ABSTRACT
Similarly Eliot stood-as he once famously said of himself-for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confi rmed laudator temporis acti and in that mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. omas Aquinas among scholastic theologians. In Dante and Aquinas, moreover, he looked up to a clarity and universality of thought that he found neither in Donne nor in Shakespeare. By contrast, in the Elizabethan age, during which both Donne and Shakespeare spent their formative years, he saw only an obscurity, or what he termed “inspissation”, which he attributed to the confl icting ideas of such thinkers as the pagan Seneca, the infi del Machiavelli and the skeptic Montaigne.
