Overview
The Poetry of Dante (translated by Douglas Ainslie from La poesia di Dante) is a work of literary criticism rather than a biography or a commentary that follows the poem canto by canto. Its subject is the Divine Comedy, and its purpose is to establish what in that poem is genuinely poetry and what is not. Benedetto Croce writes as a philosopher of art committed to a single, sharply defined aesthetic principle: poetry is the immediate expression of feeling, an intuition that is inseparable from its form, whereas everything that is merely thought, doctrine, allegory, moral instruction, or intellectual construction belongs to a different order of mental activity and cannot, as such, be poetry. The book applies this principle to Dante with great consistency and considerable polemical energy.
The volume opens with a brief author’s note and an introduction in which Croce sets out the problem and his method. The chapters then proceed from a consideration of the young Dante and the Vita Nuova to the central question of the relation between the poem’s “structure” and its “poetry,” then to the three canticles in turn, then to a synthetic account of the character and unity of Dante’s poetry, and finally to a long historical survey of Dante criticism. An index and some notes complete the volume.
Introduction
Croce begins by stating the apparent paradox that Dante’s poem, universally acknowledged as one of the supreme works of world literature, is not as a whole a poem in the strict sense. It contains poetry in abundance, but it is also, and deliberately, a work of theology, ethics, politics, and encyclopaedic learning. The question the book poses is therefore not whether Dante was a great poet — this Croce takes as settled — but where the poetry actually resides and how it is related to the non-poetic material in which it is embedded. He rejects the notion that the poem’s greatness lies in its thought, its system, or its moral message, and he equally rejects the attempt to dissolve the distinction by treating the whole construction as symbolic. His aim is to restore to criticism the capacity to distinguish, within the poem, what is alive from what is inert.
The Young Dante and the Dante of the Comedy
The second chapter considers Dante’s earlier work, and especially the Vita Nuova, in order to mark the distance between that book and the Comedy. Croce reads the Vita Nuova as a mixture of two things: genuine lyric poetry, in which the love for Beatrice is expressed with a delicacy and inwardness that he values highly, and a framework of prose commentary, allegorical interpretation, and doctrinal schematisation that is not poetry and that in places threatens to smother it. He notes the character of the stil nuovo poetry and the way in which the figure of Beatrice is first a living woman and a source of lyric feeling and only secondarily a symbol.
This leads to a contrast that runs through the rest of the book. The Dante of the Comedy is a different figure from the young poet of the Vita Nuova: he is the exile, the scholar, the theologian, the political thinker, the man burdened with a mission. Croce argues that the Beatrice of the Comedy has largely ceased to be a woman and has become the vehicle of theological and allegorical meaning. The consequence for the poem is considerable: the poetry of the Comedy is not the poetry of love in the earlier sense, and its centre of gravity lies elsewhere — in the dramatic encounter with the souls of the dead and in the moral and passionate intensity of those encounters.
The Structure and Poetry of the Comedy
This is the central and most famous chapter. Croce distinguishes with great sharpness between what he calls the “structure” of the poem and its “poetry.” The structure is the whole intellectual scaffolding: the cosmology of the three realms, the geography of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the classification of sins and virtues, the system of punishments and rewards, the allegorical meaning of the dark wood, the three beasts, the guides, and the various personifications, together with the theological and political doctrine that the poem expounds. Croce does not deny that this material is coherent, impressive, or historically important. He denies that it is poetry. In his account the structure is a work of the intellect — a scheme, a construction, at bottom a form of didactic and doctrinal discourse — and its relation to the poetry is external rather than organic.
From this follows his controversial conclusion about the unity of the poem. The Divine Comedy is not, in Croce’s view, a single poem with an artistic unity of its own. It is rather a container — he characterises it as a kind of theological romance or visionary narrative — within which a great number of separate poetic moments are placed. The unity of the work is structural and practical, imposed by the poet’s intellectual and moral purpose, not aesthetic. The poem is, so to speak, a gallery of pictures and a sequence of dramas rather than one continuous lyrical whole. Croce insists that readers have always responded to the Comedy in this way, delighting in its episodes and characters while skimming or enduring the doctrinal and allegorical passages; the task of criticism is to acknowledge this honestly rather than to pretend that the scaffolding is itself beautiful.
He also uses this chapter to attack the tradition of reading the poem as a continuous allegory in which every detail carries a hidden doctrinal meaning. Such a reading, he argues, does not enrich the poetry but substitutes an intellectual puzzle for the aesthetic experience. The allegorical interpretation may be necessary for understanding Dante’s intention, but it is not the source of his power as a poet.
The Inferno
The chapter on the Inferno is the most appreciative in the book, and it contains Croce’s most detailed treatment of particular episodes. He finds in the first canticle the richest concentration of poetry, because it is there that the human passions — hatred, love, despair, pride, grief, nostalgia — are present in their full force and are embodied in individual characters. The encounters with the souls, the dialogues, the confrontations, the stories told by the damned: these are the places where the structure recedes and the poetry emerges.
