Intertextual Echoes and their Transmutation: Quotation in Eliot’s Poetry across Source and Translation

Abstract

This article explores the concept of intertextuality as an interaction between texts, where earlier works are invoked within a new composition, creating a dialogue across time and culture. It focuses on quotation as one of the most significant forms of intertextuality, particularly in poetry, due to its role in shaping meaning and broadening interpretive possibilities. The discussion begins with a theoretical overview of intertextuality and quotation, and then followed by a practical application in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, who is recognized as one of the leading poets to have employed intertextual strategies with depth and cultural consciousness. In Eliot’s work, quotation functions not as mere embellishment, but as an essential structural device through which religious, literary, and historical texts are reimagined to create a modern poetic voice. The article analyzes selected examples from Eliot’s poems, illustrating how quotations are transformed in poetic translation and how their meanings shift across different cultural and linguistic contexts. It concludes that intertextuality in Eliot’s poetry underscores the power of cultural memory, transforming the poem into a text open to history, religion, literature, and intellectual reflection, thereby granting his poetry a universal character and a sense of timelessness.