We Live in the Flicker: T. S. Eliot and Dante on the Spaces Between

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio on two of T.S. Eliot’s most important works: The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

Mr Snook attends, in particular, to how Eliot’s treatment of fragments represents at once both a departure from and a return to medieval understandings of the whole. This medieval understanding is evidenced in the “manifold articulation” of particulars within the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, the literary shape of the Divine Comedy, and the logical structure of the Summa Theologica.

Mr Snook’s lecture was given in the final term of the 2023-24 year of Ralston College’s Master of Arts in the Humanities program, which focused on the concept of the Whole.

Applications are now open for the upcoming year of the MA in the Humanities program, which will focus on the theme of Fellowship. Apply now

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode: 

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
• René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” 
• T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Dante, The Divine Comedy 
• T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
• Ezra Pound
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth
• John Donne, “No Man is an Island” 
• Charles Baudelaire, “À une passante”
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest 
• George Herbert 
• Nicene Creed 
• Augustine, Confessions 
• Charles Williams
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 
• Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” (from The Trial) 
• Freidrich Schlegel 
• Pascal, Pensées 
• Michel de Montaigne 
• Plato, Republic