Croce discusses a series of famous episodes, among them Francesca da Rimini, Farinata degli Uberti, Pier delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, Ulysses, and Ugolino. His judgments are not uniformly celebratory; he is alert to passages where rhetoric, moral commentary, or sensationalism takes the place of genuine expression, and he distinguishes between the dramatic power of a scene and its mere picturesqueness or horror. But the general verdict is that the Inferno is the canticle in which Dante’s dramatic and passionate genius finds its fullest scope, and that its greatest figures live in the reader’s imagination precisely because they are rendered as human beings rather than as illustrations of a doctrinal scheme.
The Purgatorio
The Purgatorio is treated as a canticle of a different temper. Here the dominant notes are gentleness, memory, longing, and purification; the poetry is less violent and more lyrical, more intimate and more musical. Croce attends to the episodes of farewell and reunion, the meetings with the shades who still remember the world, the landscapes and the changing light, the earthly paradise, and the great procession that culminates in the appearance of Beatrice. He finds in this canticle a sweetness and a tenderness that are genuinely poetic, and he regards it as in some respects the most purely lyrical of the three.
At the same time, the doctrinal and allegorical apparatus is heavy in the Purgatorio, and Croce is critical of the elaborate pageantry and symbolic displays where they are offered as poetry rather than as spectacle. The figure of Beatrice in the earthly paradise, in particular, is for him a case in which the allegorical intention intrudes upon and damages the human and poetic interest of the scene.
The Paradiso
The Paradiso presents Croce with his greatest difficulty, and his treatment of it is the most reserved. The canticle is dominated by theological discourse, by abstract speculation, by the hierarchies of the heavens and the degrees of beatitude; the blessed are less individual, less dramatic, less humanly present than the souls of the other realms. Croce regards much of this as the structure in its purest and least poetic form — doctrine expounded in verse rather than poetry.
Nevertheless, he identifies moments of genuine poetry: the encounters with figures such as Cacciaguida and Justinian, the celebration of St. Francis, the prayers and the final vision. He notes that the Paradiso is the canticle in which the intellectual and the lyrical are most difficult to disentangle, and that its beauties are of a more rarefied and less immediately accessible kind. His conclusion is not that the Paradiso is without poetry but that its poetry is intermittent, and that the reader must be prepared to distinguish it from the doctrinal exposition by which it is surrounded.
The Character and Unity of Dante’s Poetry
In the seventh chapter Croce draws the threads together and offers his positive account of what is distinctive in Dante’s poetry. Its defining quality, in his view, is dramatic and passionate intensity: Dante is pre-eminently the poet of the human soul in action, of will, conflict, and moral seriousness. This is why the episodes with the souls of the dead — the dialogues, the confrontations, the stories — are the heart of the poem, and why the poem’s characters have entered the common imagination as living presences.
Croce also returns to the question of unity. The unity of Dante’s poetry is not the unity of the poem’s design but the unity of the poet’s spirit: a consistent moral and emotional temper that informs every genuine poetic moment, whatever its place in the scheme. The Comedy is therefore to be read as a sequence of poetic creations held together by the personality of the poet rather than by the coherence of its theology. This is the book’s central and most contested thesis, and Croce defends it with a mixture of aesthetic argument and practical criticism of particular passages.
Historical Survey of Dantean Criticism
The final chapter is a survey of the history of Dante criticism, and it is here that Croce situates his own reading in relation to his predecessors. He traces the interpretation of the poem from the earliest commentators, who were concerned above all with the allegorical and doctrinal senses, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when Dante was often judged by classical and rationalist standards and found wanting, to the Romantic revival, which restored him to the first rank of poets.
Croce gives particular attention to the nineteenth-century critics and above all to Francesco De Sanctis, whose aesthetic approach he regards as a precursor of his own and whose distinction between the poem’s structure and its poetry anticipates his central argument. He criticises both the purely allegorical and mystical readings, which subordinate the poetry to a hidden doctrine, and the purely philological and historical approach, which accumulates information about Dante’s sources and circumstances without illuminating the poetry. His purpose throughout is to establish the autonomy of the aesthetic judgment: the critic’s first duty is to distinguish poetry from non-poetry, and only then to explain and to judge.
Summary of the Argument
Taken as a whole, The Poetry of Dante is a sustained argument for a particular way of reading the Comedy: not as a single poem whose beauty lies in its system, but as a work in which passages of the highest poetry are set within a vast intellectual structure that is not itself poetic. Croce’s book is at once an appreciation of Dante’s genius and a polemic against those who would locate that genius in theology, allegory, or doctrine. Its chapters on the three canticles supply the practical criticism on which the general thesis rests, and its historical survey places the argument in the long tradition of Dante interpretation. The result is a critical essay of great consistency and considerable severity, which has shaped the terms of Dante criticism ever since.
