Book review: “Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography” by Joseph Luzzi

In Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi is focused on the artistic afterlife of the groundbreaking Italian narrative poem, completed around 1321, particularly on how literary evaluations of the work evolved over seven centuries.

Luzzi, a literature professor at Bard College, doesn’t seem comfortable or isn’t interested in examining the poem on his own as a religious work, as a work of faith for the faithful.

When he deals with the religious aspects of the Divine Comedy, it is through the words of others. For instance, he quotes noted Dante scholar Peter Hawkins:

That Dante’s Commedia is a religious poem, even a ‘divine’ one, seems to go without saying. Indeed, for the Christian West, it has come to set the gold standard for what such a work should be.

Nonetheless, in his book newly published by Princeton University Press, Luzzi also points out Hawkins’s observation that resistance to the religious heart of the poem was immediate and has been perennial. Within a few years of the poem’s completion, one Dominican friar called Dante the “Devil’s vessel.”

Five hundred years later, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote:

“Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.

“Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.”

 

“Dante and Shakespeare”

Even so, the early 19^th century Romantic poet appears to have prized Dante’s Comedy more for its art than for its theology. Luzzi writes that Shelley devoted large sections of his essay “A Defense of Poetry” to Dante and called great poetry like Dante’s work a

“fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.”

Shelley hasn’t been alone in worshiping at the altar of Dante. Luzzi writes:

T.S. Eliot, in typically oracular assessment, was perhaps not exaggerating when he said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between then, there is no third.”

 

“Spiritual food”

In his early and important poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), Eliot employed six lines from the Inferno, in their original Italian, as an epigraph. He said that Dante “had the most persistent and deepest influence upon [my] own verse” and called Paradiso “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or can reach.”

Eliot’s literary colleague Ezra Pound praised Dante while, at the same time, knocking John Milton and his Paradise Lost:

“Dante’s god is ineffable divinity. Milton’s god is a fussy old man with a hobby.”

James Joyce, another contemporary of Eliot and Pound, reportedly told his Italian students:

“In Dante dwells the whole spirit of the Renaissance. I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food.”

 

“Nobody reads Dante”

Of course, not everyone has been an acolyte. The famously contrarian Voltaire, who died just a few years before Shelley was born, was upset, Luzzi writes, that Dante, like Shakespeare, refused to follow classical prescriptions.

Thus it is hardly surprising that Voltaire, the eighteenth-century author who spent the most time attacking Dante — he once referred to the Commedia as a “monster” (mostre) — also called the rule-breaking Shakespeare a “drunken savage.”

Luzzi points out that, around the time Voltaire called the Divine Comedy a “hodge-podge,” he also wrote, “Nobody reads Dante anymore.”  Luzzi goes go:

The remark is extraordinary, not in the literal sense because Dante remained one of the best-known writers from the Middle Ages, but because it reveals what little symbolic capital Dante’s work had come to hold in elite circles.

This was during a period of two centuries — the seventeenth and the eighteenth — when the reputation of the Divine Comedy fell because Dante’s “sobriety, moralism, and arch-seriousness” didn’t fit the flamboyance and art-for-art’s-sake attitudes then in fashion.

 

“The Tuscan Homer”

Nonetheless, during those years, Dante had one major defender, the Italian rhetorician Giambattista Vico, a contrarian in his own right, who called the poet “the Tuscan Homer,” writing:

“On account of such poverty of vernacular speech, Dante, in order of unfold his Comedy, had to assemble a language from those of all the people in Italy, in the same way that Homer had compiled his, using all those of Greece.

“Consequently, everyone recognizing their own native speech in his poems, all the Greek cities contested Homer to be their citizen. Thus Dante, furnished with poetic modes of speaking, employed his irascible genius in the Comedy.”

Blake, Goya…and Frankenstein

As the nineteenth century dawned and the Romantics began to hold sway, Dante made a comeback. Between 1800 and 1850, 181 editions of the Comedy were published in Europe, and Luzzi adds:

Painters and illustrators were just as passionate as authors in their love of Dante: the Comedia was featured in the work of such celebrated Romantic artists as William Blake, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Dore, and Francisco Goya, among many others.

Indeed, so popular did Dante become that even Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster with a patched-together body and very human thoughts and emotions, quotes from Dante’s Inferno.

In her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, the wife of Percy, has Dr. Frankenstein engaged in a long chase to capture and kill his monster who has committed gruesome murders, “all of which he blames on Victor’s refusal to acknowledge and care for him.”

In a speech to urge the sailors to continue the pursuit through icy waters, the doctor paraphrases the words of Homer’s hero Ulysses from Dante’s visit to hell — “into a new form that goes beyond mere citation and captures the burning spirit of Dante’s original.”

A half century later, the major American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated, with painstaking accuracy, Dante’s Comedy into English, giving the work an even greater boost.  Luzzi notes that one scholar said:

“[T]he fact that the most famous and popular of all the American poets of the time turned his talents to making a translation of the Divine Comedy was a potent factor in inducing American readers to strike up an acquaintance with the great poem.”

 

Endorsed by the popes

The rebound of the Divine Comedy from its two-century slump has continued into our present day, writes Luzzi, pointing out:

Perhaps the greatest indicator of how Dante’s Commedia has been transformed from the bane of the Spanish Inquisitors to the darling of religious thinkers throughout the world is its reception by a group that Dante represented with venomous ink: the popes.

Writing on the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1966, Pope Paul VI called the poet “the lord of the sublime song,” the author of “fertile poetry,” and the “father of the Italian language.” Indeed, the pope further noted:

Nor do we regret the fact that the voice of Dante lashed out severely against more than one Roman Pontiff, and had harsh reproofs for ecclesiastical institutions and for persons who were representatives and ministers of the Church.

Because, essentially, Dante had good reason to lash out at the Church which, the pope wrote, “caused his bitterness of soul.” And he remained firm in his Catholic faith.

 

“A prophet of hope”

Pope Francis, in an apostolic letter on the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021, noted the relevance of the Divine Comedy to the present-day world. Luzzi writes:

Emphasizing the link between past and present when reading Dante, Francis spoke of his desire “to consider the life and work of the great poet and examine its ‘resonance’ with our own experience.”

Like modern-day refugees and immigrants, Dante lived the life of an exile.

Ultimately, Francis writes, that sense of permanent dislocation and displacement led to Dante’s religious vocation, inspiring his role as the “prophet of a new humanity that thirsts for peace and happiness….

Dante, Francis writes, was a “prophet of hope” who ended his Commedia with the most joyful conclusion to an epic ever written: a journey to God and a vision of the “Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Those words — Love which moves the sun and the other stars — are the final words of the Divine Comedy.

They refer to God and to that for which every human soul yearns.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.24.25