carried him into places where clarity and delusion became difficult to separate.

For Pound, Confucius offered a world in which order begins with right relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Harmony is not negotiated through democratic contest but cultivated through ritual, hierarchy, and moral authority.

To a man watching the West flounder in parliamentary bickering, financial abstraction, and ideological noise, this must have seemed like a lifeline. And so he drifted toward authoritarian politics, imagining in Mussolini a modern vessel for ancient virtues. The tragedy — if that is the word — lies in the way he blurred distinctions: the Confucian idea of authority grounded in virtue, and the modern reality of authority grounded in power, myth, and the machinery of the state.

And now, as we watch the USA and Iran exchange blows — each convinced of its own righteousness, each locked into its own narrative of grievance and destiny — I find myself thinking of Pound’s broadcasts again. Not because the situations are comparable, but because the same unease runs beneath them: the sense that nations, like individuals, can lose their bearings, and that once lost, the search for coherence can take them down unpredictable paths.

Western societies still wrestle with fragmentation, economic opacity, and the erosion of shared narratives. The fear — sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted — is that liberal democracies may be losing the capacity to sustain order. And at the same time, China’s rise, with its mixture of centralised authority, long‑term planning, and civilisational self‑confidence, has revived interest in alternative models of governance. Some see in China’s trajectory a faint echo of Confucian ideals: disciplined leadership, cultural continuity, and the belief that stability flows from moral structure rather than procedural freedom. Whether this is accurate or merely convenient is another matter, but the comparison persists.

Pound’s legacy, then, is not a moral lesson neatly packaged for our reassurance. It is a reminder of how easily the longing for order can become entangled with the politics of control, and how difficult it is — in any age — to distinguish between the two. His Confucianism survives not as a prescription but as a provocation: a way of asking what holds a civilisation together, and what happens when the threads begin to loosen.

You see this most clearly in the poems themselves. In Canto XIII, Confucius speaks directly, offering fragments of counsel on governance, conduct, and virtue. The China Cantos present history as a series of moral exempla — rulers rising or falling according to their adherence to ritual and justice. Even Cathay, though not explicitly Confucian, hints at Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ceremonious, restrained, and ethically grounded. Taken together, these works reveal his belief that poetry might do more than describe the world: it might shape it. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of memory, discipline, and order — a cultural instrument capable of restoring coherence to a fractured age.

I suppose what lingers for me is not Pound’s politics but his longing — that restless desire for a world in which words and actions, rulers and responsibilities, culture and conduct, all align. A longing that can lead toward wisdom or toward catastrophe, depending on the hands that hold it. And as today’s headlines remind us, the world is still very much in the grip of that same search for coherence, though the paths we choose may be no less fraught than his, even if they unfold in different landscapes.