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The Straight Way |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Robert Gingher |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2002 |
| Size: 2,359 Words, 14,827 Characters |
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DANTE
A Penguin Life
R.W.B. Lewis
New York: Viking, 2001
205 pp., $19.95
"Give my tongue such power
That it may leave at least a single sparkle of your glory For people to come ..."
--Commedia, Dante Alighieri
In reflecting on Dante's milieu, Ezra Pound wrote, "We appear to have lost the radiant world ... where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies 'mezzo oscuro rade,' risplende in sä perpetuale effecto,' magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante's paradiso." That passage from "The Serious Artist" will make little sense to those unfamiliar with Dante Alighieri's life (1265--1321), exile, and torment by papal factions and political intrigue of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence. But in Dante, Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer R.W.B. Lewis draws from a complex of thirteenth-century characters and events to make that poet's fiery spirit tangible. He renders the powerful Catholic Church and decadent Holy Roman Empire palpable and sifts gold from the raw ore of Dante scholarship in a remarkable example of succinct biographical excellence in the Penguin Lives editions.
Dante helps us recover the elusive radiance of Pound's antique world.
"Dante," notes the biographer, "is the supreme example in literary history of the writer who at every important turn is seeking himself (humanly, morally, psychologically, imaginatively), finding himself, defining h...
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...rtal away from the insanity of turbulent Florence to an ideal city, a haven, heaven itself. He reflects on his full journey "from the human to the divine, from time to the eternal, from Florence to a people just and sane."
The internecine extent of factions within factions and crooked politics in his world illuminated for Dante the significance of "the straight way" and a life so modeled.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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