T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief: Reading Dante in the Aftermath of World-War I

Abstract

Referring back to Coleridge's notion of ”the willing suspension of disbelief,” this paper explores the transition that occurs when ludic identification with a religious text becomes real identification. This transformation was particularly poignant in the reception of an especially strong religious poet, Dante, by an extremely influential critic, T. S. Eliot, at a major historical moment, the period of and after the sexcentenary of Dante's death in 1921. The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. Eliot's short, widely read monograph on Dante, published during a continuing dialogue with I. A. Richards on religion and literature, reveals his difficulty with the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Eliot raises and then rejects the possibility that a twentieth-century reader could cross confessional lines and truly enter Dante's world through the suspension of disbelief and the imaginative assumption of belief in Dante's theology; actual identification with Dante's faith is ultimately necessary, Eliot concludes. The fraught political dimension of the willing suspension of disbelief during this tumultuous time is apparent in the monograph's now suppressed dedication to Charles Maurras. Eliot's was developing his thinking about belief and non-belief in relation to politics, society and literature during his friendship with this self-described reactionary, monarchist, anti-democratic figure.