The poet in transformation: Dantean aesthetics in T.S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land【翻译】

Dedication
This thesis is dedicated in deep gratitude and love to my parents, Lauren Matacio and William
Berlingieri. I would like to thank the poets under meditation here, T. S. Eliot and Dante
Alighieri, and the scholars whose work has contributed to my understanding. I would also like to
thank David Choberka, “between the stars, how far…”
Acknowledgements
I would like to give credit to the teachers whose courses formed my introduction to classical,
medieval, and modern literature. First, I express great appreciation to Dr. Cynthia Sowers,
Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, for her scintillating undergraduate courses The Art of
Rome, Medieval Sources of Modern Culture, and Classic Modernism. In these courses,
respectively, she presented Virgil’s Aeneid, provided a framework for medieval sensibility, and
suggested the spiritual dimensions of modernism. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Alison
Cornish, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, for introducing me to Dante in her 400-level
seminar on the Divine Comedy. During her course, I was engaged by two themes relevant to this
thesis: 1) Dante’s understanding of love as a continuum connecting sacred and profane desires,
and 2) his declaration of the morality of art. From my graduate studies at Eastern Michigan
University, I heartily thank Dr. Christine Neufeld, Ph.D., for her enthusiastic critique, guiding
imagery on writing, and committed engagement with my work. Finally, I express deep
appreciation and gratitude to my thesis reader and committee chair, Dr. Elisabeth Däumer, Ph.D.,
of Eastern Michigan University, who introduced me to T. S. Eliot in her graduate course on
Modern American Poetry, for her gentle encouragement to pursue what unsettled me about The
Waste Land, and for her unflagging support and engagement with this thesis.
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Abstract
Dante was a seminal influence in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Many scholars have acknowledged Eliot’s
professed debt to Dante and have examined Eliot’s explicit imitations of Dante; however, few
have pinpointed Dantean influences in non-explicit references to Dante, and few have credited
the influence of a Dantean progress narrative across Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. This thesis
broadly analyzes the principles of Dante’s aesthetic in the poem while analyzing the Sibyl, the
Hanged Man, and the Prajapati parable for their relevance to Eliot’s aesthetic theory. When
Dantean aesthetics and close readings of The Waste Land are compared with Eliot’s
contemporary essays on art, a fuller view of the aspects of Dante’s fundamental influence
emerges. In particular, the prominence of Dante in the sub-text of Eliot’s The Waste Land
reveals the nature of their shared aesthetic—that art is a moral work by virtue of a spiritual
transformation endured by the artist, which involves both a sacrifice of self and a substantiation
of self. A deeper examination of Dante’s influence on T. S. Eliot yields a vaster understanding
of Eliot’s aesthetics while helping to elucidate one of the central mysteries in Eliot’s theory of
art, the role of “personality.”
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Table of Contents
Dedication....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................ iii
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi
Introduction: Dantean Aesthetics in The Waste Land..................................................................... 1
Chapter One: Approaching Source: the Sibyl of Cumae .............................................................. 19
Chapter Two: The Hanged Man as Artist’s Model....................................................................... 33
Chapter Three: Dante’s Aesthetics from Inferno, Cantos 11 & 13............................................... 58
Chapter Four & Conclusion: DA: Discipline and Creative Fitness ............................................. 74
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 94
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List of Figures
Figure Page
1 The Rider Tarot Deck, III THREE OF WANDS……………………………………...34
2 The Rider Tarot Deck, XII THE HANGED MAN…………………………………....35
3 The Rider Tarot Deck, XVI THE TOWER…………………………………………....85

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