Originally posted by scacchipazzo
Brave attempt on his part to attempt wrirting Italianate English. Perhaps he should have picked Ariosto instead of Dante, a much refined Italian's, Dante's. Florentine Italian of Dante's era was exceptionally florid by comparison to Ferrara's simpler more country Italian.
Of course Eliot worshipped Dante, so it was a kind of foregone conclusion that he would try to imitate his Italian! I remember his comment comparing Keats, Shakespeare and Dante. Keats' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty", he said, struck him as simply
untrue, false as a statement. In Shakespeare, the line "Ripeness is all", has a qualified truth as an expression of Hamlet's state of mind at that particular moment. But Dante's "E'n la sua voluntade e nostra pace", "His will is our peace", seemed to Eliot absolutely and literally true.
Eliot thought this made Dante the greatest of the three - an interesting claim, since it poses the question of whether one has to accept the truth claims made by an author to revere him. After all, many great admirers of Dante are non-Christian!