Ash Wednesday (poem)

Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", Ash-Wednesday, with a base of Dante's Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation.

In the first section, Eliot introduces the idea of renunciation with a quote from Cavalcanti, in which the poet expresses his devotion to his lady as death approaches.

Three of the five sections comprising "Ash-Wednesday" had already been published earlier as separate poems (years link to corresponding "[year] in poetry" articles): (Publication information from Gallup[7]) When first published, the poem bore the dedication "To my wife", referring to Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, with whom he had a strained relationship, and from whom he initiated a legal separation in 1933.

[10][11] In chapter 35 of Part Two of Nabokov's book, Humbert's "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem.

Two lines from Ash Wednesday are slightly misremembered by the character Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs and the 1991 film adaptation thereof.

[13]" It is unclear whether this mistake is a genuine error of Harris's memory and/or research, or intentionally misquoted as a method of indirect characterization: Starling is described as well-read and intelligent, but more oriented toward action than she is toward academia.