[Signed 'T.S. Eliot''] Italian News' [featuring 'Talk on Dante' by T. S. Eliot, the printed version of a lecture entitled 'What Dante Means to Me''].

Gallup C552. 4to (leaf dimensions 28 x 22.5 cm), 40 pp. Stapled. In original blue printed wraps. Worn and dogeard on aged paper, with minor staining at foot of front wrap and first leaf. The signature "T S Eliot" (possibly his but more words would have helped) appears top front wrap. The 'Calendar' at the front lists, on 4 July [1950], the 'Lecture by Mr. T. S. Eliot, O.M.: "What Dante Means to Me," with H.E. the Italian Ambassador in the Chair.' The printed version, titled 'TALK ON DANTE | by T. S. Eliot', is in small type, and covers pages 13 to 18, with p.12 carrying a full-page photograph of Eliot shaking hands with a smiling figure (presumably the ambassador). The talk is preceded by two paragraphs in Italian taken from 'The Italian Ambassador in his introduction to Mr. T. S. Eliot's talk'. An interesting and significant item, in which Eliot talks 'informally' about Dante's 'influence upon myself': 'his poetry [is] the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse'. 'Forty years ago I began to puzzle out the Divine Comedy in this way; and when I thought I had grasped the meaning of a passage which especially delighted me, I committed it to memory; so that, for some years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey. Heaven knows what it would have sounded like, had I recited it aloud; but it was by this means that I steeped myself in Dante's poetry.' A scarce item: no copy in the British Library, and the only copy on COPAC at the University of London.