Dante

by Harold Bloom

-- User's guide
-- A comprehensive biography of the poet
-- Detailed thematic analysis of each poem
-- Extracts from major critical essays that discuss important aspects of each poem
-- A complete bibliography of the writer's poetic works
-- A list of critical works about the poet and his works
-- An index of themes and ideas in the author's work

120 pages, Library Binding

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[David Arthur · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dante Alighieri (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, Philadelphia, 2004.
I am finally getting around to writing a review of Dante Alighieri (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Three months into 2025, this is the first book I have completed. I read a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy last year, and I was unsatisfied with my comprehension of it. By happenstance, I landed on a volume of a literature series by the late Harold Bloom. Bloom was a professor at Yale and a famous critic and was reputed to be able to read hundreds of pages per hour with comprehension.
Dante died a little over 700 years ago at the age of 56, and had begun writing the Divine Comedy at the age of 40, having been thrown out of his hometown, Florence, as a result of struggle between rival political groups, of which he was on the losing side. His wife and kids continued to live in Florence, while Dante sought patronage, after his brief political career in Florence. Interestingly, Dante cites in fictive rendering, a historical figure, the poet, Virgil, a man who lived over 13 centuries before Dante. A comedy is a story which starts out bad and ends happily. The three parts, Inferno (hell), Purgatory, and Paradise (heaven), illustrate the progression of improvement. I have obtained three separate volumes of each part of the comedy, from a different translation, with the original Tuscan of each facing page, which I will read, along with rereading the Encyclopedia Britannica volume. Along with rereading Rabelais’s giants’ novels, I will probably end up reading less books this year than in 2024.
One of the most interesting notes are what are considered among Dante’s literary progeny. They are Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shelly, Rosett, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Borges, Stevens, and Beckett. They, according to Harold Bloom are his poetic afterlife. The different essays show that there is an academic industry in arguing what Dante Alighieri was to theology and poetry.
Contents: Introduction (Harold Bloom); The Two Kinds of Allegory (Charles S. Singleton); Figural Art in the Middle Ages (Erich Auerbach); Epic Tradition and Inferno IX (David Quint); Manfred’s Wounds and the Poetics of the Purgatorio’ (John Freccero); Autocitation and Autobiography (Teodolinda Barolini); Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante’s “Counterpass” (Kenneth Gross); The Light of Venus and the Poetry of Dante: Vita Nuova and Inferno XXVII (Giuseppe Mazzotta); The Otherwordly World of Paradiso (Jaroslav Pelikan); Synchronicity (Maria Rosa Menocal); Purgatory as Paradigm: Traveling the New and Never-Before-Traveled Path of this Life/Poem (Teodolinda Barolini); Imagination and Knowledge in Purgatoria XVII-XVIII (Giuseppe Mazzotta); The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice (Harold Bloom); Finding the Center (John Kleiner); Dante’s Interpretive Journey: Truth Through Interpretation (William Franke); Chronology; Contributors; Bibliography.
“The New Historicists and allied resenters have been attempting to reduce and scatter Shakespeare, aiming to undue the Canon by dissolving its center. Curiously, Dante, the second center as it were, is not under similar onslaught, either here or in Italy. Doubtless the assault will come, since the assorted multiculturalists would have difficulty finding s more objectionable great poet than Dante, whose savage and powerful spirit is politically incorrect to the highest degree. Dante is the most aggressive and polemical of the major Western writers, dwarfing even Milton in this regard. Like Milton, he was a political party and sect of one. His heretical intensity has been masked by scholarly commentary, which even at its best frequently treats him as though his Divine Comedy was essentially versified Saint Augustine. But it is best to begin by marking his extraordinary audacity, which is unmatched in the entire tradition of supposedly Christian literature, including even Milton.
Nothing else in Western literature, in the long span from Yahwist and Homer through Joyce and Beckett, is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice, sublimated from being an image of desire to angelic status, in which role she becomes a crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation. Because Beatrice initially matters solely as an instrument of Dante’s will, her apotheosis necessarily involves Dante’s own election as well. His poem is a prophecy and takes on the function of a third Testament in no way subservient to the Old and new. Dante will not acknowledge that the Comedy must be a fictive, his supreme fiction, rather, the poem is the truth, universal and not temporal. What Dante the pilgrim sees and says in the narrative of Dante the poet is intended to persuade us perpetually of Dante’s poetic and religious inescapability. The poem’s gestures of humility, on the part of the pilgrim or of the poet, impress Dante scholars but are rather less pursuasive than the poet’s subversion of all other poets and its persistence in bringing forward Dante’s own apocalyptic potential. “(Harold Bloom, “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice).