Dante and the Romantics

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Dante and the Romantics

Antonella Braida

Dante and the Romantics

This page intentionally left blank

Dante and the Romantics Antonella Braida

© Antonella Braida 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3233–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Braida, Antonella. Dante and the romantics / Antonella Braida. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3233–6 (cloth) 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321–Translations into English–History and criticism. 2. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321–Criticism and interpretation–History. 3. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321–Appreciation–Great Britain. 4. Translating and interpreting–Great Britain. 5. Italian language–Translating into English. 6. Romanticism–Great Britain. 7. Criticism–Great Britain. I. Title. PQ4328.E5B73 2004 2004050023

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

Part I 1

(Pre)-Romantic Receptions of Dante

The Eighteenth-Century Reception: Dante and Visual Culture Dante and the sister arts

2

10

The Romantic Translation of the Divine Comedy: Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision Reception studies and the material text transfer Literary translation and its theory: Cary and his contemporaries Henry Francis Cary: the translator of Dante The Vision Cary’s approach to translation: the critic Cary’s translating practice

3

Dante and High Culture: the Romantic Search for the Epic The early reception: reviews of Boyd’s and Cary’s translations Dante and British Romantic criticism Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s criticism of Dante Ugo Foscolo and Samuel Rogers: the Ghibelline Dante Across the Channel: The Vision, John Taaffe Junior and Italian reviewers

Part II 4

9

27 27 28 34 40 41 45 56 61 65 70 77 87

Romantic Palimpsests

‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’: Shelley on Dante and Love

95

‘Beneath that opening spot of blue serene’: Shelley’s early contacts with Dante

99

v

vi Contents

Epipsychidion and The Triumph of Life: Shelley’s palimpsests 5

John Keats and Dante: Speaking the Gods’ Language Keats’s Italian readings: approaching the Divine Comedy Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: Milton’s ‘stationing or statu[a]ry’, ‘the brief pathos of Dante’ and the language of the gods

6

William Blake: the Romantic Illustrator of Dante Interpreting Dante: the ideology of the Ghibelline The commission for the illustrations The Romantic illustrator of Dante

110 128 129

136 151 153 158 161

Notes

179

Works Cited and Additional Bibliography

218

Index

237

List of Illustrations 1. John Dixon after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ugolino (1774) © The British Museum, London. 2. Moses Houghton (after Henry Fuseli), Ugolino and his Sons (1809), engraving, 59.5 × 40.5 cm © 2003 Kunsthaus, Zürich. All rights reserved. 3. John Flaxman, Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, X, ‘The Fiery Sepulchres’ (1793) © The British Museum, London. 4. William Blake, Portrait of Dante for William Hayley’s library (c. 1800) © Manchester City Galleries. 5. William Blake, Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1824–27, Paradiso, XXIII, ‘Dante Adoring Christ’. Pen, ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk, 52.7 × 37.2 cm. Felton Bequest, 1920. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

vii

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25 155

177

Acknowledgements This volume started as a doctoral thesis. I wish therefore to thank my supervisors, Professor Jonathan Wordsworth (St Catherine’s College, Oxford) and Professor John Woodhouse (Magdalen College, Oxford) for their enthusiasm and unfailing support. My doctoral research was possible thanks to the generous support of Rotary International (my thanks especially to Albano Cantarutti, Cividale Rotary Club), the Agenzia del Lavoro, Trieste, and thanks to the support of Elena Lippi. I wish to thank also my parents who sponsored my first year in Oxford. This volume was completed during a research leave granted by the School of Modern European Languages, University of Durham: I thank Carla Singh and Ita MacCarthy for having replaced me in my teaching and administrative responsibilities. I would like to thank especially Mike Rossington for his precious advice at the crucial stage of submission and, most of all, for his unfailing friendship. I thank Jon Mee for reading and commenting on a version of my chapter on Blake and providing useful advice. This project would not have reached its conclusion without Clara and Richard Cooper’s hospitality at Oxford. I must thank the following readers who commented at various stages on the volume: Mike Rossington, David Fuller, Michael O’Neill, the anonymous reader contacted by DMLS, Philippe Laplace, Anna Chahoud, Rebecca West, Helena Dallat, Luisa Calé and David Chandler. I owe thanks to Edoardo Crisafulli for reading Chapter 2 and engaging in a most useful discussion on the subject. I have learned immensely from his book and his intellectual commitment to the subject. My warmest thanks to Philippe Laplace for bearing with patience the last phase of writing the monograph and for his encouragement and help. I am grateful to the following museums for granting permission to publish images in their possession: The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, The British Museum, The Kunsthaus, Zürich, The Manchester City Gallery. The following sections of the present volume derive from previous publications: in Chapter 3, ‘Across the Channel: The Vision, John viii

Acknowledgements ix

Taaffe Junior and Italian Reviewers’, is based on the article, ‘Henry Francis Cary and John Taaffe Junior: the Translator of Dante and a Comment on The Divine Comedy’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 7 (2002); some sections from Chapter 6, ‘William Blake: the Romantic Illustrator of Dante’, are based on the chapter ‘The Literalism of Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’ in Image and Word, Reflections of Art and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Legenda, 2003); and finally in Chapter 1, the analysis of William Huggins’s contribution to the reception of Dante uses some research I conducted for the relevant entry in the New DNB. I thank therefore Professor Peter Vassallo, Kareni Bannister and Martin MacLaughlin for Legenda and the DNB for kindly agreeing to let me use this material. More specific acknowledgements will be indicated in the notes. I wish to dedicate this book to Clara Florio-Cooper.

List of Abbreviations The Inferno The Vision 1814

The Vision 1819

The Vision

Henry Francis Cary, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, 2 vols (London: Carpenter, 1805). Henry Francis Cary, The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1814). Henry Francis Cary, The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819). Henry Francis Cary, The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri (London: Smith, 1844).

x

Introduction

I have to thank you for a Letter and the two Volumes of Mr Cary’s Life. The Publication I fear will scarcely repay you as the Incidents of a Scholar’s Life can scarcely be of interest to the Public at large.1 Thus in 1847 Wordsworth expressed his doubts concerning the public interest in a biographical study of Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante. Thirty years earlier he had welcomed The Vision as ‘a great national work’, protesting that ‘it is a disgrace to the age that Cary has no church-preferment’.2 In these thirty years The Vision became a bestseller by modern standards and opened a new phase of the reception of the Divine Comedy in Britain.3 Since the publication of Cary’s translation in 1819 the number of translations in English has increased exponentially. According to Gilbert F. Cunningham, there were as many as seventeen complete translations in the nineteenth century.4 Was Cary’s translation then instrumental in introducing Dante to the English reading public and to the literary establishment? Or, on the contrary, did it exploit an existing demand for publications on the Italian poet? Henry Cary’s account foregrounds the role of chance in his father’s eventual success: After a morning of toil over Greek and Latin composition it was our custom to walk on the sands and read Homer aloud … For several consecutive days Coleridge crossed us in our walk. The sound of the Greek, and especially the expressive countenance of the tutor, attracted his notice; so one day, as we met, he placed himself directly in my father’s way and thus accosted him: ‘Sir, yours is a face I should know: I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. His person was 1

