The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (review)

In The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, Winthrop Wetherbee argues that Dante's Commedia reflects direct, unmediated reading of the Latin Poeti—Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Statius—and that Dante's poetic power derives in great part from his imaginatively participating in their tragic understanding of the human world as conditioned by inescapable destiny and loss. Such an experience is a necessary precondition to assimilating and finally emulating their poetry, but as recorded in the poem, Dante's encounter with these poets is fraught with spiritual and poetic dangers: the bleak moral vision formulated by them has the potential to engulf Dante and prevent his development of an authentic voice. Nevertheless, the tension between Dante's sense of absolute difference from his models and his dependence on them as poetic masters is crucial to his artistic development, and Dante's engagement with them "defines a process of self-discovery that is in effect an existential counterpart to the spiritual journey which is his primary theme" (4). In the Inferno, where ancient poetry most resists his appropriation, Dante's poetry registers the degree to which he at times succumbs to the power of Virgil and, more ominously, Lucan. Purgatorio and Paradiso show Dante's increasing ability to construct a poetry that is faithful both to the best aspirations of his models and his own vocation as a Christian, vernacular poet.

Chapter 1 opens these matters by comparing the description of Camille's tomb in the Old French Eneas with Dante's episode of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno V). Both resonate with dense echoes of Virgil's Aeneid, especially the death of Dido, and both balance epic against romance. But Inferno V, which demonstrates the limits of romance in light of Dido, is only an initial stage in Dante's complex encounter with Virgil and his Roman successors, who offer Dante distinctive yet linked perspectives: Virgil, whose Aeneid Dante experiences as a "compelling and authoritative" narrative of sacred history (16); Lucan, whose bitterness about Roman destiny in the Pharsalia underpins Dante's own questioning of Virgilian authority; Ovid, whose approach to metamorphosis may have instructed Dante's own more probing explorations; Statius, whose epic admits but fails to integrate the private and spiritual within his pagan context. In contrast to typological critics or those who read classical echoes in Dante's works by means of medieval grammarians or mythographers, Wetherbee aims to show how Dante experienced and mastered an authorizing tradition that was nevertheless historically alienated from his own.

The remaining chapters of the book examine in more detail the stages by which Dante comes to terms with these models, "the depth to which his allusions plumb the archive of poetic knowledge embodied in their texts" (23), with different Poeti represented at successive moments of Dante's journey. Virgil and Lucan dominate Inferno. So Chapter 2 demonstrates the "power of the remembered Aeneid to shape Dante's experience" (37) in the early cantos of Inferno. In Canto III, for instance, when he appropriates Virgil's comparison of damned souls to autumn leaves, Dante incorporates himself into the image as the bough that "sees all its spoils upon the ground" (III.113-14). Dante's Virgilian language shows him imaginatively experiencing damnation, to the point that he risks losing his sense of "the sustaining love of God" (37), represented by Beatrice, and subjects himself to the intense psychological confusion dramatized by his loss of consciousness. Virgil, then, is not simply an agent sent by Beatrice to help in Dante's salvation, or a voice of Roman triumphal destiny, but a source of Dante's participation in the limits of paganism and alienation. Virgil's authority is itself limited, yet challenging Virgil may draw Dante into the excesses modeled by the poetry of another epic writer, Lucan. Chapter 3 examines the relation between Virgil and Lucan, a connection exemplified in Dante's fable of Virgil's summoning by Lucan's Erichtho. In...