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Peter Montgomery wrote: > > > It's not that the influence necessarily shows up in his poetry > in terms of specific, obvious allusions, but unless he was wrong in > his own observations, we have his word for the importance of the influence. > Given that he took to memorizing whole passages of the COMMEDIA > in the original, it is hard to think that his poetic sensibilities and > perceptions of > his own world were not conditioned by such an exercise. But what you say about Eliot here applies equally to Ezra Pound & P.B. Shelley: all three emormously influenced AS POETS by Dante. There is no evidence that Dante as _thinker_ ever had much influence on any of the three (exept, perhaps, Pound). Certainly Eliot's later Christianity shows very little DAntean influence. Carrol