Canto 28: Dante & Facebook
It is easy to be pessimistic. A pessimist can always find something about which to complain. Looking at recent polling, roughly 63% of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. For more than the past ten years, over 50% of Americans have felt this way. I should note a slight dip to 49% in May of this year, but the rate has gone back up since then. The cause of this negative outlook is the result of a pandemic more lethal than Covid. A virus whose carriers do so willingly, happily. Dante describes these people in the Inferno.
100 Days of Dante
This September 14th will be the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of the greatest poet of western literature, Dante Alighieri.
This claim of Dante’s position in literature, is more than the assertions of an Italophile. Eric Auerbach, the author of Mimesis, said that there is Dante and then all others. Michael Dirda notes that in the early part of the twentieth century, “one important writer after another argues strongly for Dante – even above Shakespeare – as the central figure of European literature, the linchpin of the great classical and Christian tradition of learning and culture.” For Italians, Italian-Americans, and Italophiles Dante bears even greater importance than the rest of the Western World.
Dante at 700
This September 13th is the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the greatest poet in all of western literature.
I am not sure where to go from there with this post. There is so much I would like to say, but I am not quite sure how to put it all together in a logical way that fully expresses my feelings about Dante without sounding trite. So much has been written over the past seven hundred years that you could easily spend the rest of your life reading about Dante without ever reading his actual work. Has it all been said? Is there anything new to say about Dante?
Sauce, Gravy, or Dante? (Part 1)
In 1954, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Italian author and historian of Italian literature asked; “what is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti?” He went on to observe “spaghetti has entered many American homes where the name of Dante is never pronounced.”