Dante Alighieri, 2nd Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

243 Pages·2010·2.65 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
DANTE ALIGHIERI
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Dante Alighieri—New Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dante Alighieri / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
English and Italian.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-880-1
1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
PQ4335.D283 2010
851'.1—dc22 2010021315
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
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Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY
Date printed: November 2010
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Purgatory as Paradigm: Traveling the
New and Never-Before-Traveled
Path of This Life/Poem 21
Teodolinda Barolini
Part I: The Order of the Paradiso 53
Marc Cogan
Dante’s Beatrice and the New Life of Poetry 83
R.W.B. Lewis
The Destination: Dante’s Eyes
Fixed and Attentive 97
Lloyd Howard
Does the Stilnovo Go to Heaven? 123
Lino Pertile
The Heaven of the Sun: Dante Between
Aquinas and Bonaventure 133
Giuseppe Mazzotta
vi Contents
Dante’s Other World: Moral Order 149
John A. Scott
The Classical Context of the Ulysses Canto 177
Michelangelo Picone
Modes of Metamorphosis in the Comedia:
The Case of Inferno XIII 197
Lynne Press
Chronology 217
Contributors 219
Bibliography 221
Acknowledgments 225
Index 227
Editor’s Note
My introductory essay takes serious issue with the overtheologizers of
Dante: T.S. Eliot, Erich Auerbach, Charles Singleton. Instead I follow E.R.
Curtius in emphasizing Dante’s spiritual originality and also pay tribute to
John Frecerru for his celebration of the poet as agonist.
Detheologizing Dante, Teodolinda Barolini notes Dante’s rugged trans-
gressiveness, after which Marc Cogan outlines the imaginative order of the
Paradiso.
My late friend R.W.B. Lewis acutely analyzes the Vita Nuova, while
Lloyd Howard centers on Casella’s song in the Purgatorio.
Seeking the representation of “exemplary love” in the Commedia, Lino
Pertile locates it outside the poem, if anywhere: “there is no room for earthly
love in Paradise.”
In a brilliant essay, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows Dante surpassing the
greatest of theologians and, by his poetry, opening up new vistas for theology.
Dante, like Shakespeare, has rethought everything for himself. John A. Scott
then explores Dante’s delayed moral revelations.
The famous Ulysses canto of the Inferno is refigured by Michelangelo
Picone, after which Lynne Press concludes this volume with a consideration
of Inferno XIII, where Virgil and other precursors are transmuted into Dante’s
own terrifying originality.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
T
he life of Dante Alighieri itself can seem a turbulent poem, closer to his
Inferno than to his Purgatorio, quite aside from his Paradiso. Biographies so
far are mostly inadequate to Dante’s genius, with the major exception of the
very first, Giovanni Boccaccio’s, aptly described by Giuseppe Mazzotta as
a “self-conscious fictional work akin to Dante’s own Vita Nuova (The New
Life) which responds imaginatively to Dante’s steady self-dramatization in
his works.” This need not surprise anyone; Dante, like Shakespeare, is so
large a form of thought and imagination that individual biographers, schol-
ars, and critics tend to see only aspects of an extraordinary panoply. I always
recommend to my students, in preference to all biographies of Shakespeare,
the late Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a rather Joycean novel nar-
rated by Shakespeare in the first person.
The exalted Dante regarded himself as a prophet, at least the equal of
Isaiah or Jeremiah. Shakespeare, we can assume, had no such self-estimate;
the creator of Hamlet, Falstaff, and Lear has much in common with Geof-
frey Chaucer, the maker of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, and Chaucer
subtly mocks Dante. One has to be of Chaucer’s eminence, if Dante is to be
treated ironically, and even Chaucer clearly admires far more intensely than
he dissents.
One cannot discuss genius in all the world’s history without centering on
Dante, since only Shakespeare, of all geniuses of language, is richer. Shakespeare
to a considerable extent remade English: about 1,800 words of the 21,000 he
employed were his own coinage, and I cannot pick up a newspaper without
finding Shakespearean turns of phrase scattered through it, frequently with-
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