2 Dante and the Romantics

not unknown to my father, who had already pointed him out to me as the greatest genius of our age and country … The close of our walk found Coleridge at our family dinner table. Amongst other topics of conversation Dante’s ‘divine’ poem was mentioned: Coleridge had never heard of my father’s translation, but took a copy home with him that night. On the following day when the two friends (for so they may from the first day of their meeting be called) met for the purpose of taking their daily stroll, Coleridge was able to recite whole passages of the version of Dante, and though he had not the original with him, repeated passages of that also, and commented on the translation. Before leaving Littlehampton he expressed his determination to bring the version of Dante into public notice.5 Cary and Coleridge’s meeting on the Littlehampton beach is certainly a fascinating episode of the reception of Dante in Britain, but chance only anticipated a contact that was to some extent bound to happen: had the two men not met, The Vision might have still found its way into Coleridge’s voracious reading. Momentous meetings like the one recorded are often the result of a quest: for Cary, the quest for recognition, for Coleridge the quest for the sources of European poetry. This study aims to explore the complex way in which an author, Dante, and a text, the Divine Comedy, travel across countries and across time and are rediscovered and canonised by the English literary establishment in the Romantic period. First of all some terminological explanation is necessary. Despite the polysemy of the word Romanticism, as explained by Lovejoy in his influential essay ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticism’ (1924), chronological definitions have progressively displaced ideological ones; moreover, the traditional chronology has been revised so as to emphasise the importance of avoiding clear-cut separation between the eighteenth century and Romanticism.6 Following the accepted practice in the discipline, the term Romanticism here refers to the period that ranges from about 1780 to 1830.7 The first section of the monograph will also however explore the earlier reception of Dante in order to explain later developments. Such a project is by its very nature interdisciplinary: understanding the reception of Dante in a particular period, the Romantic age, and in a particular culture, here referred to as British, with the different qualifications of ‘high’, ‘low’ or ‘visual culture’, means first of all accepting the complexity of the construction of literary identity. This volume, therefore, combines a variety of

Introduction 3

approaches, in the belief that multidisciplinarity is a prerequisite to any study of literary reception. Although the focus will be on high culture, three different aspects of reception have been identified: as the first chapter argues, Dante was first introduced into English Romantic culture by artists and connoisseurs. Despite the episodic nature of this first contact, its influence on broad sections of British society is highly significant. The increasing popularity of prints symbolises the middleclass aspiration to ‘acquiring’ culture, a wish that some Romantic writers perceived as a threat to the integrity of the literary tradition. Some, like Charles Lamb, react by adopting an iconoclastic attitude in order to maintain the importance of reading, others, like Blake, come surprisingly close to adopting aristocratic attitudes in envisaging a British ‘republic of taste’.8 The visual reception of Dante encompasses both high and low culture; championed by two of the most authoritative representatives of British Romantic art, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli, it reaches a broader public through prints of their most influential works. Dante’s Romantic critical reception is also promoted by the literary establishment: although not equally appreciated by Wordsworth, Cary’s The Vision and the Divine Comedy are championed by Coleridge and Hazlitt in their critical works. However, the critical appropriation of Dante is also promoted by the Whigs’ interest in Italian politics and by their support of Italian expatriates like Ugo Foscolo. Chapter 3 illustrates the interesting intersection between English, Italian and European Dantean criticism: the greater freedom of the press is responsible for the fact that Britain witnesses the debate in all its ramifications. While the approach in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 is mostly documentary and historical, Chapter 2 follows the indications of descriptive translation studies and undertakes a stylistic analysis of Cary’s translation. The two complete translations of the Divine Comedy, respectively by Henry Boyd and Henry Francis Cary, are partly responsible for the successful literary reception of the source text: The Vision became a best-seller only after it was promoted by Coleridge’s and Foscolo’s critical contributions. However, Cary’s own translating strategies are in themselves significant in promoting the canonisation of the Divine Comedy: as Chapter 2 points out, he succeeded in fabricating a ‘Miltonic’ Dante, thanks to his use of blank verse. Cary’s style is therefore foregrounded as an important domesticating strategy. When dealing with a translation, however, more complex interdisciplinary aspects are brought into play; these concern the hermeneutics of translation, translators’ decision-making processes and receiving literary


norms. The analysis of these aspects of Cary’s translation will benefit from Edoardo Crisafulli’s (2003) interdisciplinary approach to The Vision. The second section of the book concerns a different aspect of literary reception: intertextuality. First introduced by Kristeva in her critical studies of Bakhtin, the term has only slowly challenged Harold Bloom’s definition of the anxiety of influence in English studies.9 Despite their respective bases in psychoanalytical approaches to literature, their critical approach to intertextuality could not be more different. As Graham Allen points out: Reading Bloom’s work one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the theory of misreading is actually a defence against the plurality celebrated by Barthes and Kristeva and the accompanying recognition that literature does not exist in a hermetically sealed universe. Bloom’s vision refuses to accept social and cultural contexts as relevant intertextual fields of meaning for literary texts … Beginning with his theory of the anxiety of influence there is nothing to stop Bloom demonstrating that poems are written by ephebes defending against their precursors.10 Despite their fundamental difference, Bloom’s and Kristeva’s approaches have in common their inscription of literary history in different systems, respectively of Freudian and post-Freudian theories and of semiotics. By doing so they tend to be diverted from Bakhtin’s analysis of the evolution of literary genre.11 When dealing with the Romantic poets’ use of Dante or Cary, questions relating to literary genre soon emerge. Shelley’s and Keats’s Dantean intertextuality in The Triumph of Life, Laon and Cythna and the Hyperion poems reveals a structural significance that implies a decision-making process incompatible with Freudian approaches. Furthermore, their writing is strictly bound up with their reading of Dante. Their approach evokes De Quincey’s suggestive use of the palimpsest as a symbol of Romantic critical practice; in Suspiria de Profundis, he envisages future readers’ ability to recover all the different layers of writing superimposed on ancient vellum and parchment.12 In Reading, Writing and Romanticism Lucy Newlyn foregrounds De Quincey’s palimpsest as a suggestive representation of a crucial issue of Romantic hermeneutics, ‘namely, how the past can properly be read and understood from outside itself’ and ‘what value can be ascribed to works of art, under the changing conditions of successive generations of readers’.13 De Quincey’s potential description of

Introduction 5

intertextuality thus recuperates some aspects of Bloom’s psychoanalytic reading of intertextuality but opens his definition to take into account the Romantics’ perception of readers’ collaboration in the construction of genres. As Tilottama Rajan points out, English Romantic writing ‘assumes that genre participates in constructing the appropriate public through “taste” and “judgment”’.14 Romantic production could therefore be described as ‘writerly’ for its request to readers to provide closure. Keats’s and Shelley’s echoes and allusions to Dante are significantly inscribed within this process of genre negotiation with readers. Lucy Newlyn defines the difference between echo and allusion as the result of varying degrees of consciousness in an author’s reference to the predecessor.15 When starting from this definition, the question of meaning, of the hermeneutics of intertextuality remains a crucial one. Why did Keats, Shelley and Blake introduce Dante into their works? The second section of this book answers this question by invoking Gérard Genette’s critical elaboration of De Quincey’s palimpsest. Genette inscribes intertextuality in the broader issue of genre. In Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré he formulates the notion of ‘hypertextuality’. This involves, ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall of course, call it hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’.16 Genette is here introducing a distinction between works that depend for signification on the hypotexts, such as parodies, and those that rely, in Allen’s words, ‘on the notion of the imitation of generic models rather than specific hypotexts’.17 For this second type of texts he uses the definition of ‘architextuality’. Genette’s studies have the advantage of providing hermeneutics in the study of intertextuality: the relationship with the ‘hypotext’ and ‘architext’ is explained as an author’s inscription of his/her work within accepted systems of meaning, genres being the most prominent among these. Without applying literally either of the two concepts by Genette this book follows his contribution to the study of intertextuality. Keats’s and Shelley’s use of Dante will therefore be inscribed within their search for means of legitimising the epic nature of their long unfinished narrative poems. Contemporary and earlier critical readings of the Divine Comedy as medieval epic belonging to a ‘genre unto itself’ explain their use of the poem as ‘architext’ side by side with Milton’s Paradise Lost. Lord Byron’s poetry has thus been excluded from the present study because his use of Dante does not involve the same issue of genre: his echoes from Inferno generally do not imply the complex allusive relationship that one finds in Keats’s and Shelley’s poems.18


One still unexplored area of the Romantics’ use of Dante is parody however broadly defined; Byron’s Dantean echoes in Don Juan are extremely interesting for their complex reworking of Dante’s text. With Blake’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy this study moves from intertextuality to intermediality. Blake’s complex approach to book illustration is again strongly linked with his reading of Dante. His illustrations represent complex palimpsests because their relationship to the Divine Comedy is mediated by Cary’s and Boyd’s translations but also by Blake’s use of the figurative language he had been developing in his illuminated poems, from Vala to Milton to Jerusalem. Challenging earlier readings of the illustrations in terms of Blake’s own mythology, Chapter 6 intends to recuperate his own palimpsestic approach to Dante.

Part I (Pre)–Romantic Receptions of Dante


1 The Eighteenth-Century Reception: Dante and Visual Culture

I was delighted, the other day, with a new pamphlet on the subject, in which the author applies Dante’s inscription over the Inferno to a slave ship – Per me si va nella città dolente, Per me si va ne[l]l’eterno dolore, Per me si va tra la perduta gente. (Hannah More to Horace Walpole, April 1789)1 Hannah More’s praise for Thomas Burgess’s reference to Dante in his pamphlet on slavery attests a current usage of the name of the Italian poet in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Most recent studies of the reception of Dante in British Romanticism have focused on the early nineteenth century and have established Cary’s translation as the terminus post quem of the Romantic assimilation of Dante.2 While the acknowledgement of the significance of The Vision was long overdue, one should also take into account different approaches to the study of reception. This includes the reconstruction of the actual ‘text transfer’, from the appearance of editions of the text imported or printed locally to the publication of translations and their relative sales and to the various typologies of assimilation in the target culture, from intertextuality to references and commentaries of the text. More recent approaches to the study of reception have broadened its scope so as to include visual culture, and in particular prints, the performing arts and all other artistic forms that tend to mediate between high and low culture.3 The cultural and visual turn in reception studies represents a suitable critical frame for a comprehensive understanding of the reception of Dante between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. 9


Dante and the sister arts The Romantic reception of Dante stems from attitudes elaborated throughout the early eighteenth century. Some critics have already pointed out the need for the earlier exploration of the sources and origins of this interest. Charles Peter Brand identified the late eighteenth century as the time of a significant change in taste, thanks to a group of ‘few pioneers [who] aroused an enthusiasm for Italian literature far out of proportion to the quantity of their published works’.4 Alison Milbank’s Dante and the Victorians and Valeria Tinkler-Villani’s Visions of Dante in English Poetry similarly suggest the need for an earlier contextualisation of the Romantic and Victorian interest in the poet. According to Millbank, Dante’s reception in the Victorian period was prepared by the Whigs’ interest in all things Italian because ‘Italy for the Whigs was the source (with Greece) of their aesthetic and political inheritance’.5 I agree with Millbank in finding an aesthetic origin in the British love for Dante and for Italy. The eighteenth-century tradition of the Grand Tour is partly responsible for the development of a new Italian fashion in British art and architecture that was to spread to the world of literature. While the gentry were competing in the splendour of their Palladian or pseudo-Palladian villas,6 young British gentlemen, often accompanied by artists, were expected to visit France and Italy to complete their education and be introduced into the science of connoisseurship. The painter Jonathan Richardson laid the foundations of the new discipline in his Two Discourses, which together with An Essay on the Theory of Painting could be considered ‘the first significant treatise of artistic theory by an English author’.7 Carol Gibson-Wood, in a recent article, reassessed Richardson’s contribution as an attempt ‘to promote connoisseurship as a science, a branch of knowledge rather than a matter of opinion’.8 Richardson was expressing a widespread opinion when he stated that the visual arts were contributing to ‘the reformation of our manners, refinement of our pleasure and increase of our fortunes and reputation’.9 His view that this new science should be included among the many accomplishments of the young gentleman was in fact supported by all those who maintained the need for a British school of painting. Often quoting Baldassarre Castiglione’s Cortegiano,10 writers like William Aglionby urged their countrymen to remedy the artistic failings of their native land.11 Richardson’s Discourses differ from previous similar undertakings in their deliberate avoidance of French or Italian terminology, as was

The Eighteenth Century: Dante and Visual Culture 11

common in contemporary translations or adaptations of continental art treatises. As Richardson explains, his main reference is the connoisseur’s ability to discriminate, a quality Locke ascribes to the faculty of judgement: A good Connoisseur will take care not to Confound things in which there is a real Difference because of the Resemblance they may Seem to have … A good Connoisseur will take care not to make a Difference where there is None and so Attribute those Works to Two Several masters which were both done by the Same Hand, or call that a Coppy [sic] which is truly an original.12 As Gibson-Wood points out, Richardson’s claim that connoisseurship was a science that could be learned was quite radical and original. To support his argument Richardson resorts to the established eighteenthcentury tradition of ekphrastic discourse, usually referred to through interpretations of Horace’s casual comparison ‘Ut pictura poesis’. For Richardson, painting is superior to the other arts, but he exploits the wider appreciation of poetry to instruct his readers on the additional benefits of artistic criticism. The poetry of Milton is the source of some of Richardson’s literary digressions; here he could draw on the rigour displayed in his collaborative work, Explanatory Notes, and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734). Quite surprising, however, is his comparison between Michelangelo and Dante because the traditional order of precedence is inverted; the painter is in fact compared to the poet since ‘he was a Dante in his way, and he read him perpetually’.13 This acknowledgement foregrounds Richardson’s awareness of contemporary interest in the Italian poet since his literary examples were ‘meant to capture the interest or sympathies of an English readership’.14 In particular, his circle included some of the leading men of letters of Augustan London, from Alexander Pope to Matthew Prior and the doctors Mead, Sloane and Cheselden.15 Richardson’s decision to quote and translate from Giovanni Villani and from Inferno, XXXIII demonstrates his belief in his readership’s interest in Italian culture and in Dante. Richardson’s own interest in Dante, by his own admission, had its origins in the Italian tradition of illustrations and interpretations of the Divine Comedy.16 According to Richardson’s and Joseph Warton’s account, a copy of a bas-relief of Ugolino and his sons17 attributed to Michelangelo was brought to Britain by the historical painter Trench.18 Richardson provides a most interesting description of the bas-relief as


well as some suggestions to any painter who would take the challenge and decide to paint the scene: He [Michelangelo] shews us the Count sitting with his Four Sons, one dead at his Feet, Over their Heads is a Figure representing Famine, and underneath is another to denote the River Arno, on whose Banks this Tragedy was acted … And could we see the same Story Painted by the same great Master it will be easily conceiv’d that this must carry the Matter still farther; There we might have had all the Advantages of Expression which the Addition of Colours would have given, and the Colouring of Michelangelo was as proper to That, as his Genius was to the Story in general; These would have shewn us the Pale, and Livid Flesh of the Dead, and Dying Figures, the Redness of Eyes, and Blewish Lips of the Count, the Darkness and Horrour of the Prison, and other Circumstances, besides the Habits (for in the bas-relief all the figures are Naked as more proper for Sculpture) These might be contrived so as to express the Quality of the Persons the more to excite our Pity as well as to enrich the Picture by their Variety.19 Richardson’s translation renders Ugolino’s speech in blank verse paragraphs that respect Dante’s narrative units. However, some forced foreignising structures, quite different from the contemporary translating practice, reveal his amateur approach and his lack of ambition as a translator. Among these are the emphatic position of personal pronouns, such as ‘Know then that I Count Ugolino am / Archbishop Ruggieri this’ (lines 12–13), and the regular distribution of the accents with the consequent lack of variety of the blank verse. Because of his amateurish attitude to translation, Richardson adopts a foreignising approach that aims to maintain a close correspondence between target and source text. This basic form of equivalence has been praised by Tinkler-Villani, who emphasises the contrast with Thomas Gray’s more interpretative approach.20 Despite two further editions in 1773 and 1792, the Two Discourses remained the least popular among Richardson’s works. Critics especially ridiculed and attacked his decision to communicate his ideas in clear and plain English and to avoid the common tendency to quote and paraphrase French treatises.21 Horace Walpole, too, while defending Richardson’s merits from his detractors, conceded that this ‘singularity in style and expression … was much ridiculed’ and was the source of criticism.22 Despite its limited circulation Richardson’s trans-


lation did promote an interest in Dante among artists and, more generally, among all those with a strong interest in the visual arts, including the poet and patron William Hayley and the collector Lord Somers. With the exception of the Frenchman Pierre Desmaizeaux’s translation of some twelve passages from the Divine Comedy,23 all eighteenthcentury translations were undertaken by art connoisseurs. Furthermore, two of the most significant promoters of the reception of Dante belonged directly or indirectly to the eighteenth-century British art milieu: William Huggins and William Hayley. William Huggins (bap. 1696–1761) is usually referred to in studies of the textual reception of Dante because of two remarkable events: the publication of the first short translation of Dante’s Comedy in terza rima and the loss of his complete translation of the poem.24 In fact a cursory look at his biography reveals that his role as a cultural mediator should not be overlooked. Through his father’s acquaintance with Sir James Thornhill, William Huggins became a close friend of William Hogarth. Both were members of the Academy of Ancient Music in the 1720s. Hogarth closely followed Huggins’s career as writer of librettos: he designed the frontispiece for Judith, an Oratorio or Sacred Drama (1733) and even illustrated the unsuccessful performance of A Chorus of Singers. Before devoting himself to the Divine Comedy, William Huggins translated Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1755) in the original ottava rima, as well as the sonnets of Giovanni Battista Felice Zappa. While working on the translation of Ariosto, Huggins became acquainted with the Italian critic Giuseppe Baretti, who had recently published a pamphlet defending Italian poetry from Voltaire’s disparagement.25 According to Baretti, when they met Huggins had just finished the translation: ‘He has just finished it, but did not dare publish it till it had been seen by some one like myself. We spent forty days comparing it with the original, working like niggers, in order to perfect it as much as possible.’26 Soon after the publication of the translation the two became estranged after a strong disagreement. For his translation of the Divine Comedy, therefore, Huggins could not rely on the advice of the Italian critic. He therefore enlisted the support of William Hogarth, as a reader and, he hoped, as engraver. Hogarth declined such a monumental enterprise. His letter to Huggins is worth quoting because it reveals that Hogarth must have approved of his friend’s admiration for Dante: I wait with great impatience till Mrs Hamilton has put together the sheets you are so good as to bestow upon me with so kind and Friendly an Intention, but give me leave to blush when I think of


the great folly I have been guilty of in not having long agoe [sic] Enrich’d my little stack of books with your Great Author What you propose would be a Noble undertaking which I believe ten or a dozen years agoe [sic] I should have Embraced with joy, and would have pleased the Public, if I could have done the Author any degree of Justice, but consider now my dear Friend Sixty is too late in the day to begin so arduous a Task a work that could not be completed in less than four or five years.27 Hogarth’s refusal was more the consequence of failing health and lack of energy than enthusiasm for the undertaking. He did, in fact, take an interest in Huggins’s work up until its successful completion in June 1760. According to Ronald Paulson, Dante’s Inferno left its traces on Hogarth’s last work from The Cockpit onward: On the simplest level, this work can be said to convey a stronger sense of damnation than any done previously: these people appear to be condemned to futile and repetitive actions. Even the circular structure … may owe its inspiration to Dante’s circles of Hell. Enthusiasm Delineated (engraved some time in 1760 or 1761) is definitely reminiscent of the Inferno, down to the Dantesque observer watching these damned souls with fascinated attention through a window.28 The Dantesque influence would not have been easily recognised by Hogarth’s contemporaries. It is important, however, to acknowledge Huggins’s role in the reception of Dante in Britain thanks to his eagerness for patronage. He also communicated his appreciation for the Italian poet to the critic and novelist Tobias Smollet. The two met around 1756 and exchanged a fruitful correspondence. Informed of Huggins’s latest translations, Smollet offered to publish a short excerpt in the British Magazine of which he had been editor since February 1760. Huggins complied by offering twenty-one lines from Purgatorio, II.29 These were to remain the only known lines of the translation because Huggins’s instructions in his testament to publish it went unheeded and the manuscript was lost.30 Huggins uses iambic pentameters joined by various rhymed patterns and grouped in two sixline stanzas and three tercets. His declared intention is to translate ‘as literally as possible’. In the translation of Ariosto, Huggins made similar claims thus revealing his role as translator to be subservient to the source text. This foreignising approach did not conform to the


common contemporary practice and Hoole’s Ariosto soon replaced Huggins’s in readers’ preferences. At the same time Huggins won the praise of some more contemporary critics for his unusual translating ethics.31 Twenty years after Huggins’s experiment, William Hayley published a terza-rima version of the first three cantos of the Inferno in the notes to the third edition of his Essay on Epic Poetry.32 Even more than Huggins, Hayley was at the very centre of the late eighteenth-century artistic milieu. He liked to engage artists for various commissions and his own son Thomas Adolphus was for a time apprenticed to Flaxman as a sculptor. Hayley probably became interested in Dante through Richardson’s Discourses and through Sir Joshua Reynolds’s extremely popular painting of Ugolino (Figure 1).33 Whatever the source, Hayley and Flaxman shared a common interest in Dante. As early as 1781 he composed a Dantesque poem, The Triumphs of Temper, that became extremely popular: it was published twenty-four times between 1781 and 1817.34 Hayley’s poem borrows some images from Dante’s Comedy. Serena, the protagonist, is guided through a supernatural adventure in

Figure 1

John Dixon after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ugolino (1774)


order to manage her ‘temper’. Hayley’s main model is Pope’s The Rape of the Lock with which it shares the supernatural machinery; some of the adventures endured by Serena are, however, borrowed from Dante. These include the encounter with the three beasts (Inferno, I), the entrance through Hell’s gate and the view of Charon and the first sinners, the pageantry of Purgatorio, XXVIII, and the Heavenly spheres. The overall effect is far removed from Dante’s moral and theological scheme and no attempt is made to evoke the pilgrim’s attitudes. The poem belongs to the genre created by Alessandro Tassoni and imitated by Pope: the mock-epic. Only somebody well acquainted with Dante’s poem could have detected its intertextual presence in The Triumphs of Temper. However, Hayley’s use of paratexts is significant for a study of the reception of the Divine Comedy. His ‘Preface’, in fact, foregrounds to the reader the presence of Dante: I wished, indeed, (but I fear most ineffectually) for powers to unite some of the sportive wildness of Ariosto, and the more serious painting of Dante, with some portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the moral graces of Pope.35 This mention in a very popular poem brought the name of Dante to a wide readership. The curiosity of the fewer readers who read Hayley’s Essay on Epic Poetry (1782) would have been further satisfied with the translation of the first three cantos of Dante’s Inferno. The significance of this undertaking is twofold: Hayley uses terza rima and he prints the Italian text alongside the translation. Hayley’s contribution to the textual reception of Dante is, therefore, fundamental. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of his poem and of the translation, he directed English poets and readers to a new source and continued the process of assimilation begun by his less popular predecessors and contemporaries. Hayley’s three-canto translation is characterised by a certain variety in scope and in results. According to Tinkler-Villani, The latter part of Canto III is more gothic than the opening of the canto, and more gothic than Cantos I and II, the gothic being the style Hayley selects as most appropriate for Charon, the spectacular setting of Hell, and the damned. In fact the gothic style is usually merged into the more encompassing visionary style as used by the eighteenth-century Miltonians such as Young. In specific instances, Hayley also uses the manner of Pope.36


Hayley’s translating ethics are different from Huggins’s in that his intention is to produce a more domesticated version. This is achieved by adding a Gothic quality to Dante’s Inferno and by changing its point of reference from the world of morality and allegory to that of a romance. Yet the result is only a matter of degree: to Hayley’s contemporary readers his translation would have seemed extremely literal. Leigh Hunt found the translation ‘if far beneath the simplicity of the original … for spirit as well as closeness, much above the mounting nonentities which have been palmed upon us of late years for that wonderful poet’.37 Had Hayley chosen some of Dante’s more dramatic cantos he would have had a greater hold on his readers’ attention. However, his unusual and persistent interest in Dante produced stronger effects on William Blake, the most ‘literally-minded’ illustrator of the Divine Comedy, as will be discussed in the last chapter of this book. In the same year as Hayley’s translation, another art collector, Charles Rogers, Fellow of the Royal Society, published the first complete translation of the Inferno. The translation did not receive much attention from contemporaries or later critics. Toynbee criticises it both as poetry and as translation and writes that ‘while entirely devoid of any spark of poetry, [it] has not even the merit of being faithful’.38 Tinkler-Villani points to some mistakes that show that Rogers was an amateur critic.39 Nevertheless, Rogers’s translation is noteworthy as the longest experiment in blank verse before Cary’s. Tinkler-Villani interprets his failure to attract attention as a proof of the general preference for more interpretative versions: ‘for the very fact that Rogers’ stress on plain matter proved unpopular may have suggested that any future attempt at a translation of Dante should follow a different approach’.40 As the next chapter will illustrate, Cary’s translation was certainly more successful in negotiating with the reader a domesticating approach to Dante, but in doing so he was supported by Foscolo’s and Coleridge’s influential reviews and by a contract with a more prestigious publisher. Rogers further substantiates the claim that Richardson’s contribution had claimed Dante for the field (to use a terminology borrowed from sociology) of the visual arts. Painters and illustrators soon followed in the wake of critics and connoisseurs with visual interpretations of Dante. Most British artists would have been aware of the translations and references to the poet mentioned so far. A second account of Michelangelo’s interest in Dante was published in the Annual Register for 1764.41 The article mentioned a volume of the Divine Comedy illustrated by Michelangelo and then lost in a shipwreck.42 According to


Paget Toynbee, ‘There is little doubt that it played an important part in directing the attention of British artists to the Commedia as a subject for illustration.’43 The illustrator Flaxman, for instance, acknowledged the influence it played on his decision to illustrate Dante. Other painters and connoisseurs equally accepted or asserted the similarity between Michelangelo and Dante: the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli is the best interpreter of this inter-arts association. Fuseli is the first modern illustrator of the Divine Comedy; he resumed a tradition that had stopped in the sixteenth century with painters such as Federico Zuccari (1542–1609) and Giovanni Stradano (Jan van der Straet) (1523–1605).44 According to Gert Schiff, Fuseli did not have access to these earlier illustrators of Dante;45 he did, however, almost certainly see Botticelli’s illustrations as well as Raphael’s Vatican portraits of Dante.46 Although the Swiss critic Johann Jakob Bodmer had earlier introduced Fuseli to Dante, the illustrations are the result of his stay in Italy from 1770 to 1778. His Italian journey, warmly encouraged by Sir Joshua Reynolds and sponsored by Thomas Coutts, was meant to provide Fuseli with the necessary experience for his new artistic career. It did in fact provide him with commissions and repute, as a letter from Thomas Banks to Joseph Nollekens shows: Among the students in Painting, Fuseli cuts the greatest figure; last season he had pictures bespoke to the amount of £1300, good encouragement for a student, yet nothing more than, from his great abilities, he is justly entitled to.47 Rome, in particular, also induced a surprisingly original turn in his artistic tastes. Despite his early study and translation into English of Winckelmann’s works, in Rome Fuseli was not attracted by Mengs’s neoclassicism. He indulged, instead, in the study of select classical works, such as the Dioscuri of Montecavallo, copies of Greek originals then attributed to Phidias of Praxiteles, and in the study of Michelangelo.48 According to Schiff, his long study of the Sistine Chapel, especially of the Last Judgement and the lunettes with the Ancestors of Christ, left a permanent mark on his art.49 Michelangelo’s figures represent for Fuseli the psychical energy painting should portray. As he states in one of his aphorisms – number 89 – the passions create the universality needed for artistic representation: The being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, hope or despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is


absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it: Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that sweeps his sons.50 The illustrations of the Divine Comedy follow the precept just quoted in that Fuseli is interested in emotionally charged episodes that transcend the historical moment. As shown also by his contemporary illustrations of Shakespeare, Milton and Homer, the text is for him only a point of departure and he does not intend to produce ‘literal’ illustrations.51 At variance from other illustrators, Fuseli does not aim to appropriate Dante through his work. His selection of episodes complies with the search for powerful feelings: all drawings except for one (Purgatorio, V) are from the Inferno. They include Dante’s confrontation with the central characters of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, V), Farinata (Inferno, X), the spendthrifts (Inferno, XIII), the metamorphosis of thieves (Inferno XXIV–XXV) and Ugolino (Inferno, XXXIII). Each episode portrays a strong passion either in the features of a sinner (Ugolino in Inferno, XXXIII, Gianciotto in Inferno, V) or of Dante (Inferno, X, XXIV–XXV, XXXIII). The need to emphasise emotions, claimed in different ways by Fuseli’s Swiss friend Bodmer and by Johann K. Lavater’s physiognomy, also satisfies the Pseudo-Longinus’ requirements for the sublime. Critics have pointed out the centrality of the debate on the sublime and the beautiful in the second decade of the eighteenth century. According to Theodore E.B. Wood, after Boileau’s translation of the Peri Hypsous attributed to the classical scholar Cassius Longinus, ‘the enourmous volume of references to the sublime during the period 1650–1760 poses a problem of interpretation that remains to our day’.52 Longinus locates the sublime in the artist’s ability to control his medium; language and his different types of sublimity correspond in fact to rhetorical prerequisites: First and most potent is the faculty of forming great conceptions … Secondly, there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. The fifth cause of elevation – one which is the fitting conclusion of all that have preceded it – is dignified and elevated composition.53


The Pseudo-Longinus emphasises the role of the writer/artist: their powers are the prerequisite for the creation of sublime experience, a resource for great men, especially in times of degeneracy. If not directly from the Pseudo-Longinus, Fuseli absorbed this epic approach to sublimity from Johann J. Bodmer, whose treatise Von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740) urged the artist to portray all passions, from the pleasing to the marvellous to the terrible and grotesque. Despite its source in a classical text the new aesthetics paved the way to the Romantic appreciation of the Middle Ages. Fuseli is at the forefront of the new European aesthetics with his choice of ‘primitive’ subjects, from Homer to Dante to the Nibelunglied. His almost exclusive inspiration from literature and art further complies with the Pseudo-Longinus’ emphasis on imitation as an essential means to achieve sublimity. However, Edmund Burke’s approach to the sublime is at work in Fuseli as well. Burke locates the sublime in the subject’s experience of pity and fear: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.54 Fuseli’s portrayal of strong passions similarly involves the viewer in a dramatic fashion: Ugolino directs his despair to the spectator, while all the remaining illustrations of Inferno, those of cantos VI, XIII, X, XXIV–XXV and XXXIII, attract the viewer through the gigantic distorted proportions reminiscent of Michelangelo’s statuary. Fuseli’s approach emphasises the epic role of the pilgrim, forced to face supernatural events in order to educate the reader. His use of contrastive proportions is quite similar to those of early film-makers, and in particular of Bartolini’s 1911 silent film Inferno; long shots are contrasted with close ups in order to create epic proportions and epic action. Fuseli has to his advantage the artist’s freedom in distorting the human body in order to emphasise sublimity of feeling. The direct source of Fuseli’s epic treatment of Dante is Michelangelo. The Punishment of Thieves (1772) and Ugolino in the Tower (1806) (Figure 2) comprise the most obvious references to Michelangelo: The Punishment of Thieves combines Fuseli’s study of the Laokoon and of Michelangelo’s Adoration of the Bronze Serpent.55 According to Schiff, these debts reveal Fuseli’s belief in Vasari’s claim that Michelangelo was inspired by Dante.56


The drawings were not available to the general public, but they were shown to fellow artists and friends, among them John Flaxman and William Blake. However, in the years after his return to England, Fuseli worked on subjects taken from the Inferno and exhibited three paintings at the Royal Academy in 1786, 1806 and 1818.57 The subjects are all taken from the most famous episodes of the Inferno: cantos V and XXXIII. Here Fuseli reveals himself capable of seizing new literary fashions: not only did he anticipate the interest in Dante, but he also understood the general interest in the two compassionate episodes of Ugolino (see Figure 2) and Francesca da Polenta. A translation by the collector Henry Constantine Jennings documents the readers’ new interest in Inferno, V: his translation, printed privately in 1794, aims, in Jennings’s words, to render ‘the consummately pathetic Narrative of Hugolino … and besides the little Novel of Francesca (the most elegant in the whole piece)’; these two cantos represent the exception in a poem which ‘by a lapse of Five Hundred Years, almost precluded any just Claim to its present Power of amusing, if its Reader be not a mere Antiquatian’.58 The illustration of Canto XXXIII did attract significant attention from painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds was, despite himself, the initiator of the interest in the subject thanks to his Ugolino (see Figure 1).59 The subject chosen was in fact an afterthought as recorded by James Northcote: The head of the Count had been painted previous to the year 1771, and finished on what we painters call ‘a half-length canvas’, and was, in point of expression, exactly as it now stands, but without any intention, on the part of Sir Joshua, of making it the subject of an historical composition, or having the story of Count Ugolino in his thoughts. Being exposed in the picture gallery, along with his other works, it was seen either by Mr. Edmund Burke or Dr. Goldsmith (I am not certain which), who immediately exclaimed, that it struck him as being the precise person, countenance, and expression of Count Ugolino, as described by Dante in his ‘Inferno’.60 Reynolds had been using George White as a model since 1770.61 Northcote’s account is confirmed by the presence of a seam revealing that the painting comprises two pieces of canvas. However, Reynolds’s pocket books show that in fact he had planned working on a composition for Ugolino since the summer of 1770.62 Although it was


Figure 2 Moses Houghton (after Henry Fuseli), Ugolino and his Sons (1809), engraving, 59.5 × 40.5 cm


attacked in the Morning Chronicle,63 the painting was extremely popular; it attracted Horace Walpole’s praise, despite his otherwise scathing remarks on Dante.64 In his ‘Advertisement’ to the Anecdotes of Painting in England he commended Reynolds’s contribution to British painting: ‘In what age were paternal despair and the horrors of death pronounced with more expressive accents than in his picture of Count Hugolino?’65 The popularity of the picture was also assured in the year following the exhibition when Dixon did a mezzotint engraving published by John Boydell.66 This image did more to create an awareness of Dante’s Inferno than most publications before Henry Francis Cary’s translation (1819). The print was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1774 and was then marketed on the Continent. According to Postle, the print influenced the new generation of neoclassical painters, like Antoine-Jean Gros, Pierre Narcisse Guerin and Jacques-Louis David.67 Both Reynolds’s and Fuseli’s paintings of Ugolino illustrate his imprisonment in the tower with his sons (see Figures 1 and 2). Reynolds’s Ugolino is, to some extent, too literal in portraying the stillness of his despair.68 There is a significant analogy between the two as both are inspired by Michelangelo. Reynolds’s figure is based on the figure of Aminadab from the Sistine Chapel. Fuseli, too, uses Michelangelo, but to a higher degree and with different results: he intensifies the pathos of the scene by giving Ugolino some features of Michelangelo’s Moses and by supplanting the emphasis on stillness with features of despair. It is significant that Fuseli’s treatment began supplanting Reynolds’s in critics’ admiration during the first decades of the nineteenth century when the Dante fashion took a stronger hold on the British public. Although Bell’s Weekly Messenger attacked Fuseli’s more epic treatment of the subject,69 criticism soon turned against Reynolds. William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb found Reynolds’ treatment unsuitable.70 Fuseli’s increasing popularity after his return to England must have attracted considerable attention to his Ugolino. According to Paget Toybee, ‘[his] pictures, which were exhibited at the Academy, created no little sensation in their day’.71 An article published in the Monthly Magazine in August 1803 did in fact suggest that Fuseli should devote himself to creating a ‘Dante Gallery’: I wish Mr. Fuseli could be prevailed on to supply the loss of the marginal-drawings which Michael Angelo drew in his Dante … There is, perhaps, no artist living better qualified to wield the mighty pencil of that wonderful painter. A Dante Gallery by this great master – for


so Mr. Fuseli deserves to be termed – could not fail of being highly interesting.72 Fuseli and his patrons for the Shakespeare and Milton galleries did not pursue this path and John Flaxman was the first Englishman to undertake the project. Like Fuseli, Flaxman completed the project in Rome, as a commission for Thomas Hope. Although completed by 1793 and soon engraved by Tommaso Piroli, the 110 plates were published only in Rome in 1802, according to the patron’s wishes. The English edition followed in 1807 accompanied by quotations from Henry Boyd’s recently completed translation of the Divine Comedy. The edition came at a turning point in the British reception of Dante: in 1785 the Irish Revd Henry Boyd published a translation of the Inferno and in 1802 he published a translation of the whole poem. Henry Francis Cary’s groundbreaking translation soon followed, with the publication of The Inferno in 1805 and of the complete poem in 1814. Thomas Hope’s commission responded to a private interest in the poem, but the later publication in Britain testifies to an interest in Dante that was soon to involve even further the reading public and critics alike.73 Although working with different media the approach of the illustrator and the translator responds to some extent to the same categories. In both arts one finds the same difficulty in addressing the question of degrees of ‘equivalence’ between source and end product, and the same issue of the relationship between the aims of the translator/illustrator and their execution. Flaxman’s intention as an illustrator is to approach the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The illustrations could be described as ‘literal’, using a terminology derived from translation studies, because of their close attention to Dante’s narrative. There is in Flaxman’s illustrations an overwhelming attention to detail, occasionally even to the detriment of the narrative: as Ralph Pite points out, ‘in Flaxman’s pictures Dante himself disappears almost entirely [and] … the reader is perfectly identified with Dante’s personaggio’ (Figure 3).74 Flaxman ignores the potential offered by varying proportions and viewpoint exploited by Fuseli, and opts, instead, for a standardised rectangular composition that recalls the stage. From the theatre derives also the use of gestures of the hands and arms to suggest mood and to evoke the character’s speech, a device Blake shares with Flaxman.75 Contemporaries and later critics have praised Flaxman’s illustrations for their ‘sublime simplicity’, their ‘classical dignity’, for their search for abstraction.76 There is, however, in Flaxman an explicit attempt to give epic dimension to Dante’s poem. This is clearly visible in Inferno,


Figure 3 John Flaxman, illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, X, ‘The Fiery Sepulchres’ (1793)

plate 3, ‘Charon’s boat’, where the ferryman of the dead souls has the features of a classical god rather than those of Dante’s demon with fiery eyes. In fact, Flaxman illustrates most of the Infernal episodes that evoke classical figures: plate 7, ‘Cerberus’, plate 8 ‘Plutus’, plate 9 ‘The Furies’, plate 13 ‘the Centaurs’, plate 14, ‘The Wood of Suicides’, plate 27, ‘Cacus’. Flaxman’s emphasis on Dante’s debt to Virgil and the classics is stronger in the Inferno. Renato Barilli has identified a contrast between Flaxman’s approach to the three cantiche: the violence of the Inferno, visually portrayed as lack of order with a broad use of circular lines and diagonal compositions, gives way to the progressive equilibrium and abstraction of the Purgatorio and Paradiso.77 Analogies between Flaxman’s illustrated Homer and Dante can be found also throughout the Purgatorio and Paradiso; the illustrations in fact exploit solutions based on his portrayal of the Greek Pantheon, as shown by plate 37 of the Odyssey, ‘The Council of the Gods’, or plate 47, ‘The Morning’.78 In fact, Flaxman’s outline illustrations foreground Dante’s humanism and the intertextual references to Virgil and the Homeric tradition.


The implicit or explicit association with Flaxman’s Homer emphasises the impression of a ‘neoclassical’ or ‘classical’ Dante. To some extent Henry Francis Cary’s translation endorsed the same reading of the Divine Comedy through the translator’s debt to William Cowper’s blank-verse translation of Homer. As will be discussed in the next chapter, Cary, however, understood the need to highlight the association between Dante and Milton, both in terms of content and of style.

Concluding remarks By the end of the eighteenth century the visual reception of Dante had created three approaches to the poet that were to dominate the British reception of the Divine Comedy. Reynolds’s popular painting of Ugolino established the image of Dante as the Gothic poet of Inferno; this approach found increasingly fewer supporters as Fuseli’s paintings were shown to the general public. Fuseli’s illustrations, by foregrounding the emotional challenge of the Infernal journey and by using Michelangelo as his source were extremely successful in creating an epic Dante. Flaxman, on the contrary, visualises a controlled narrative in which the dangers of Dante’s journey are balanced out by the certainty of his return. As in the Homeric poems, Dante’s narrative becomes a series of gripping accounts that do not threaten or challenge the reader’s moral stance. The popularity of the episodes of Ugolino and Paolo and Francesca suggests the wide currency of Fuseli’s approach. Raphael’s two portraits in the Stanza della Segnatura, the Parnaso and the Disputa, available in Paolo Fidanza’s print, codified the image of the heroic poet with proud and haughty features, and remained the standard Romantic iconology of Dante till the discovery of the Bargello portrait.

