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Olivia Walsh
Colaianne/ENG 2604
March 23, 2009 (First Draft)
Crossing the Scorched Waste Land of Dante’s Inferno
Foreshadowing his attempt to express the impotence of modern civilization, T.S.
Eliot opens up his stylistically and socially radical 1922 poem, “The Waste Land,” with
an allusion to the Greek story of the Cumean Sybll. The Sybll, a prophetic seer of
ancient times, is eternally trapped within a jar as her physical body “threatens to
deliquesce” and, thus, her existence denotes immortality without its youthfulness (Eliot,
page 3). Translated, the three line epigraph reads: “Sibyl, what do you want?” to which
she answers, “I want to die” (3). The classical reference not only imposes upon the
reader a sense of futility towards humanity , but also hints at Eliot’s purpose in writing
the heavily fragmented poem for a contemporary audience, that is, a people who have lost
its “common ground” (Brooker, 26). Nearly every line of the 436-line poem combines
Eliot’s own personal insights directed at the decay of European civilization and the
“disillusionment of a generation” with mythological, religious, and philosophical
allusions, not to mention bits and pieces of music and conversation (see Brooker, 26) (not
a direct quote). The epigraph, much like the poem itself, breeds even further obscurity as
it is only the beginning of a complex web of voices from varying time periods and places;
nevertheless, the frightening image conjures up Eliot’s personal experiences and his
vision of self-isolated individuals coping with a landscape on the verge of death. In the
aftermath of World War I and amidst a miserable marriage, Eliot draws much inspiration
from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno—a masterpiece of literature that
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details the journey of the human soul, its spiraling descent into the eternal torment of Hell
and, its fate, undoubtedly attached to society as a whole.
In a banquet speech following his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1948, Eliot
claimed: “Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them; [however],
poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier.” The language of
poetry, in other words, carries with it the numerous voices of history, the “foreign
tongues” of past, present, and future poets that inextricably nourish the spirit of the
people. “The Waste Land,” therefore, takes a step towards connecting all generations of
people through its unconventional language. It is as if the tangled web of perspectives
bridges the gap between the “ordered world of myth (abstraction)” (Brooker, 27) and the
chaotic, modern society—enough for us to identify with figures from other times and
places. Eliot not only reiterates the voices of historical thinkers and artists through his
vast references, among them Dante, but also recreates a ground of social understanding
for his contemporary generation, desiring to contribute to a collective human feeling and
potential restoration—very much like Dante in early 14th century Florence. The Inferno,
with its multitude of classical, religious, and metaphysical allusions, forms the framework
for Eliot’s poem both stylistically and thematically. The Inferno speaks to a medieval
audience through a single character’s journey and education, and yet it records precisely
the same indictments as that of “The Waste Land”: that society’s greater problems inflict
permanent consequences upon the human soul—one lasting effect being the dual nature
of greed-motivated fraud or pride. Just as Dante vividly describes the medieval Hell
through the eyes of a mortal man encountering the empty souls and harsh climate of each
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circle, so too does Eliot portray the voices of humans suffocated by the “brown fog of a
winter dawn,” wandering in isolation along the dry, withered Earth (Eliot, 61).
The first of five sections in “The Waste Land,” titled “The Burial of the Dead,”
opens with an unexpected juxtaposition of melancholy and rebirth—“April is the
cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire,
stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain”—the spring season should deliver budding life and
yet it stirs up painful memories out of the “dead land” as if April is somehow responsible
for this change (Eliot, 1-4). The speaker then shifts his attention to the “Son of Man”
(20), a human who apparently cannot even begin to guess what sprouts from such “stony
rubbish,” (20) for he only knows a “heap of broken images, where the sun beats/ And the
dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief/ And the dry stone no sound of water” (2224). The speaker, albeit briefly, takes on the role of a spiritual guide, and this is evident
by his tone of overseeing control, much like Virgil in the Inferno. The speaker also offers
to show the “Son of Man” something other than his own shadow; instead, he will show
him “fear in a handful of dust” (30)—a strong foreshadowing of the following encounters
soon to be approached across the desolate wasteland. Then, the speaker’s perspective
shifts once again: after meeting with a fortune-teller who reads his Tarot cards, he arrives
at the “Unreal City,” (60) where he confronts a large crowd that “flowed over the London
Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many” (62-63). The direct
allusion derives from Canto 3 of the Inferno; Dante, alongside Virgil, catches sight of the
neutral souls outside the gates of Hell and is told that they “have no hope of death, and
their blind life is so base that they are envious of every other fate” (3.46-47). Even these
beings are isolated from the rest of Hell’s inhabitants. In fact, they were once a part of the
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“frivolous class who lived only in the moment” and as punishment for their selfindulgences they now suffer as slaves to their unconscious selves (Blow, 14). Upon
seeing this horde of neutral angels and cowardly souls, Dante the pilgrim remarks in
mingled shock and awe that “there came so long a train of people, that I would not have
believed death had undone so many” (3.55-57). Like Dante, the speaker notices the
shame bound to so many people’s fate for “each man fixed his eyes before his feet”
trudging up and down the hill (Eliot, 65). Undoubtedly, Eliot reveals that death is not
merely a physical shutting down but also an end and later a beginning for the collective
human consciousness—part of a “natural cycle” (Brooker, 29)—just like the plants that
produce a fertile harvest, then eventually wither and die into the earth like corpses.
