Abstract
In the late 1920's, when T. S. Eliot was haunted by Dante's Vita nuova and by the Earthly Paradise cantos of the “Purgatorio,” he was also very much under the influence of Charles Maurras, the French monarchist and anti-Romantic. He found in Maurras the “criterion” he was searching for—a sense of “order” that would save the poetic sensibility from mere emotional self-indulgence. In 1928, Eliot himself translated an old essay on criticism by Maurras which argued that readiness for impression must be matched by a capacity for selection. Eliot had Maurras very much in mind when he sat down to write his own essay on Dante, and, by a special dedication, he tied the essay very tightly to Maurras, whose treatise on Dante he knew. “Ash Wednesday,” too, with its interplay between the yearning, regretting sensibility, and the expiatory frame that controls it, is a mirror of both Eliot's Dante essay and the esthetics of Maurras. In the long run, however, the tutelage of Dante began to move Eliot away from Maurras.
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