To Hell or Heaven and Back
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry To Hell or Heaven and Back By Phoebe Pettingell Attending a number of recent funerals brought home to me the overpowering influence Dante has had on people who probably have...
...Readers were further impressed by the author's power to describe a spiritual world of angels, demons and the dead that is somewhat foreign to our skeptical nature, yet is nostalgically missed...
...Beauty convinces...
...Where Eliot, who fled the provincialism he perceived in his native America, thought Dante personified continental cosmopolitanism, Mandelstam, by contrast, viewed his hero as unique, outside the politics of corrupt bureaucracies like the Soviet Union...
...And it reproduces a selection from Charles Williams' groundbreaking study, The Figure of Beatrice (1943), which profoundly influenced T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Sayers, among others...
...The immutability of art becomes the immortality of heaven...
...Williams is also invoked by many writers who first discovered Dante through his romantic exposition of courtly love and mystic theology...
...This is partly because of his book, De vulgari eloquentia, defending the eloquence of Italian over Latin, the more common literary Ianguage of his day...
...Part I of the book allows some dead 20th-century poets to commune with us through their various essays about Dante...
...There are surely as many Dantes as there are people who write about him...
...Writers continue to find inspiration in Dante, and try to put forward their own insights into the scheme of life and death...
...Dante's angels surpass human nature and differ from it...
...Early in the poem, the speaker avers that All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life...
...Similarly, the final image of Paradise, a whirling point of light, suggesting an eye, and revealing "Love, which moves the sun and other stars," makes him wonder if the image is not meant to evoke the first glance Dante received from Beatrice, winning his irrevocable devotion: "Black pupil and convex lens so sheer as to be luminous and reflective, the poet's own ecstatic passion and longing for the dead girl shining back at him...
...Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "A Gilded Lapse of Time" engages Dante directly...
...I have, if I can in any sensible way be said to have it, a vast universe, but it is empty and dark, and compared with what is to be known, I do not know it at all...
...For deities, all human words have two sets of meanings, theirs and ours, and mortals can never be sure of the definition a god may currently be using when talking to us...
...Through Carson's verbal alchemy, this only too ordinary story transmutes into myth and literature...
...You know beauty makes sex possible...
...As the editors observe, Dante has been many things to different eras and individuals...
...Some of the other notables you will find in this section are W. B. Yeats, Osip Mandelstam, Jorge Luis Borge, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, and James Merrill...
...The work is dedicated to Keats...
...During the past decade, though, attempts have been made to render the medieval poem in accessible contemporary verse...
...As James Merrill notes, many of us discovered the poet through the air-raid scene in Eliot's "Little Gidding," based on the encounter with Latini...
...For Emerson, he became the forerunner of the American frontier writer: "He knows 'God damn,' and can be rowdy if he pleases, and does please...
...The father of Modernism scorned that other great poet of Heaven and Hell: "Milton has no grasp of the superhuman...
...Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars...
...Beauty...
...Around the middle of the last century, Dorothy Sayers and Lawrence Binyon each tried to capture the terza rima in English, but their treatments are dated...
...Pound, always happy to speak up for the pretechnological Middle Ages against the Industrial Revolution, was impressed by the fact that "Dante's Satan is undeniably and indelibly evil...
...No great secret...
...the least provincial...
...The concept of how punishments are meted out may be foreign, if not incomprehensible, to the modern reader...
...This introduces the husband's "Homeric" use of language in the manner of the Greek gods...
...Seamus Heaney's Station Island also talks to the dead in a Dantean manner...
...That inspired Robert Pinsky to produce his The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1994), while last year W. S. Merwin published his rendition of Purgatory...
...He finds her as a girl gathering flowers, then steals her away from the daylight world to dark Hades, while her mother, the goddess of growing things, weeps and crops fail...
...When the two poets reach the lowest circle of Hell, they pass through Satan's sphincter to exit...
...Rochester, and so forth...
...In all three states of the afterlife, the poet is permitted to converse with the dead: figures he knows through history or legend, public leaders of his own time, and people he knew when they were still alive, such as his mentor, Brunetto Latini, the Guelf philosopher and politician...
