T. S. ELIOT’S “DISORDERLY ORDER” AND THE ECHOES OF DANTE’S INFERNO

Bozica Jovic

Abstract


How right was T. S. Eliot when he claimed to be able to truly venerate “tradition” in a largely disillusioned and traumatized Europe after the Great War? This paper opens the investigation by a comparison and apparent similarities between Harold Bloom’s conceptualization of poetic influence and those of T. S. Eliot dispersed among the body of his literary criticism. On one hand, Bloom maintains his idea of poets being out of necessity on the defensive mode when it comes to the influence, whereas T. S. Eliot tried to at the same time “embrace” the chaos of Modernism and his idea of a venerated, abstract and unchangeable “tradition”. For T. S. Eliot, the figure of Dante looms large on the European poetic horizon as a link between the present and the past. In order of illustration, the author of the paper emphasizes Eliot’s use of epigraphs or direct borrowings from Dante at the beginning of his poems as a means of the insertion of the great poet’s imagined “missing” link into the poetry of his day. Thus, Eliot’s legacy effortlessly engrafted itself onto that of his beloved poet master, Dante.

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Keywords


tradition, disorder, Bloom, Dante

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References


Bloom, Harold, 2012. The Anatomy of Influence, Yale, Yale University Press.

Bloom, Harold, 2012. The Anxiety of Influence, Yale, Yale University Press.

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Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 2000. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, New York, Bartleby.

Penda, Petar, 2011. Cultural and Textual (Dis)unity: Poetics of Nothingness in The Waste Land, in Joe Moffett (ed.), The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi.

Penda, Petar, 2012. T. S. Eliot: Poetska i teorijska kontekstualizacija, Banja Luka, Filološki fakultet.

Williamson, George, 1984. A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis, New York, Syracuse University Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v5i3.297

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