A Note for Dante Scholars
This book is not for dantisti or medieval experts; it is for lovers of poetry. Dante scholars may be uneasy with the notion of an anthology—of picking the plums out of the pudding—because of the way the poem was interpreted and understood for many decades in the twentieth century.
A hundred years ago the philosopher and literary critic Benedetto Croce, a towering figure who dominated Italian intellectual life in the first half of the century, wrote a book on Dante’s poetry to mark the sixth centenary of the poet’s death in 1921. Called simply La poesia di Dante, the book made a distinction between poetry and structure in the Commedia—a distinction which was to be profoundly influential. Croce’s influence, and the later strong reaction against it in the second half of the century, casts a long shadow.
In the Commedia, Croce tells us, there is poesia, true poetry, and there is non-poesia (non-poetry), the supporting structure on which the poetry grows. He talks of a vast edifice which allows a flowering vine to scramble over it, but does not investigate the relationship between structural support and flowering plant. He does, however, insist on a qualitative difference between some parts of the poem and others, the genuine poesia and the rest, the non-poetry. A judgment of poetic quality—telling true from false, genuine from fake—lies at the heart of Croce’s understanding of the critic’s task.
Croce’s magisterial intervention in the critical debate was decisive. For decades afterwards, critical practice in Italy focused on identifying poesia in the Commedia, making fine discriminations about which passages of the poem matched up to Croce’s definition in terms of lyrical intensity and emotional force. Thirty-four years after Croce’s formulation (and three years after his death in 1952), the Dante scholar Natalino Sapegno finally called a halt to this practice. In the introduction to his epoch-making edition of the poem, which shaped a generation of students, he stated flatly: it is not my intention in the commentary to distinguish so-called poesia from non-poesia. His statement of “firm resolve” to “renounce” this “customary” critical practice marked a watershed in Dante studies. Far from helping us to understand the Commedia, Sapegno insisted, Croce’s approach served rather to distort the meaning of a work conceived with a rigorous conceptual and imaginative unity.
Croce does not think that poetry expresses feelings in any simple sense, but rather that poesia embodies a dimension of human experience which does not grow out of rational or analytical thinking. It reflects a profoundly different way of engaging with the world, whether as a poet or as a reader of poetry. Few lovers of poetry would argue with that.
Croce did not believe, as he is sometimes said to have believed, that only lyric poetry is true poetry. He believed—a very different thing—that true poetry is by its nature “lyrical” in the specific Crocean sense that it is not a product of rational thinking or of willed activity. It is striking how often poets who know nothing of his thinking echo his ideas about creativity. But although Croce’s account of the creative process seems profoundly in tune with the experience of many writers and artists, it is sadly true that in the hands of some literary critics his aesthetic theory became a blunt instrument which deadened rather than illuminated the experience of engaging with Dante’s poem.
Needless to say, no such absolutist or Crocean view of poesia has informed the choice of extracts included in this book. Nor is this simply an anthology of favourite excerpts. I have chosen as wide a range of passages as possible, some lyrical, some dramatic, some expository, some argumentative, some narrative. My aim has been to show the versatility and range and power of Dante’s imagination and poetic language, while never losing sight of the formidable intellectual structure of his masterpiece.
Fig. 10 italy c. 1300