The Journey from the Inferno to the Purgatory: Eliot’s Religious Odyssey

Abstract

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is akin to a full term conception of spiritual faith that inevitably ushers in the birth of spiritual salvation after a long period of suffering and labour. This pattern is not perceived in one single poem or a specific collection of poems, but rather in the entire corpus of Eliot’s poetry. It is rendered tangible when we trace the process of questing for spiritual faith in his early poetry where the need for faith is the sorest after the panorama of suffering that the human beings brought upon themselves. Throughout his poetic career, Eliot attributed this suffering to mere futility, greedy materialism and loveless existence marred by lechery rather than genuine feelings. This paper tries to prove that Eliot’s poetry delineates a mental process that takes the reader from the inferno of contemporary life to the purgatory of religious faith which is potentially capable of lifting Man before falling into the abyss of loss. This being said, the paper aims at drawing the features of Eliot’s perception of salvation which seems similar to a piece of mosaic which gets clearer and clearer as every piece is put in its proper place.