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The Book Show

Barbara Reynolds: Dante: The Poet, The Political
Thinker, The Man (review)

16 February 2007

Age has certainly not wearied Dante scholar Barbara Reynolds who has, in her 92nd year, just published her
magnum opus on this towering medieval Italian poet. Entitled Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The
Man' it gives, as critic Alison Croggon explains, an incomparable background to this most fascinating figure.
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Transcript

Alison Croggon: It is common to compare Dante Aligheri's epic poem the Divine Comedy to a cathedral: vast,
soaring, sublime. And like the altar pieces of mediaeval churches, the poem is crowded with a seething mass of
human figures, symbolic and allegorical as well as literal, many of them still recognisable portraits of Dante's
contemporaries.
However, unlike the sculptural forms in a cathedral, Dante's poem is not static, but a living drama. People move,
speak, beg, plead, curse, suffer unimaginable pain or tremble in extremes of ecstatic joy. They lay anathemas on
one another and express undying love. And in the centre of the poem is Dante himself, the poet permitted by the
prayers of his beloved muse Beatrice to tour through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, in order to bring news back
to the living of the fate of souls in the Christian afterlife.
Almost 700 years after Dante's death, the Commedia still stands as a cornerstone of Western poetic art. It was
the first major literary work in a European vernacular tongue, predating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by almost
half a century. It is a work of staggering poetic hubris, which only Dante's brilliance could get away with: he
places himself not only with the poets of classical Greece and Rome -- Virgil is his guide through Hell and

Purgatory -- but with St Paul, who according to a popular legend of the time was the only living person
permitted this privilege.
Yet, for all its visionary excess, the Commedia is a poem rooted firmly in its time and place. Dante refers
constantly to people and events which were well known in his own time, but which are now obscure. As a result
of the complex and violent politics of mediaeval Italy, Dante was exiled from his birthplace, Florence, and he
uses the poem to upbraid his city and the many people -- especially Pope Boniface -- whom he considered
responsible for his city's degradation and disgrace. As much as a vision of sin and redemption, the Commedia
is, in every sense, a political poem.
This makes it a very complex work indeed. For some illumination, the curious reader could do much worse than
to turn to Barbara Reynolds' giant work of literary biography, Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The
Man. The greater part of this book is devoted to a step-by-step tour through the Commedia, and here Reynolds
is like the knowledgeable guide who knows the names of every person in a mediaeval frieze, and can explain the
lost symbolism of every obscure Boschean narrative.
Reynolds is well qualified: she is one of the world's foremost Dante scholars, and completed Dorothy L. Sayers'
translations of the Commedia after Sayers died and left the final 13 cantos unfinished. Reynolds does a good,
clear job of explaining the labyrinthine state of Italian politics in Dante's time, and sketches the details of his life,
including his literary milieu, from the few sources available. There are fascinating glimpses of the poverty-stricken
poet in exile, scrabbling for a living by delivering lectures at universities, getting freelance diplomatic jobs or
seeking patronage from rich sponsors.
Speculations are sometimes ventured on the slenderest of evidence, such as her conjecture that Beatrice was
red-haired, because her eyes are described as green and her skin as very fair. Among her more controversial
suggestions is that Dante's vision of the Trinity in Paradiso is a literal transcription of a vision inspired by drugs;
according to Reynolds, cannabis was a known drug at the time. She suggests that he had homosexual affairs
early in his life. She claims also to have solved some puzzles that have occupied Dante scholars for centuries.
One shining virtue of this book is that it gives precedence to Dante the showman and orator. Reynolds says that
in 13th century Italy, poems were written to be performed: often they were set to music, and were even
presented as ballets. Pointing to several clues in the text, she suggests that Dante's unfinished Il Convivio -- a
work that she argues shaped many of the ideas that inform the Commedia -- was originally delivered as a series
of lectures.
When Il Convivio failed to sell, Dante picked up a popular story of St Paul's tour of Heaven and Hell, the
mediaeval equivalent of pulp fiction, and adapted the idea to his own uses. The Commedia was, Reynolds
argues convincingly, a poem designed to entrance illiterate or ill-educated audience members with its narrative
drama. And it also gave Dante a chance to enact some savage revenge against his political enemies.
Among Reynolds' major aims is to give a portrait of Dante himself: a perilous enterprise which she enters with
sometimes surprising confidence. The portrait that emerges is a harsh one: Dante was a proud, quick-tempered,
passionate, vengeful, impatiently brilliant man, resentful of his poverty and certainly disdainful of women.

(Reynolds' discussion of his gender politics, marvelling at his harsh statements about women while he so elevates
Beatrice, is, it must be said, a little nave). This book is probably unrivalled in its breadth -- Reynolds wrote this
in her tenth decade, which allows for a lifetime of reading -- and gives an invaluable grounding to anyone curious
about the background to Dante's astounding masterpiece.
However, if you want to understand Dante the poet, you would be better off turning to the Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam's celebrated essay, 'Conversation with Dante'. Mandelstam has the quick, intuitive perceptions of a
poet, and in a much smaller space he captures with far greater subtlety the essential qualities of the Commedia.
Like Reynolds, he perceives Dante's mastery of expressive language, his poetic, dramatic and rhetorical control.
But he has far less concern with its literal realities: whether or not Dante took drugs wouldn't have struck him as
at all important. Mandelstam sees the Commedia as a great work of poetic and, crucially, scientific imagination:
not a cathedral at all, but a huge, complex crystal. And it is Mandelstam's essay that conjures, to my mind, the
most vivid portrait of Dante the man.
'Dante is a poor man,' says Mandelstam. 'Courtesy is not at all characteristic of him, rather something distinctly
the opposite. One would have to be a blind mole not to notice that throughout the Divina Commedia Dante
does not know how to act, what to say, how to bow... The inner anxiety and painful troubled gaucheries which
accompany each step of the diffident man, as if his upbringing were somehow insufficient, the man untutored in
the ways of applying his inner experience or of objectifying it in etiquette, the tormented and downtrodden man - such are the qualities which provide the poem with all its charm, with all its drama, and serve as ...its
psychological foundation.'
Dante, the shy, awkward poet whose arrogance is a defence against bitter anxieties, steps out the page and
stands at your elbow. Mandelstam summons the living man in a flash of acute, compassionate perception that no
amount of careful scholarship can match. The answer, of course, is to read both works.

Guests

Alison Croggon
Theatre critic and Book Show reviewer
Further Information

Alison's blog
Publications

Title: Conversation about Dante

Author: Osip Mandelstam
Publisher: New York Review Books Classics

Title: Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man

Author: Barbara Reynolds
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Presenter

Ramona Koval
Producer

Rhiannon Brown
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Weekdays 10am
repeated 8pm Weekdays
Presented by
Ramona Koval
In This Program

(full program)
1007: Panel discussion: what makes a great speech?
1030: Barbara Reynolds: Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man (review)

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