Dante in Love
A Biography
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
For William Butler Yeats, Dante Alighieri was "the chief imagination of Christendom." For T. S. Eliot, he was of supreme importance, both as poet and philosopher. Coleridge championed his introduction to an English readership. Tennyson based his poem "Ulysses" on lines from the Inferno. Byron chastised an "Ungrateful Florence" for exiling Dante. The Divine Comedy resonates across five hundred years of our literary canon.
In Dante in Love, A. N. Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of Dante's great poem. He explains how the Italian states were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. He shows how Dante's preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology, and the great Christian philosophers inform every line of the Comedy.
Dante in Love also explores the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice whom he barely knew. With a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's comprehension of the creative process, A. N. Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prolific culture critic and novelist Wilson (The Victorians) tackles one of the central literary and spiritual figures of Western civilization in this crowded and uneven study. As Wilson notes, for Anglo-American readers, Dante (1265 1321) remains something of an acquired taste; 30% of modern Italian comes from him, but his celebrated terza rima is difficult to render in English. His allegorical imagination is difficult to decode. His relationship to young Beatrice Portinari strikes us today as far too idealized. Despite these factors, Wilson's learned discourse does much to show Dante's relevance: how he fuses sacred and profane love; how his turbulent times featured new contact between the West and the Arab world; how the Courtly Love tradition, with ecstatic adultery as one of its ideals, is strikingly contemporary-sounding; how the high priests of modernism, Eliot and Pound, placed Dante at the center of their respective poetic universes. The title hints at but one aspect of Wilson's book. If this subject were adhered to with greater discipline, with less repetition and rambling, the book would be more accessible. 24 pages of color illus.