Sean Winkler's List: The Divine Comedy

• "used the language of the market-place,"

  • Dante used a language that could be understood and comprehended by all therefore not only did the rich and educated understand his point but also the commoners.
• What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of course, he could have  done it only because not merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience  also, would have accepted it as natural

  • Difference in time is shown by how Dante's audience accepted his views where as today's audience would not.
• Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions of his day did not forbid  him to use human nature just as he saw it, no less than human nature as he read  about it

  • Continues to talk about Dante's writing style and how it discusses fundamental human nature and he gathered this from what he say and understood of literature in his time.
• The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life,  of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is  haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the "Inferno."  But no man of Dante's art and with Dante's soul would write of it nowadays; and  he would hardly be understood if he did

  • Description of Dante as how he was unique to his day and age and that if he were alive in the author's opinion would not make it in the societal norms that is expected of today's authors.
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  Only the  great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he spoke of    pride  or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his thesis by an  appeal   to the past, he could speak only of great and  prominent characters; but in the   present of  his day most of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of    no  permanent importance—just as is the case in the present of our own day.  Yet   the passions of these men were the same as those  of the heroes of old, godlike   or demoniac;  and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate    predecessors, to illustrate his points, without  regard to their prominence or   lack of  prominence. He was not concerned with the differences in their fortunes    and  careers, with their heroic proportions or lack of such proportions; he was  a   mystic whose imagination soared so high and whose  thoughts plumbed so deeply the   far depths  of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the eternal    mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared  to them, the differences   between the careers of the mighty masters of  mankind and the careers of even   very humble  people seemed trivial

  • The characters that Dante uses in his novel, he had no idea that they were going to be as prominant as they are today, rather his audience recognized the fundamental truths that he was trying to portray rather then the recognition of the chracters that he is punishing.
• Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people would  ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante did six hundred  years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as he saw it around him and  from human nature as he read of it
• To such critics it seems improper, and indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human  nature by examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and  the Piræus, alike from Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or  friends of Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.
• Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he spoke of  pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his thesis by an appeal  to the past, he could speak only of great and prominent characters; but in the  present of his day most of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of  no permanent importance—just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet  the passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old, godlike  or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate  predecessors, to illustrate his points, without regard to their prominence or  lack of prominence. He was not concerned with the differences in their fortunes  and careers, with their heroic proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a  mystic whose imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the  far depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the eternal  mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the differences  between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and the careers of even  very humble people seemed trivial
• When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and barratry, he  flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as those who in our days  flourish by political or commercial corruption; and he names his offenders, both  those just dead and those still living, and puts them, popes and politicians  alike, in hell

  • This is an important fact when determining Dante's purpose as he put people he knew in hell.

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