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The splendid Penguin Lives series already includes brief biographies of a gallery of
notables reaching from Buddha and Saint Augustine to Chief Crazy Horse and Mao Zedong. The
list of promised future titles runs from Saint Therese of Lisieux to Elvis Presley.
There's inclusiveness for you!
The author of the entry on Dante Alighieri is Yale professor and Pulitzer Prize winner R.
W. B. Lewis, one of whose previous books was a celebration of Dante's native city of
Florence. He has succeeded quite well at the daunting task of encompassing both Dante the
man and his works in a book of only 200 pages. Dante's personal and family life, his
involvement in the political and social life of his time, his years in exile, and his
major poetical works are all covered succinctly yet in enough detail to make the reader
feel they have been led well inside man, era, and works alike.
Dante lived from 1265 to 1321, a time of political and military turmoil in what is now
northern Italy but was then a collection of dozens of tiny city-states fiercely
competitive with one another, all in thrall in important ways to the church authorities in
Rome and only grudgingly willing to cooperate, even against threats from foreign invaders.
Dante was in the thick of the famous feud between Guelphs and Ghibellines in Florence (he
was a Guelph), served his time on the battlefield and in government councils and paid for
his political activism with some 19 years of exile from the city he loved. As he wandered
about from city to city, he composed his great epic, the COMEDY (that was the title he
gave it --- the adjective "divine," now a part of the title, was added many
years later by others) and several other long poems, notably the VITA NUOVA
(New Life) as well as a number of important prose works. He was happiest during long
stays in Verona and Ravenna, where he died and is buried.
All this is deftly told by Lewis; but what really matters with Dante, of course, is the
poetry, and the heart of Lewis's book is three chapters of enlightening textual and
historical commentary on the COMEDY.
This is a tough assignment. Anyone who has ever tackled this immense epic knows that
virtually every page alludes to some now-obscure person or event in Medieval Italian
history. The names and allusions must be explained for a modern reader, so reading the
COMEDY becomes a steady alternation between text and explanatory footnotes. Lewis gets
through this literary-historical thicket with a minimum of scars. We get just enough of
the background on Dante's huge cast of characters, ranged in the circles of his Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven, to understand what points Dante is using them to make and how they
seem to Lewis to illustrate the overarching grand themes that run through the three parts
of the poem.
Most readers know that Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory is the Roman poet Vergil,
and that he is shown through Heaven by his earthly lady-love Beatrice. Beatrice was a real
person, Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante first met when they both were nine years old, and
whom he held in a kind of quasi-religious Platonic veneration forever after, even long
after the lady died at age 25 (both of them married others, but that detail did not stop
Dante from admiring Beatrice reverentially from afar).
In the light of his considerable achievement in this book, Lewis can perhaps be excused
for a certain amount of hyperbole. He calls the COMEDY "the greatest single poem ever
written" and Dante "the universal presence in literature around the globe, to a
degree matched only by Shakespeare." Both of these seem arguable. A greater lack,
perhaps, is any personal summing-up by Lewis of his own critical estimation of Dante and
his influence on subsequent literary ages. He contents himself with a pedestrian list of
allusive tributes from people like T. S. Eliot and Robert Penn Warren --- but we never get
any final detailed critical assessment from Lewis himself. Perhaps three more pages of
that sort would have made this an even better book.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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