Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

The presence of Virgil in The Waste Land is at least as pervasive and important as that of Dante. Although the poem has no overarching structure or narrative, it has a world, a geography, a cast of characters, and a sense of human experience that is most like the world of Virgil: it begins and ends in the world of The Aeneid, overlaps with Eliot’s own experience during World War I, and incorporates—in its images—a background of Roman and Carthaginian history. While Eliot wrote little on Virgil until his late major essays, “What is a Classic” (1944) and “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), The Aeneid is present much earlier, in The Waste Land, as a journey with sorrow, loss, betrayal, and war. The Waste Land is not only more Virgilian than is still usually acknowledged, it reveals very early Eliot’s lifelong developing conception of a Latin Europe.