Time, History, and Literature by Erich Auerbach & Jane O. Newman

Author:Erich Auerbach & Jane O. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 Changed in the 1967 rpt. from “figurative” in the original version.—Ed.

2 See previous note. —Ed.

3 See n. 1 above.—Ed.

4 Changed to “facts” in the 1967 rpt. —Ed.

5 Changed in the 1967 rpt. from “figural interpretation” in the original version. —Ed.

6 See previous n. —Ed.

9

On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante

Dante’s poetic fate is so astonishing that one would have to despair of the laws governing intellectual history to imagine that this fate had already run its course. In every age the poetic sources of a cultural sphere penetrate the deepest layers of popular consciousness. Homer and the Greek tragedians, the heroic lay and Shakespeare, have all been absorbed in their entirety. In Dante we have a poet who must surely be deemed the fons et origo of modern poetry. His name and image live on. Yet in his native country, his work has only partly been internalized and absorbed. In the rest of Europe, it has no resonance at all.

This fate began to take shape immediately after his death. Dante’s impact was massive: he singlehandedly established the expressive possibilities and the landscape of all poetry to come, and he did so virtually out of thin air, without any tradition behind him and with no fellow travelers at his side. But this impact, though immense, was not direct. Dante was transmitted to the Romance countries and to England through Petrarch, and it is only in Shakespeare’s less intense and much refracted form that he reaches us today.

I believe that Dante is far from having achieved his maximum impact even now. No nation has had the strength needed to absorb him. Boarding a vessel that was far too small for the task, everyone followed him into open waters, and then lost sight of him altogether. No later generation proved a match for the powerful force of his character, which erupts into view fully formed and self-fashioned. As a consequence, his truest impact remained limited to a very few. The poetry of subsequent eras oscillated between the two poles of aimless elemental power and rational connection. No poet who could give adequate form to Dante’s incandescent fullness ever appeared again.

In Dante the individual was born anew. The individual life of the person had been buried since the fall of antiquity. With Dante, this powerful stream of life was liberated and came to light in the most compelling form the world has ever seen. Then there was his fate, which cut the poet off from his customary and beloved surroundings and denied him the slightest of earthly satisfactions. Dante was as unhappy as anyone endowed with so elemental an intensity can only ever be. He was permitted to enjoy little of what a more fortunate lot grants to other mortals. His earthly love was tragic. His beautiful city, to which he was attached like a young lamb to its flock (Paradise 25), banished him. His political aspirations came to naught, and he remained lonely and poor, obliged to “climb another’s stairs” (ibid., 17.58–59). In a later era such a man would have been torn apart from within.

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