![]() Unusual among poetry manuals, La Vita Nuova is something of a page-turner. It was La Vita Nuova that truly made me excited to return to the Divine Comedy. What reconciled me to the Divine Comedy was reading Dante’s earlier works, such as De Vulgari Eloquentia, a bizarre and comical Latin treatise on vernacular poetry, and La Vita Nuova, Dante’s handbook on composing love poems and the story of his romance with Beatrice Portinari, who would later become his guide through Paradise. I still have trouble getting excited about parts of Paradise, but I think that will come. This is all wrong, of course, and thank goodness I’ve changed my mind. ![]() Readers of the Divine Comedy, ceaselessly glancing down to the critical commentary for context, were basically like Michael Scott from The Office: “I love inside jokes. Why should I be expected to know the social circles of late thirteenth-century Florence to understand half the references in Hell or Purgatory? It was like Eliot’s Wasteland: a cascade of private allusions, Shibboleths, inside jokes. To be fair to my old self, behind the hubris and impertinence lay a real objection to the Divine Comedy: it was just too specific. I took a kind of pride in being able to differ with the authorities who had, on one or two points, been a little more liberal than I would have been in bestowing canonical status. NOTE: this piece first appeared in the Spring 2021 print edition of Ad Fontes ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |