John Freccero enables us to see the "Divine Comedy" for the bold,
poetic experiment that it is. Too many critics have domesticated
Dante by separating his theology from his poetics. Freccero argues
that to fail to see the convergence of the letter and the spirit,
the pilgrim and the poet, is to fail to understand Dante's poetics
of conversion. For Dante, body and soul go together and there is no
salvation that's purely intellectual, no poetry that is simply
literary.
The essays that form this book were originally published between
1959 and 1984. They are arranged to follow the order of the
"Comedy," and they form the perfect companion for a reader of the
poem. With these essays assembled for the first time, we can now
see Freccero's stature: he is the best contemporary critic of
Dante. Freccero is that rare article, a critic of eclectic and not
dogmatic persuasion. Throughout Freccero operates on the
fundamental premise that there is al- ways an intricate and crucial
dialectic at work between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, and
that it is this dialectic that makes the work so profoundly
dramatic, one of the great novels of the self.
Thanks to Freccero we readers have the "Comedy" whole again.
Freccero calls upon medieval philosophy, cosmology, science,
theology, and poetics to enable us to traverse Dante's moral
landscape without losing our way in the confusions of minute
exegeses. In a secular age Freccero enables us to see this poem as
what it is, something wholly other than what we might believe or
write. In doing so he shows us the most that language can achieve
in any age, secular or not.
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