Dante Alighieri & John Ciardi (Alighieri, Dante & Ciardi, John) - The Divine Comedy-NAL
Metadata
- Author: Dante Alighieri
Highlights
The eagle, as unlike an eagle as can be imagined, stands as a figure for the poem itself, a nonrepresentation that is its own reality. — location: 9975
the representation of nonrepresentation
Moreover, it is this sense of the universe as a symbolic book, of which the Bible was the concrete manifestation, that gives to everything its quality of sign, pointing beyond itself to its Maker. So it is in Dante’s poem, where the ultimate reality is seen precisely as a book: — location: 9979
The entire poem, from the dark wood to the Empyrean, traces the gradually transcendent view of Dante on his own culture, his own country, and even his own family, from the isolated and alienated bewilderment of the pilgrim in the first scene to the soaring view of the eagle in the upper reaches of the universe. It is characteristic of Dante and of his faith that any such transcendence must begin with the self; — location: 9990
the unification of the individual and the collective
The retrospective illumination of Dante’s own life by Cacciaguida is the dramatization of the poet’s self-transcendence, the achievement of a place to stand from which the course of time, its trajectory, may be viewed as though it were completed. — location: 10010
It was St. Augustine in his Confessions who first drew the analogy between the unfolding of syntax and the flow of human time. As words move toward their conclusion in a sentence in order to arrive at meaning and as the sentences flow toward the poem’s ending in order to give it meaning, so the days of a man’s life flow toward his death, the moment of closure that gives meaning to his life. — location: 10012
the analogy between a book and a man’s life
When pilgrim and poet meet at the last stage of the journey, the circle is squared, to use Dante’s figure, the poet’s word joins the flesh of his experience and, in a sense that is at once paradoxical and exact, the poem is born. — location: 10053
The final scene is not an apotheosis of the self in splendid isolation, but a return to the darkness of this world for its own good and a reintegration of poetry into society. — location: 10063
Dante’s personal fulfillment of his own most intimate desires is perfectly harmonized with the Love that is the motive force of the entire universe, of the Sun and the other stars. Spatially, to speak of the Sun and stars is to return to our perspective, looking up at the heavenly bodies which had long been surpassed by the pilgrim’s journey to the Empyrean. The word “Love” is therefore the link that binds heaven to earth and the poet to his audience, containing within it the substance of the poem. — location: 10070
Thus every nature moves across the tide of the great sea of being to its own port, each with its given instinct as its guide. — location: 10134
Note that in this godly sport the skin was not pulled off Marsyas but that Marsyas was pulled out of his skin. In citing this incident Dante may be praying that he himself, in a sense, be pulled out of himself (i.e., be made to outdo himself), however painfully. its sheath: its skin. — location: 10167
Narcissus. His error was in taking a reflection (his own) to be a real face. Dante’s opposite error is in taking real faces to be reflections. — location: 10485
With caritas as the essential mood of the Paradiso, no soul can help but rejoice in the joy of all about it. Contrast the state of things in the Inferno: the infernal souls have all refused to accept and to identify themselves with the Divine Love; each, therefore, is closed into itself, and no soul in Hell can derive any comfort from any other — location: 10499