The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses

The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 403 pp., $30.00. Dante was the first poet to explore the self in conflict, and it is certainly one reason these 28 classic and commissioned essays by modern and contemporary poets--from Eliot and Borges to Edward Hirsch--are works of adulation. Included is Charles Williams's classic "The Figure of Beatrice." But they also reveal the particulars of Dante's genius for subject matter and craft, reminding us why we turn to great poetry. Every essay is like an excavation, full of scholarship, revelation, and celebration.

Pound's essay begins the book and sets the standard of erudition: "The Divina Commedia ... is ... the tremendous lyric of the subjective Dante ... which differs from tragedy in its content, for 'tragedy begins admirably and tranquilly,' and the end is terrible, 'whereas comedy introduces some harsh complication, but brings the matter to a prosperous end.'" That "prosperous end," according to the editors, is the image of Beatrice and "the possibility that the beloved might actually become a way to God."

In his influential essay, Osip Mandelstam calls the cantos "missiles for capturing the future," and he praises Dante's groundbreaking use of dialect; his metaphorical wizardry, suturing the metaphysical to the concrete. The work, he says, is a blend of history, theology, and amore, and is guided by "instinct" rather than standard "conceptions of literary invention and composition."

According to Heaney, Mandelstam brings Dante "back to the palate," and he acknowledges his own debt to the Comedy, the scheme he used for Station Island. The "main tension," he writes, giving insight into both works, "is between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self."

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