...The Russian saw Dante as a musician of language who "constructed in verbal space an infinitely powerful organ (before the great instrument of Bach's day had even been dreamt of) and already delighted in all its conceivable stops, inflated its bellows, and roared and cooed through all its pipes...
...As I would again if he came near...
...Mary Baine Campbell wants "Dante to spend several lifetimes as a woman, as a Jew," and as all the other classes of people he treats with a lack of contemporary sympathy...
...The Story of Red and Men in the Off Hours both obliquely tell what may be the same story found in The Beauty of the Husband, but with each retelling, the hell of loss and the torture of love's bliss recalled in loneliness become more eloquent...
...Though they meet in Hell, theirs is one of the most tender encounters in the entire poem...
...The shadow of New Criticism looms so large that the naïve reader will come away with little historical perspective onltaly's supreme poet...
...If the Florentine poet's portrayal of Purgatory and Heaven has swayed imaginations somewhat less, it is probably because they lack the drama inherent in eternal torment...
...Every "tango" begins with an epigraph from the poet who wrote '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know...
...Not only the smog prevents me from seeing the stars, but the electric light so effective in demythologizing the world that shields me from demon and angel alike...
...Loss brings suffering, making hell's torments real to us...
...to stare down his losses...
...Dante has a small universe, but a full one, and he knows it thoroughly...
...Tired out by not being able to trust or believe him, she eventually left...
...Wiiat really connects words and things...
...He ultimately ate the dead bodies of his sons, he is condemned to Hell for being a traitor, not for cannibalism...
...Thus, feelings of hopelessness and futility evoke lines from Samuel Becket...
...In 1993, Daniel Halpern, founder of Ecco Press, commissioned 20 poets to tackle a different canto of the Inferno...
...Inevitably, The Poets'Dante contains some disappointments...
...McClatchy offers another reason The Divine Comedy remains so compelling today...
...Until recently, however, those who are unable to manage Italian could only read him in one of several rather mannered Victorian translations, or in a small number of newer ones, mostly prose...
...That the path to paradise should begin here," McClatchy exclaims...
...The wife is Persephone, her nogoodnik husband is the Lord of the Underworld...
...No current poet can surpass her ability to dissect raw emotions...
...Hell, for example, instantly conjures up images of burning pitch and ingenious punishments that, in the words of W. S. Gilbert's Mikado, "fit the crime...
...T. S. Eliot believed him to be "beyond all other poets of our Continent, the most European...
...Merrill himself modeled The Changing Light at Sandover, a colloquy with his mentors and friends who had died, on The Divine Comedy...
...Mark Doty objects to Dante "outing" Brunetto Latini as a "sodomite," and accuses the poet of hypocrisy...
...They move in their high courses inexplicable...
...to see his fresh and living grass become hard, timeless enamel...
...The beyond in this poem is made up of graphic physical details...
...Teddy Roosevelt lamented that no 20th century Dante existed to describe the Bowery, "haunted by demons as horrible as any that talk in the pages of the Inferno!' American writers have often seen the Florentine poet as a model...
...It is at such moments when Dante's invention—his immediate, tactile handling of things—surpasses his scheme, and astounds us...
...Milton's angels are men of enlarged power, plus wings...
...Mostly, this is a passive omission, a desire not to burden us with the minutiae of Guelf/Ghibelline warfare, or the theology of Thomas Aquinus, both readily available elsewhere...
...Carson's recent books have steadily gained in verbal power...
...Part II presents mostly new essays by 15 living poets, including Seamus Heaney, J. D. McClatchy, Merwin, Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, and Edward Hirsch...
...This gritty reality is matched by the always fascinating play of her intellect...
...Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Knopf, 147 pp., $22.00) tells of a wife mourning her divorce from a handsome man who compulsively cheated and lied to her...
...Dante's journey through the beyond, guided first by his admired Roman model, Virgil, then by his beloved Beatrice, appeals to something deep in the human psyche...
...Now, the editors of The Poets Dante have gathered 28 essays by prominent poets and critics that discuss the continuing influence of the great work on poetry and Western culture...
...But in ignoring the historical perspective some critics readily slip into the "political correctness" of our own age...
