"Riguarda bene omai sì com'io vado |
"Observe well how I pass along this way |
Dante Alighieri
For my spring 2021 Dante's Divine Comedy syllabus, click here.
T. S. Eliot once wrote that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third," and John Ruskin declared that "Dante is the central man of all the world, representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties." While we should rightly be wary of such hyperbole, it is indeed hard to think of many writers who approach the poetic virtuosity, scintillating intellect, and sheer visionary audacity of the great Florentine. A philosopher, a politician, a theologian, a lover, but, above all and always, a poet, Dante (short for "Durante") Alighieri was born in May 1265 to a modest family in Florence, a city riven by partisan strife. Working first as a notary, the young Dante studied poetry and befriended the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti, whom he would later view as part of the core of his own school of love-poetry, the dolce stil nuovo. Dante also entered politics and for years supported the faction of the White Guelphs as one of the city priors of Florence until the rival party came to power in 1302 and sent him into permanent exile. It was in this exile, which lasted almost two decades until his death in 1321, that seemed to afford him the time to compose his major works: the Convivio (a sort of philosophical miscellany, written in Italian), the De Vulgari Eloquentia (a survey in Latin of the Romance languages and an ardent defense of the use of the vernacular in poetry), the De Monarchia (a Latin treatise on world-government and the need for strong secular leaders) and his masterpiece, the Commedia (The "Divine" Comedy, composed between about 1308 and 1320).
Such are the basic facts of the poet's outer life. For the story of his inner life, we must turn to what he tells us in his works, though we would be wise to assess his self-presentation cautiously. Dante claims, in his early prosimetrum La Vita Nuova and again in the Commedia, that the real turning-point of his life was not his exile from his beloved Florence but his remarkable falling in love at the age of nine with an eight-year-old girl named Beatrice. Dante's earliest biographer, no one other than Giovanni Boccaccio, identifies the girl as Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a Florentine banker. Dante claims that he loved her only from afar, and never spoke to her, yet she nonetheless became his Muse for life. Her early death, perhaps in childbirth, in 1290, occasioned the writing of his Vita Nuova in 1292, at the end of which he declared that io spero di dicer di lei quello che non fue mai detto d'alcuna ("I hope to say of her that which has never been said about any woman").
T. S. Eliot once wrote that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third," and John Ruskin declared that "Dante is the central man of all the world, representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties." While we should rightly be wary of such hyperbole, it is indeed hard to think of many writers who approach the poetic virtuosity, scintillating intellect, and sheer visionary audacity of the great Florentine. A philosopher, a politician, a theologian, a lover, but, above all and always, a poet, Dante (short for "Durante") Alighieri was born in May 1265 to a modest family in Florence, a city riven by partisan strife. Working first as a notary, the young Dante studied poetry and befriended the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti, whom he would later view as part of the core of his own school of love-poetry, the dolce stil nuovo. Dante also entered politics and for years supported the faction of the White Guelphs as one of the city priors of Florence until the rival party came to power in 1302 and sent him into permanent exile. It was in this exile, which lasted almost two decades until his death in 1321, that seemed to afford him the time to compose his major works: the Convivio (a sort of philosophical miscellany, written in Italian), the De Vulgari Eloquentia (a survey in Latin of the Romance languages and an ardent defense of the use of the vernacular in poetry), the De Monarchia (a Latin treatise on world-government and the need for strong secular leaders) and his masterpiece, the Commedia (The "Divine" Comedy, composed between about 1308 and 1320).
Such are the basic facts of the poet's outer life. For the story of his inner life, we must turn to what he tells us in his works, though we would be wise to assess his self-presentation cautiously. Dante claims, in his early prosimetrum La Vita Nuova and again in the Commedia, that the real turning-point of his life was not his exile from his beloved Florence but his remarkable falling in love at the age of nine with an eight-year-old girl named Beatrice. Dante's earliest biographer, no one other than Giovanni Boccaccio, identifies the girl as Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a Florentine banker. Dante claims that he loved her only from afar, and never spoke to her, yet she nonetheless became his Muse for life. Her early death, perhaps in childbirth, in 1290, occasioned the writing of his Vita Nuova in 1292, at the end of which he declared that io spero di dicer di lei quello che non fue mai detto d'alcuna ("I hope to say of her that which has never been said about any woman").
And he did. At the beginning of his Commedia, Dante the pilgrim is rescued from a "dark wood" by the great Roman poet Vergil, who had been dispatched at the request of Beatrice, who looked down from Heaven and saw Dante's plight. Vergil leads Dante into the depths of Hell (Inferno) and then up the arduous slopes of the Mountain of Purgatory (Purgatorio) to the Earthly Paradise, where Beatrice then takes over as his guide, leading him through a kaleidoscopic ascent through the heavens. She ultimately leads him to the threshold of a beatific vision of God, proving the virtue inherent in her name -- Beatrix = "she who blesses" in Latin.
Too much attention to Dante's Beatrice -- who may, after all, be entirely fictional -- should not lead us to overlook other aspects of Dante's career, personality, and literary output. He was married, perhaps even happily, to a woman named Gemma Donati, and they had four children. (Significantly, his daughter Antonia later became a nun and took the name Sister Beatrice, and two of his three sons, Jacopo and Pietro, wrote commentaries on their father's Commedia.) And his civic life in Florence as well as his later exile had crystallized his political-philosophical positions. He believed strongly in the need for a strong ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor, to maintain and enforce the law in order that people could best attain the human flourishing talked about by Aristotle and others. In this, he was a champion of the secular state (and, implicitly, of a secular society) and was critical of the Church, whose powers, he believed, should only be in the spiritual realm; the involvement of the Church, and the recent popes especially, with temporal politics, made it unbearably corrupt. As a testament to his political views, there are many clergy in Dante's Hell, while his Purgatory has a special place for secular rulers and the longest speech in the entire epic is given in Paradise by none other than the Emperor Justinian. Dante was enamored of the Roman Empire as the ideal secular state, and it is no accident that he accords the Roman poet Vergil, whom he regarded as the great celebrant of the Empire, such a vital role in the Commedia. Dante believed too in the power and value of the parlar materno, the "mother tongue" or vernacular, and it is striking that he composed his masterpiece in his native Italian rather than in Latin, which had hitherto been the language of serious literature. In this vein, he also praised the work of many vernacular poets, both in Italian and in Occitan and Old French, and he saw the value of their attempts to capture in verse the many aspects of the phenomenon of Love. Indeed, it seems that Dante recognized the value of all the arts: his Purgatorio is swarming with the saved souls of poets, painters, and musicians. Still, Dante's belief in the dignity and potential of the Italian vernacular resulted in a work of monumental importance for the history of world literature. The influence of Dante upon later poets and writers is ubiquitous: not only Petrarch and Boccaccio and later poets writing in Italian (Leopardi, Quasimodo, Montale), but also, outside Italy, Chaucer, Milton, Goethe, Blake, Byron, Melville, the Brownings, Balzac, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, C. S. Lewis, Amiri Baraka, James Merrill, Gloria Naylor, Seamus Heaney, W. S. Merwin, Toni Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Cormac McCarthy, and countless others. And English translations of Dante have nearly doubled in the years since 1990, proving that Dante's compelling vision of the worlds beyond our world, of the worlds of the spirit, can still find a voice —and an ear— in our disillusioned and largely spiritless post-industrial age. Further Reading
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Dal primo giorno ch'i' vidi il suo viso |