Poems

Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R, Jacoff, rpt. Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, Fordham UP, 2006, pp. 23-46, 1993

Dante and the lyric past TEODOLINDA BAROLINI DANTE is HEIR to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provencal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfthcentury southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry -based on the notion of the lover's feudal service to "midons" (Italian "madonna"), his lady, from whom he expects a "guerdon" (Italian "guiderdone"), or reward -were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo, which became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence's contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The "leader" (or "caposcuola") of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provencal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric "genres"). Giacomo signs himself "the Notary," referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old -represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself -and the new: the avant-garde poets of the "dolce stil novo" or "sweet new style" (Purgatorio 24, 57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth. Like Giacomo, the other Sicilian poets were in the main court functionaries: in the De vulgari eloquentia Guido delle Colonne is called "Judge of Messina," while Pier della Vigna, whom Dante places among the suicides in Hell, was Frederick's chancellor and private secretary. Their moment in history coincides with Frederick's moment, and the demise of their school essentially coincides with the emperor's death in 1250.

PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International …, 2008

The Medieval Review, 2015

Review of a new English edition of Dante's early lyric poetry.

CoSmo - Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2022

Charles Wright is one of the contemporary American poets who have most profoundly absorbed Dante's Commedia into their work. This paper places Wright's interest in Dante in context, focusing on Purgatorio as the canticle he relates to most in his poetry, and as the book closest to his own poetics. Examples taken from various texts support this reading of Wright's relationship with the medieval Florentine poet.

2011

The ‘fortuna di Dante’ among English and American poets of the twentieth century is a rich story that continues on into this millennium with new permutations and undiminished energies. Pound and Eliot canonized Dante for more than one generation of poets and readers. Although Eliot famously rewrote Dante’s infernal encounter with Brunetto Latini in ‘Little Gidding’, it was Purgatorio rather than Inferno that both Pound and Eliot valorized, its charged and affectionate poetic encounters serving as […]

Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton UP., 1984

Dante Studies, 2017

Today we are going to introduce and so to speak to taste Dante’s Commedia. The poem opens with a poet, also named Dante, who finds himself lost in a wood. The ghost of the ancient Latin poet Vergil appears, and offers to guide him on the first part of a journey that will take him through all the cosmos, starting in Hell, going up through Purgatory, and finally, ascending into skies, with another guide. The poem tells the journey of the poet himself throughout the 3 realms, with the many encounters and dialogues. According to Genette’s definitions, then, its narrator may be defined "intradiégétique" et "homodiégétique".  We will focus on his cosmology, which plays a large part in the poem. To this end, we must compare the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, while also reading a literary account of the unpredictable consequences of the new cosmology.  Going on we will see which is the origin of Hell, according to Dante, and comparing it with the modern/ancient view in Milton’s Paradise Lost.  We shall clarify the structure of Dantean Hell: before from a physical after from a moral point of view. With the prior expression, I mean its orography and hydrology, and even its architectural parts (walls of Ditis’ town, Malebolge).  With the latter one, I mean the ethical criterion for the discernment of sin, in comparison with that which divides the sins in Purgatory. Again, I will explain you an annotated list of many, but not all, sinners and some of their pains.  At the end, if we have time, we will read one of the most famous and relevant episode of Inferno.

TEXT

And as into life fall from the CO.TRA.L bus into the storm. Water shreds the forests. Every darkness is swollen, a black pulp pushing through prepositionsunder, betweenas a kingdom come. Climb to the light by the wuthering of a TV in another room, random as wrong wiring, wet as electricity, follow shoes in tea, the hairpins, out of the cloud. 2 What is hail more like: barley or polystyrene? Kick it into corners among the oleander; it will keep its own company. Tread on purpose on the lethal tiles, towel, put your pith feet in the window to air. The martins come down from the cliffs of S. Nicolo di Bari, a thousand socks in the wake of the weather. And plastic tables are drawn like a jet across the cobbles to dry. 3 Wipe your chair with a waiter's clout and wait, who is also served. Across the cobbles watch water through watered air. And an embarrassed sun. A dark you can no longer see bows you down at the fosses where your brain is loam, sheds water out of sight. All's well at those wells, you feel, your face untangling storm air and sunlight. Torn hills and phosphates, coffee, dark stuff.