Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History - Hardcover

Rubin, Harriet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743234464 ISBN 13: 9780743234467

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

Dante in Love is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Dante Alighieri, exiled from his home in Florence, a fugitive from justice, followed a road in 1302 that took him first to the labyrinths of hell then up the healing mountain of purgatory, and finally to paradise. He found a vision and a language that made him immortal.Author Harriet Rubin follows Dante's path along the old Jubilee routes that linked monasteries and all roads to Rome. It is a path followed by generations of seekers -- from T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Primo Levi, to Bruce Springsteen. After the poet fled Rome for Siena he walked along the upper Arno, past La Verna, to Bibiena, to Cesena, and to the Po plain. During his nineteen-year journey Dante wrote his "unfathomable heart song," as Thomas Carlyle called The Divine Comedy, a poem that explores the three states of the psyche. Eliot, a lifelong student of the Comedy, said, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third." Dante in Love tells the story of the High Middle Ages, a time during which the artist Giotto was the first to paint the sky blue, Francis of Assisi discovered knowledge in humility and the great doctors of the church mapped the soul and stood back to admire their cathedrals. Dante's medieval world gave birth to the foundation of modern art, faith and commerce.Dante and his fellow artists were trying to decode God's art and in so doing unravel the double helix of creativity. We meet the painters, church builders and pilgrims from Florence to Rome to Venice and Verona who made the roads the center of the medieval world. Following Dante's route, we are inspired to undertake journeys of discovering ourselves.In the vein of Brunelleschi's Dome, Galileo's Daughter and Wittgenstein's Poker, Dante in Love is a worldly and spiritual travelogue of the poet's travels and the journey of creativity that produced the greatest poem ever written.

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Review

No figure speaks for the Christian High Middle Ages more emphatically than Dante Alighieri, and according to Harriet Rubin, author of Dante in Love, no writer reveals the path to creative genius more emphatically either. Combining history and literary criticism, Rubin contends that "there is another way to read Dante"--not as a scholar, but as a fellow journeyman. Rubin's admiration and grasp of Dante's masterpiece is clear. She writes as one with an intimate knowledge not only of the period that shaped the poet, but also of the subsequent artists, thinkers, scientists, and statesmen that the poet helped to shape. But this strength, paradoxically, turns out to be the book’s biggest weakness: Rubin's obsessive contextualizing. The bulk of Dante in Love consists of historical references that are meant to define Dante's age and to illustrate the poet’s development and far-reaching influence. However, with each historical digression, we get farther and farther away from Dante and the Commedia itself. The result is a meandering narrative that in the end lacks focus, despite Rubin’s references to the poem (from multiple translations) and her stated intention of tracing Dante’s progress as an exile and artist through Italy and his creative process. Many of Rubin’s historical asides, such as her discussion of the rise of devotion to the Virgin Mary, truly help illuminate the poem. But others read like sweeping pronouncements that lack sufficient explanation: "Keats had the right instinct but the wrong method for exploiting Dante." Rubin marvels how Dante "kept his vision alive over nineteen years of trials to make the Comedy seem as if it were all one line, the work of one awful moment of birth which time stopped for genius." Unfortunately, Rubin's own work lacks a similar cohesiveness. -- Silvana Tropea

About the Author

Harriet Rubin was the founder of Doubleday Currency and has published dozens of bestsellers. She is the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, which has been translated into twenty-three languages. She is on USA TODAY's editorial board and is a consultant to media companies. She currently lives in Manhattan and Portland, Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743234464
• ISBN 13: 9780743234467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288