Waiting for Godot at Prufrock’s Cheap Hotel
Courage and Finality in a Modern Poetics of Inertia
Dante’s Divina Commedia is the quintessential poem of motion. The depths of Inferno are frozen and immobile. Satan moves, but does not change. In contrast, Paradiso bursts with light — photonic streams carry angelic tunes as saints bless the dancing stars. In Inferno we travel through two-dimensional circles; in Paradiso we journey across pulsing spheres. The human yearning for ascent, which must first confront the harrowing pits of hell, is motivated by a purpose whose prospective completion inspires sustained action. We move toward “higher things.” The closer we become to the source of reality, the more movement we experience, in the world and in ourselves. Once we attain intimacy with the “ground of being,” we intuit the guiding force that stirred our journey all along: “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”[1]
Dante’s poetics of motion represents a poetry rooted in order and above all else. This poetic attitude gradually lost prominence over recent centuries. By the early 1900s, the Dantean search for coherence gave way to a less systematic, more haphazard “poetics of inertia.” We find two divergent but fundamentally similar representations of this distinctly modern genre in T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred…
