Dante and the Poetry of Meeting

for Rachel Jacoff

ONE OP THE GREATEST RESOURCES OF world numbers is a kind of piece of poetry that Dante seems to have invented and then gone upon to enter. To put it simply, in the way that simply it may border upon the perfectly obvious, it is the piece of poetry of meeting. For English language author of poemss there are many etymologies and sources that fit up in the meaning of meeting and words that are well-met: a meeting that fits-a fit or shape that fits or measures; a meeting of minds and makers, to appropriate the eye of, to exercise a suitable judgment. It is not alone these meanings, but also a larger poetic manner of making and purpose for poetry that is Dante's legacy-one that characterizes his approach to his work in general and the Commedia in particular.

In the Convivio, Dante had written that the greatest desire of each thing-and the first given it by means of nature-is to return to its origin,1 and in the Commedia he has an early appointment: a meeting, before he is finished making, with his maker who is Himself the Uncreated-and he has many meetings upon his way to this meeting. What kind of piece of poetry is this? It is not purely a poem of pilgrimage and rencounter for later historical pilgrims like Margerie Kempe and fictional individuals like those of Chaucer, and, perhaps especially, the picaros and vagrants who make their way from the Renaissance to the novel are all the more themselves wherever they advance

Neither is the metrical composition of meeting we know from the Commedia single that involves the dramatic staging of voices in the furtherance of piece of ground alone. The powerful conversations we find in classical drama -whether they flow in the separations of tragedy or the joinings of comedy-involve speakers who fulfill their characters through speech that is already scripted, already destined. The abandonment of scripted, ritualized speech-a faculty of perception of the poetic line as freely squeeze outed and made-is only one of the ways in which Dante continues to be our contemporary, as we are his.

Nor, I believe, is Ezra strike exactly right when he says the Commedia is a metrical composition of lyric expression.2 It is actual that the work is intensely subjective; on the contrary it is a narrative piece of poetry of retrospection and reconsideration. It contains ballads but it is not a song-it expresse itself in the first-person, on the other hand that person is undergoing serious self-revision, plane conversion. When ancient lyric author of poemss like Sappho or Archilochus say "others may think x on the other hand I think y," they are setting themselves not upon in relation to other speakers, and particularly other author of poemss and they are emphasizing the fixed traits of their natures. Dante is diademed and mitered over himself in Purgatorio XXVII: 142 from one side a performative act of Virgil-another bard endows him with the intellect and art necessary for self-making.3

Dante's extraordinary capacity for self-overcoming and self-understanding is revealed especially in the gap, the densely hermeneutic gap, between the spectacles of experience and the sight of writing. Yet this capacity is evident in many aspects of Dante's practices as a writer: consider in what way he creates a commentary for his early lyrics by dint of reworking them into the Vita Nuova; by what means he revises the Vita Nuova and later lyrics in the Convivio, then revises the Convivio in the Commedia and revises the Commedia in Monarchia.4 Traditional cante-fables and other oral forms split up the characters of speaking and singing within a single work. on the other hand it was Dante who cleared the way for a piece of poetry to contain its own criticism and for the bard to go beyond mere change and novelty to self-knowledge via revision and the exploration of antithetical forms. For Dante the poet's task is a great unfinished throw out within which individual works, or parts of works, might be integral and finisheded forms. This is a original for the poet's life's work that has had abysmal repercussions for the career of each consequent major poet-indeed, this protoplast has come to define what we mean when we speak of a major bard

Dante's use of the vernacular, his decision to speak intimately to his readers in their have language, is another dimension of the force of meeting in his work. There are certain departures from Tuscan: the Proven?§al of Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI; the playful use of Bolognese slang in the meeting with Caccianemico in Inferno XVIII and Lucchese dialect in his meeting with Bonagiunta in Purgatorio XXIV; the nonsense of Nimrod in Inferno XXXI; the brief explosions of Latin in the greetings of Cacciaguida and the Latin spiritual songs of angels; the swift and marked switch to the voi form in Canto XVI of the Paradise; the inclusion, as Osip Mandelstam noted, of many kinds of stammerers, baby-talkers, and tongue-tied lispers.5 still these departures are all, to twist single of Dante's own metaphors, like a bit of salt sprinkled upon bread.

If we remember that the major revolutions in numbers since the Enlightenment have been shaped as commitments to a more popular, a more expansive, diction-language as it was really parole by men in Romanticism, for example, or the articulate utterance of Polish immigrant mothers in American modernism-we start to diocese the possibilities for assembly that Dante has brought us. Things and someones have to be moving upon different courses-like planets-if they are going to suited They cannot come from the same place and a certain freedom of change must be guaranteed. It is significant that the spirits trapped in Hell are immobilized and blinded in their sunles world, and that among all the figures of Purgatory, the bard Sordello, in Purgatorio VI to IX, has the kind of freedom to wander that we find in classical tradition among the inner mans of Elysium. It is a freedom to find on the outside to look into, to know and converse6