...As with Carson's previous verse—most recently Men in the Off Hours and The Story of Red (about a monster who is mentioned in The Inferno)—many layers of reference are interwoven here: classical, literary, historical, cultural...
...Even those who have not read The Divine Comedy are likely to have heard that "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ("In the middle of life's journey") Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood...
...In the 19th century, depending on the viewer, "he was considered the father of modern poetry, the liberator of vernacular speech, the civic poet, the exile and wanderer, the prophet of nationalism or of world government, the adoring lover, the exacting craftsman...
...Once the wedding was over, she discovered him to be a compulsive philanderer, often involved with several other women at once...
...During the 19th century cultural flowering that F. 0. Matthiessen dubbed "the American Renaissance," Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and their friends hailed Dante as one whose example inspired denizens of the United States to forge their own colloquial literature, proudly distinct from literary English...
...After several frightening encounters with animals, he is rescued by Virgil, who offers to conduct him through the first stages of the afterlife—Hell and Purgatory—before turning him over to his long-lost love, Beatrice, who will guide him through Heaven...
...But Osip Mandelstam declared him not at all "a poet in the 'general European' sense," and praised his Italian for its "beautiful childlike quality, its closeness to infant babbling, to some kind of eternal dadaism...
...He kept trying to woo her back: A man who after threeyears of separation would take his wife to Athens— for adoration, for peace, then telephone New York every night from the bar and speak to a woman who thought he was over on 4th Street working late...
...On one level, the speaker reminisces about her marriage to a man of Greek ancestry who met her when she was quite young, and courted her despite the disapproval of her family and his...
...It opens with Ezra Pound, an early champion from the Age of Modernism...
...The 20th century also appreciated Dante's insisting ordinary speech is appropriate to literature...
...Jealousy recalls a remark of Jane Eyre's Mr...
...Yet even celibate theologians have agreed that erotic love can be a foretaste of heaven...
...On Poetry To Hell or Heaven and Back By Phoebe Pettingell Attending a number of recent funerals brought home to me the overpowering influence Dante has had on people who probably have never read him...
...The "tangos" into which the book is divided sizzle with the slippery, erotic rhythms and melancholy harmonies of that sensuous dance...
...The failure of once intimate relationships can be as painful as the demise of people, and often leaves the bereaved full of questions...
...Like Dante, my father was in advertising," X D. McClatchy tells us, catching our attention immediately— probably because we never thought of the 13th-century poet quite that way, although he did in fact live as a propagandist...
...Nevertheless, the emotion that resonates through Dante's descriptions of his encounters feels as fresh as ever...
...As McClatchy emphasizes, in eternity the physical does not develop or decay: "The project of Dante's poem has been to fix his feelings, as an eye will...
...No matter how agnostic we may be about the afterlife, part of us remains hopeful that somehow people we have loved, perhaps even those we hate, continue to exist in a universe parallel to ours...
...Still, how many 700-year-old poems possess the vitality to make us still read and passionately love the work, yet want to argue with it...
...He is not 'Free Will' but stupid malignity...
...Reading about the death of the heart can transform pain into beauty, after all...
...Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty...
...And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question...
...Certain other episodes are truly horrible, none more so than Count Ugolino's description of "the hunger tower" where he and his children were imprisoned to starve...
...The Poets' Dante helps us realize how much poets owe to this passionate voice, both angry and loving, as it continues to address us across death's barrier...
...For Nemerov, Dante helps us to communicate with a culture whose worldview is far different than ours, yet can break through the limits of our own horizons...
...His dramatic vision colors the mental pictures of believers and skeptics alike...
...Dante made communication with the dead the substance of his poetry," say the editors of The Poets' Dante, Peter S. Hawkins and Rachael Jacoff (Farrar Straus Giroux, 404 pp., $25.00...
...Beauty makes sex sex.' Carson's poetry fully understands how the books we read inform our emotional reactions and how we make sense of life...
...So why did the wife love her faithless husband...
...Shelley, too, characterized Dante's poems as "the bridge thrown over the stream of time, uniting the modern and the ancient world...
...Howard Nemerov remarked that Dante's three-tiered cosmos "does indeed look silly" to modern eyes, "but only until I try to contemplate my own and learn that I don't effectively have one...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
