The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses

by Peter S. Hawkins (Editor), Rachel Jacoff (Editor)

Essays on the most celebrated Italian poet by eminent poets
of the twentieth century

"Perhaps confessions by poets, of what Dante has meant to them, may even contribute something to the appreciation of Dante himself."
-T. S. Eliot

The great fourteenth-century poet has been an unequaled influence on many writers in the twentieth century, whose "confessions" may well foster a deeper appreciation of Dante. Previously published essays by some of this century's most renowned poets-Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Robert Fitzgerald, Borges, Merrill, Montale, Lowell, Duncan, Auden, Yeats, Charles Williams, Nemerov, Heaney-join new essays commissioned by the editors. Contemporary poets Mary Campbell, W. S. Di Piero, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, Alan Williamson, and Charles Wright reflect on Dante as well as on their own complex (and often contentious) relationship to his legacy. Their engagement with his work offers a fresh perspective on the Commedia and its author that more academic writing does not provide.

As the editors write, a new consideration of Dante "should generate insights not only about his work but also about poetry written in our own language and time.

Genres: Criticism, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Professor Hawkins’ work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), co-edited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three co-edited volumes to which he also contributed essays, Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006), Medieval Readings of Romans (2007), and From the Margin I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives (2009). Together with Paula Carlson he has edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series, Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith. He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace), utopia (Getting Nowhere), and the language of ineffability (Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’ essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. He writes regularly for The Christian Century’s ”Living by the Word” column and has work forthcoming in Religion and Literature, Modern Language Notes and The Yale Review. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and on the selection committee both of the Luce Fellows in Theology and of the Dante Society of America.

Reviews

[David Curry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had The Poets’ Dante, a 2001 collection of essays in which other poets living and dead try to come to terms with Dante, on hand since publication, taking it off the shelf occasionally but always giving up after pages of turgid academic prose.

Finally, I stayed with the book long enough to come to Robert Fitzgerald’s eminently readable and highly enjoyable essay “Mirroring the Commedia: An Appreciation of Laurence Binyon’s Version.” Perhaps Fitzgerald nails the problem with many of the other essays when he says this: “My generation in America suffered from the assumption that to understand Dante it was necessary to suffocate in a pile of commentary.”

Not the least of the charms in Fitzgerald’s essay are the quotations from the correspondence between Ezra Pound and Dante translator Binyon, including this from Pound on Binyon’s version of the Purgatorio: “Nobody has had such a good time of this kind since Landor did his notes on Catullus … And now, Boss, you get RIGHT ALONG with that Paradiso as soon as you’ve stacked up the dinner dishes …”

After that, I found myself skimming through the remaining mostly stultifying essays.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This works as companion to The Divine Comedy, with many of the famous essays { by TS Eliot, Auden, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, other poets) and a number of interesting essays by living poets (Seamus Heaney, Charles Wright, CK Williams, Robert Pinsky, WS Merwin, others.)

[Stephen Register · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a little gem. I particularly like the essays by Mandalstam, Eliot, and Heaney.