T.S. Eliot and Josep Carner in Dialogue

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show that Nabí’s poem, written by Catalan poet Josep Carner, contains allusions to the works of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land as well as to “Burnt Norton”, the first poem of Four Quartets. Allusion is a literary resource which is recurrent in both authors, to whom literary tradition is pivotal in the process of poetic creation. A thorough analysis of the main allusions of Nabí to these two poems of T.S. Eliot demonstrates that by means of allusion a dialogue between works of different times, languages and authors may be established.

Keywords

• Eliot. Influence. Josep Carner. Literary allusion. Literary tradition. Nabí. Poetic dialogue. S. T