Eliot's interest in Dante and his use of allusions to Dante in The Waste Land are too well known to need further documentation. However, there is one allusion which has been overlooked and which reinforces the theme of sexual sterility and lack of proper love in the modern world.
In the last verse paragraph of section one of The Waste Land …, "The Burial of the Dead," Eliot, in his notes, identifies two allusions to the Inferno. Line 63, "I had not thought death had undone so many," refers to the Opportunists of Canto III, those who had not committed themselves to any side during their lives, either to God or to Satan. The next line, "Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled," comes from the description of Limbo, that place of souls who, living in a perfect physical paradise, can aspire no higher, and whose punishment is the ever-present knowledge that they are cut off from God. But lack of commitment and lack of hope do not completely describe the inhabitants of the world of Eliot's poem.
