The epigraph of this poem is a six-line
quotation from Canto of the Inferno by the Renaissance Italian poet
Dante Alighieri .. the italian term " Inferno" means the horrors
of Hell
And
no, Eliot doesn’t translate it out of the Italian, which makes people think Eliot is a
snob and
showy.
But why
did Eliot quote Dante's poem "Inferno" and did'nt even translate it out of the italian
?
He was absolutely and
totally obsessed with Dante and maybe he thought other people loved Dante as much as he
did – enough to translate the quote for
themselves
Before
we start explaining Dante's Inferno we should recognize 2 guys , Dante and Guido ..
Dante who has messed up his life badly enough to require some help from heaven and In
order to scare him away from sin and other bad things, heaven sends him to hell ,
Along the way he meets a lot
of evil and misguided people including " Guido" this guy was the worst of the worst
people are stuck in hell for eternity
.
and
when Dante asks to hear his story, here’s what he
says:
"If I thought that my
reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain
without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what
I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of
infamy."
So
What does this quote mean? Well, Dante is really curious to know why Guido ended up so
far down in Hell. But Guido is selfish. He’s afraid that people back on earth will find
out about the horrible stuff he did – he’s concerned about his
reputation
On
the other hand, Guido knows that no one has ever entered Hell and made it out again, so
he figures that it's safe to tell his story because Dante is stuck
here.
Unfortunately
for Guido, Dante is the first human ever to be allowed to pass through Hell and "return
to earth," so people do eventually find out about Guido’s sins…from reading the
Last
thing: What did Guido do? Essentially, Guido committed terrible atrocities in
war.
But that’s not the worst
part. The worst part is that he tried to have himself forgiven
before he committed these atrocities. He basically thought he could
out-smart God and get into heaven despite doing things that he knew were really bad.
It’s like if before you broke your mother’s favorite lamp you asked her, "Mom, if I
broke this lamp right now, would you forgive me? . . . Yes? OK."
CRASH
Why
does Eliot choose this epigraph for his poem? Well, it suggests a couple of things.
First, that "Prufrock" might not be a poem about good people, but about bad ones
pretending to be good. The setting of the poem is a kind of
hell.
Second,
it tells us that this fellow Prufrock, who is singing his "love song," might be
concerned about his reputation like Guido. In other words, Prufrock is going to tell us
things because he thinks we won’t have a chance to repeat them to other people
.
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