Dante

Poet of the Secular World

By Erich Auerbach
Introduction by Michael Dirda

Erich Auerbach's Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of the world's greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach's study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante's work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Auerbach offers the thought that for all its investment in the eternal and immutable, the Divine Comedy is even more successful in representing reality as basically human...The refinement of Auerbach's own writing about Dante is truly exhilarating to read, not just because of his complex, paradox-filled insights, but because of their Nietzschean audacity.
— Edward Said

This is a book with all the freshness and excitement of new discovery. The excitement remains through all these years since its writing. This account of Dante's poetry, from the moving springs of its style and the human presentness of its drama to the cosmic vision which produces and validates them both, an account based on history but shaped by a special sense of the issues, possesses a validity which no other book, past or present, can diminish.
— Theodore Silverstein, The University of Chicago

Also see:

The New Life By Dante Alighieri Translated from the Italian by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Preface by Michael Palmer The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante's youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death.

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri New translation by Ciaran Carson This is a truly original retelling of Dante's epic journey that will surprise and renew the twenty-first-century reader's faith in the art of translation.

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