The Inferno works in a linear format as the character Dante descends deeper and
deeper into Hell and, at the same time, evolves to develop more allusions and complexity
just as he evolves to understand the magnitude of an existence without God. The
medieval Hell that Dante the character approaches in Canto 3 is guarded by the famous
inscription:
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE GRIEVING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW,
THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE.
JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER;
DIVINE POWER MADE ME,
HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME WERE NO THINGS CREATED
EXCEPT ETERNAL ONES, AND I ENDURE ETERNAL.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER.
(3.1-9)
This is Dante’s vision of the “Unreal City.” Passing through these gates, Virgil explains
that “each man through sin has isolated himself from all others”—there is no hope for
those who make themselves slaves to sin (Blow, 36). The warning implied in the
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inscription essentially introduces to us the nature of separation from God, its
manifestation in a dark and sorrowful realm populated by despondent souls. The mental
image here is of a wasteland, broken and scorched. Virgil informs the trembling Dante
that here marks the beginning of “strange languages, horrible tongues, words of pain,
accents of anger, voices loud and hoarse,” all of which “[make] a tumult that turns
forever in that air darkened without time, like the sand when a whirlwind blows” (3.2530). Again, the God-designed Hell forms the basis for Eliot’s portrayal of modern
civilization—a wasteland bereft of vegetation and vitality. Additionally, the end of Canto
3 parallels one of the final scenes of “The Waste Land.” As the “tearful earth gave forth a
wind that flashed with a crimson light” (3.133-134), Dante abruptly faints; the fifth and
last section of Eliot’s poem titled, “What the Thunder Said,” similarly includes such an
event. The speaker revives the broken images from the opening: “There is not even
silence in the mountains/ But dry sterile thunder without rain/ There is not even solitude
in the mountains/ But red sullen faces sneer and snarl/ From doors of mudracked houses”
(Eliot, 340-345). The connection between the two texts is natural and unparalleled. Eliot
draws upon Dante’s dream-like visions of Hell, the aridity and ensuing thunder, to fuel
his hope for humanity’s recovery.
“The Burial of the Dead” evokes the prevailing themes of “salvation-seeking”
(Brooker, 58) through isolation, self-destruction, and death followed by rebirth as set
forth in the Inferno. The final stanza in which the speaker observes a crowd of empty,
wandering people, emitting “sighs, short and infrequent” (Eliot, 64), while crossing the
London Bridge echoes Dante’s similar experience at the mouth of Hell and renders the
overall message even more powerful and relevant to today’s secularized audience. Both
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writers seek to reveal the weaknesses inherently bound to modern civilization, such as the
isolation of individuals and classes from each other, human alienation from God, and the
tensions caused by disillusionment caused in part by political and economic fluctuations.
Eliot’s poem addresses these aspects in a style more obscure and mosaic-like in structure;
he certainly makes use of Greek, Latin, German, and Dravidian languages amidst musical
scores and bouts of conversation but not with the intent to confuse. Rather, his use of
multilayered allusions to invoke the voices of historical figures and, thus, “make the
modern world possible for art” (Brooker, 27) are reminiscent of Dante’s work though
without the superstitions of his day. The catastrophic visions, from endless drought and
thirst and blood to a constant pelting of freezing rain, depicted in “The Waste Land” and
the Inferno pertain to two separate realms—Earth and Hell. At the same time, both works
advocate that there is salvation or hope following death and decay; restoration is possible,
basic human feeling can return to us if we allow it.
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Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP, Inc., 1996.
Blow, Susan E. Dante's `Inferno', in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. XVIII,
No. 2, April, 1884, pp. 121-38. Reprinted in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism,
Vol. 3.
Brooker, Jewel Spears. “T.S. Eliot.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 329:
Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, Part 1: Agnon-Eucken. A Bruccoli Clark Layman
Book. Gale, 2007. pp. 402-421.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.