al-Baymtl’s mind on many occasions. Its recall of Dante’s purgatorial fire and
its intensification of his The Waste Landpremise to “establish a relationship
between the medieval inferno and modern life,” may have drawn al-Baymtlto
his precursor al-Macarrl(d. 1057). Al-Macarrlreceived great attention from
al-Baymtl. Since the 1950s and just before his death in 1999, al-Baymtl
devoted many poems to that strong ancestor. Eliot’s “dead master” is not
different from al-Baymtl’s. Both recollect their precursors as masks, but they
also fuse into them as “intertextual compounds”^42 that invite comparison but
resist total identification. In their response, Eliot and al-Baymtlengage in
adoption and evasion. The tactic could amount to a strategy that draws
the present poet into the orbit of the great without detracting from the
precursor’s status.
Nevertheless, the whole effort to draw a comparison between al-Baymtland
his Anglo-American precursor should not mislead us into thinking of the
ephebe as passing into a fit of appropriation or surrender to Eliot’s formida-
ble authority. The first allusion to Dante in The Waste Land—which obviously
suits al-Baymtl’s discontent with the urban center—recalls for him al-
Macarrl’s identical condemnations and satires as presented in his poetry and
Epistle of Forgiveness, which some scholars claim as another source for Dante’s
Inferno. Al-Macarri’s Epistlesurveys dignitaries, poets, and writers in hell or
in limbo, and investigates ironically superficial readings of the Qur’mnic
text regarding heaven and hell. Along with the tradition of the Prophet’s
night journey to heaven, al-Macarrl’s writings provided monastic scholasti-
cism with a lot to consider, manipulate, and utilize against competing
religions, especially Islam.^43 Al-Macarrlas a poet of so much discontent, with
a deep meditative mind and enormous knowledge, should have been in
al-Baymtl’s mind whenever hell and heaven become paradigms for contemporary
perspectives.
Speaking of his use of Dante in The Waste Land, Eliot sounds intentionally
bent on a specific address: “I have borrowed lines from him, in the attempt
to reproduce, or rather to arouse in the reader’s mind, the memory of some
Dantesque scene, and thus to establish a relationship between the medieval
inferno and modern life” (Quoted in Svarny 208). Al-Baymtl’s blind poet and
philosopher was not a poet of disenchantment despite his ironic reminiscences
about life and death, but he was a person whose personal record was an indirect
satirical view of life. His existentialist preoccupations and stark images of life
and hell, along with his deep philosophical musings and poetic ironies, made
out of him al-Baymtl’s counterpart to Eliot’s Dante.
On other occasions, al-Baymtl’s acquaintance with both invites some anal-
ogous manipulation of their texts. In more than one instance, but especially
in his poems on al-Macarrl, al-Baymtlfound in Eliot’s depiction of Tiresias a
viable mythical method. Oriented in the cynical, but exposed to provocative
scenes of sterility and corruption, Tiresias’s vision is revisionist in the main.
“I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / can see at the violet
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION