T. S. Eliot, Animula

William Baker (Northern Illinois University); Katie Wales (University of Nottingham)

Ed. by Chris Baldick, Goldsmiths College, University of London
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Chris Baldick (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University), Louise McDonald (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow)

Dates

First circulation or publication Oct 1929

Places

England (Publication/ performance; Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Recommended Reading

Animula

(October 1929) is the third of Eliot’s shorter verse pieces that he gathered under the title of “Ariel Poems” in his

Collected Poems

(1936) and subsequent collections. Its title, meaning “little soul”, derives from a short Latin poem by the Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE), translated by Lord Byron as “Adrian’s Address to His Soul When Dying”, with the opening line “

Animula vagula, blandula

” (“Little soul, wandering, pleasant”). This indicates that Eliot’s poem is a philosophical one concerning the journey of the soul. The opening line of the poem with its dramatic verb-subject inversion “Issues from the hand of God the simple soul” derives from the sixteenth canto of Dante’s

Purgatorio

(lines 85-90) in which the human soul is figured as an infant. In…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2140 words

Citation: Baker, William, Katie Wales. "Animula". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 April 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=40473, accessed 21 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

T. S. Eliot, Animula

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback