Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’: A Biography

In this erudite chronicle, Luzzi (Botticelli’s Secret), a literature professor at Bard College, traces how Dante’s Divine Comedy has fallen in and out of favor since its publication in the early 1300s. Dante’s decision to write in Tuscan vernacular instead of Latin colored early reception to the poem, Luzzi contends, discussing how biographer Giovanni Boccaccio praised the choice by anointing Dante “Italy’s first poet laureate” while poet Petrarch “deride[d] Dante as a mere ‘dialect’ love poet.” The Comedy proved a major influence on the Italian Renaissance, but declined in stature during the Enlightenment, Luzzi notes, suggesting that the poem’s experimentalism was viewed unfavorably by the latter era’s “neoclassical, rule-bound literary culture.” Luzzi also describes how Dante’s reputation was revived by Romantics, whose veneration of “artistic endurance in the face of strife” made a martyr out of Dante, who wrote the Comedy while exiled from his native Florence for advocating limits to papal power. Elsewhere, Luzzi explores how such modernists as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound drew inspiration from Dante’s “experimental poetics” and how Italian politicians with wildly different ideologies have cited Dante as a forefather. Luzzi covers the seven centuries since the Comedy’s publication with concision and verve. It’s a fleet-footed overview of the influential poem’s eventful afterlife. Photos. (Nov.)