Selected Essays

"It’s not a biography of Dante in the ordinary sense, and I don’t think Eliot thought of it as such. I chose it because he sets out a schema that was of huge importance to Eliot’s life and achievement. You don’t have to have read Dante’s The Divine Comedy to know that the inferno is followed by purgatory followed by paradiso. Eliot argues that this is a universal life and a universal pattern, and he wanted to tap into that pattern. It’s the schema of a life which moves from a sense of sin to an awareness of a broken-down life – a Waste Land life – and which moves deliberately through a purgatorial phase of suffering. One could say the equivalent was Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday”. In some sense Eliot remains a purgatorial poet, always looking towards a paradiso that he didn’t attain. He shared with Dante that sense of sin and introspection. Dante was, to him, the greatest exponent of the soul’s journey. Eliot was actually critical of biography. He thought the writing of a real experience was not exactly that experience. He would use the word “transmuted” – that it is life transmuted into art. There is a source experience, but Eliot is most interested in the act of what he calls “sublimation” – of taking the material of life and looking at its most ideal or idealised form. He is interested less in the man, more in the universal schema. This essay is about a poet who conceives of a plot, and insists that life will fit the plot. I chose it because it is a traditional plot in biography, shall we say. It’s the plot of Exodus, of moving through a desert to a promised land. It’s the plot of Jesus’s life, experiencing temptations in the wilderness. It’s the plot of Pilgrims’ Progress , moving through a slough of despond to a celestial city. And it’s the plot of the grail quests of the Middle Ages. It’s a plot you’ll find over and over again whenever the life of the spirit is involved, a plot of suffering and of looking at one’s flaws. It’s just such a pervasive biographical plot that I had to include it in some way. Eliot’s life as a banker was a way of funding himself. At the same time, he’s someone who is precise, hard-working, reliable – there is that meticulous, scrupulous side to him. But there was another side, which I can’t put into words in one sentence."