Abstract
The epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s first major poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the coda of his last, Little Gidding, contain the same image, enfolding tongues of flame. His Collected Poems opens with the voice of a damned soul, Guido da Montefeltro, who is being tormented in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell for giving false counsel to others, a sin committed with his tongue.1 Guido’s punishment, in keeping with Dante’s representation of divine justice, is a visual counterpart of the sin itself, and thus in perfect contrapasso, Guido is forever wrapped in a quivering tongue of flame. His voice merges with that of a modern deceiver, J. Alfred Prufrock, whose signature sin of endless rationalization also involves an abuse of language and whose punishment is to wander endlessly in the circular and smoky alleys of his own mind.
In Four Quarters, culminating in Little Gidding, Eliot found Julian of Norwich to be a powerful ally in dealing with the problem of evil in the context of war.
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Notes
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the first poem in T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950)
“A Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Version Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 209. The version used by Eliot: Revelations of Divine Love Shewed to Mother Juliana of Norwich, preface by George Tyrell (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1920).
Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 175–97.
T.S. Eliot, “Paul Elmer More,” Princeton Alumni Weekly 37.17 (February 5, 1937): 374
Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 70.
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 271.
T.S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 382–93.
Evelyn Underhill, Mystics of the Church (1925; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1964), pp. 130
Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 63.
T.E. Hulme, translator’s preface to Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), p. ix
T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 98
T.S. Eliot, “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” Tyro 1 (Spring 1921): 4
T.S. Eliot, “Hidden under the heron’s wing,” Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 82.
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© 2009 Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker
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Brooker, J.S. (2009). The Fire and the Rose: Theodicy in Eliot and Julian of Norwich. In: Salih, S., Baker, D.N. (eds) Julian of Norwich’s Legacy. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101623_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101623_5
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