Dedication : To a Living Escort
0.6. DEDICATION: In his translation of Dante, Purgatorio 26:115, 117, Longfellow interpreted “il miglior fabbra” as “a better smith”:
“‘O brother,’ said he, ‘he whom I point out,..
...Was of the mother tongue a better smith.’”
This was Dante’s own tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel, once described by Petrarch as a “grand master of love.” See Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis, ca. 1350.
EZRA POUND translated Dante’s phrase for Daniel as “the better craftsman” and commended Daniel for his “refusal to use the ‘journalese’ of his day.” See Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910). For Eliot’s own nod to Daniel, see line 428.
Eliot first added this dedication to Pound in the 1925 Faber edition of The Waste Land (0.3). After they met in 1914, Pound was influential in getting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1911), Eliot’s most famous poem before The Waste Land, published in Poetry Magazine in 1915. See Letters (0.3).
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK, reprinted in full on the following pages, will be noted several more times, particularly with respect to Eliot’s dedication of that poem to a friend in 1917 (42), the focus of Eliot’s poetry on time (141) and age (219) and the occasional appearance of Eliot’s obstinate Prufrock counterpart, Sweeney (198). Prufrock opens with a Greek epigraph of its own, from Dante, Inferno 27.61-66:
"If I believed that my reply were made
To one who to the world would e'er return,
This flame without more flickering would stand still;
But inasmuch as never from this depth
Did any one return, if I hear true,
Without the fear of infamy I answer,”
SAGE HOMME: Pound continued to support Eliot and became even more involved eight years after Prufrock as a reader and editor for The Waste Land (67, 69, 167, 212, 219 and 293, and see F&T generally).
In a 1921 letter to Eliot, just before The Waste Land was published, Pound wrote a 48 line poem he called “Sage Homme,” in which he congratulated his friend for creating The Waste Land but took his due credit for helping with the delivery; from Letters:
“These are the poems of Eliot
By the Uranian Muse begot;
A Man their Mother was,
A Muse their Sire.
How did the printed Infancies result
From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?
If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”
For a later appreciation of Pound’s help, see Eliot, Ezra Pound (Poetry, Sept. 1946):
“I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard, is trying to rewrite somebody's poem in the way I should have written it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried to help one do it in one's own way.”
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