ABSTRACT
The mystical allegories of Persian poetry are not so alien to us as they might have been if English poetry had not undergone so many attacks of platonism; but they might well have interfered with the establishment of the Persian garden myth that has kept the poem popular. The poem is an allusion to the Rubaiyat, a product of FitzGerald's good mid-Victorian talent under Persian stimulus. That is why it could eventually satisfy a public indifferent to the finesse of so foreign a poet as Omar. As poets, Eliot and Milton wrote with voluptuousness of youth, and with unmatched force of the lacerations of age. And each of them lived on into a time when it seemed there was little for them to say to their compatriots, God's Englishmen. The essay on Dante, which is one of the true masterpieces of modern criticism, has been called a projection on to medieval poet of Eliot's own theories of diction and imagery.