2 The Romantic Translation of the Divine Comedy: Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision

Reception studies and the material text transfer Comparative literary studies now concur on the importance and role of translation in promoting literary reception. In the English tradition, characterised by the translator’s ‘invisibility’, that is to say, by the preference for domestication of foreign texts, literary translations have often become a metonymy for the source text; references to Harington’s ‘Ariosto’, Dryden’s ‘Virgil’, Chapman’s or Pope’s ‘Homer’, far from foregrounding the translator’s role, were received as the very voice of the author. Henry Francis Cary’s translation performed a similar role for Dante in British Romanticism: not only did he choose to foreground his domesticating strategy by changing the title of the translation, The Vision instead of The Divine Comedy, but he also consistently adopted translating strategies that could make the poem acceptable to the received norms of his readership. While doing so, Cary also intended to reject Henry Boyd’s freer complete translation of the poem. His approach is therefore extremely interesting as an example of the changing expectations and norms of translation in the Romantic period. As Lawrence Venuti points out, ‘by the end of the 18th century, the theories and practices of English-language translation were thus riddled with the contradictory values that characterised modernity’.1 The ambiguities of Cary’s translating practice are characteristic of his belonging to a period of transition in which aesthetic norms were in the process of being challenged without being completely abolished. As Marshall Brown points out, ‘no longer the inspired representatives of divine order, and not yet Arnoldian pedagogues, Romantic authors have their own, multiple versions of authority’.2 27


With Cary’s translation, the Divine Comedy becomes one of the texts Romantic poets and critics can rewrite or, rather write upon. As the second section of this book argues, The Vision becomes a palimpsest erased and recomposed by English poets and critics for their own ends; Keats, Shelley and Blake used it as a replacement of the Divine Comedy, inscribed it, but also erased it to rediscover Dante’s own text and his language. This chapter aims to understand the role that The Vision played in the Romantic reception of Dante. Following the approach outlined by the descriptive study of literary translations,3 the focus is on the translation itself and its effects on the receiving culture. This clarification cannot ignore the fact that any approach to translations involves a comparative and therefore an interdisciplinary approach. A translation mediates between two cultures and two languages as well as between two or more historical periods. Furthermore, this process of mediation is only partly the translator’s responsibility: publishers, reviewers and critics play an essential role in the promoting or discrediting of the translated text. This complexity explains perhaps why the reception of Dante in Britain has already been approached from a variety of perspectives, without completely exhausting the subject. The recent development of descriptive translation studies explains why the first comprehensive study of The Vision has only just appeared: Crisafulli’s monograph is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary study of Cary’s translation, its poetic and translation strategies and, more importantly, the translator’s ideological interventions. It goes without saying that Crisafulli’s study has influenced my approach to The Vision, as will be acknowledged throughout this chapter. However, my approach to Cary’s translation is different and to some extent complementary to Crisafulli: my focus is more exclusively on the stylistic and linguistic aspects of The Vision foregrounded by the English Romantic poets and critics. How did The Vision influence the Romantics’ understanding of Dante? What literary processes did it influence? Why did Cary decide to translate the Divine Comedy? Trying to answer these questions, our approach intends to understand and foreground Cary’s intervention in the Romantic reception of Dante.

Literary translation and its theory: Cary and his contemporaries In order to understand Cary’s translating practice it is important to comprehend the late eighteenth-century approach to translating poetry.

Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision 29

Writing in 1680 in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles Dryden introduced a distinction between ‘metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation’: All Translation I suppose may be reduced to these three heads: First, that of Metaphrase, or turning an Author word by word, and Line by Line, from one language into another … The second way is that of Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude, where the Author is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow’d as his sense, but that too is admitted to be simplified, but not alter’d.4 Paraphrase differs from imitation only in the modernisation of names and references. Dryden’s distinction reproduces norms derived from the terminology of translations from Latin and Greek, which distinguishes between ‘ad sensum’ versus ‘ad verba’ translations.5 Like his Latin models Dryden rejects the possibility of a literal translation. A good translation requires that ‘The sense of an author, generally spoken, is to be Sacred and inviolable.’6 In the following century, the approach to translation is still unchallenged; Alexander Pope’s preface to his translation of Homer’s Iliad follows Dryden in claiming that ‘it is the first Duty of an Interpreter to give his Author entire and unmaim’d; and for the rest, the Diction and Versification only are his proper Province’.7 Quite interesting, however, is the growing awareness of the potential of translations as publishing ventures, as Dryden’s translations and Pope’s Iliad had demonstrated. As Venuti explains, Dryden both consolidated an emerging tradition of English literary translating and invested it with considerable authority. That a poet of his stature should have a consuming interest in translation shows not only that he held it in high esteem, but that it proved instrumental in defining literary authorship.8 The increased appreciation of translations, also protected by the Act of the Encouragement of Learning of 1710, explains perhaps the appearance of a full-fledged treatise on translation in eighteenth-century England: Tytler, later Lord Woodhouselee’s Essay on the Principles of Translation.9 Tytler exemplifies his approach to translation by way of his models, Pope’s Odyssey and Iliad and Dryden’s Works of Virgil. He praises especially the second: ‘But it was to Dryden that poetical translation owed a complete emancipation from her fetters; and exulting in her new


liberty the danger now was, that she should run into the extreme of licentiousness.’10 Tytler’s treatise uses vague and ambiguous definitions that could accommodate very different translating practices.11 He thus wishes that translation ‘should give a complete transcript of the original work’ but also that it ‘should have all the ease of original composition’.12 Crisafulli foregrounds Tytler’s ambiguity in opposing excessive freedom in translation and yet invoking ‘a compromise between two extremes: “rigid fidelity” … and loose translation’.13 Revealing of the author’s approach to poetic translation is the section of the treatise entitled: ‘Whether a poem can be translated into prose’. Tytler is totally opposed to any sort of prose rendering of a poem and justifies bowdlerisation and creative renderings of the source text: a superior degree of liberty is allowed to a poetical translator in amplifying, retrenching from, and embellishing his original, than to a prose translator. For without some portion of this liberty, there can be no case of composition; and where the greatest liberty is attainable, there that ease will be the most apparent, and it is less difficult to attain to it.14 Although Tytler’s treatise seems to endorse Dryden’s or Pope’s translating approach, a distinction must be introduced between the theory and practice of translation. The theory of translation, as Tytler shows, is ambiguous because it is typically based on few chosen translations. On the contrary, literary reviewing and translators’ prefaces show that by the end of the eighteenth century precision and equivalence become a basic requirement. The critique of Pope’s freedom in his translation of Homer becomes a commonplace of translation criticism in the Romantic period.15 Henry Francis Cary, too, contributed to the debate with two articles published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789.16 Anna Seward had opposed Joseph Weston’s claim that Dryden was superior to Pope. Despite his admiration for Seward, Cary criticises her disparagement of Dryden, following Tytler in this: Yet, much as I admire the good sense and taste of the fair writer, I cannot help thinking that she overstepped the limits of justice, and that, in endeavouring to vindicate Pope and the moderns from some undeserved accusations, she has been too hard upon Dryden, and totally unfair in her estimation of the poets of preceding times.17


When we move from the theory to the practice of translation, the first English translators of Dante are highly innovative in their choice of verse. As has been shown, poetic translations of the Divine Comedy range from Huggins’s six-line stanzas and Hayley’s terza rima to Rogers’s blank verse and Henry Boyd’s Spenserian six-line stanzas. By comparison Cary’s blank verse stands out as being a conservative choice motivated by his desire to produce a version closer to the recent tradition of the English narrative poem and of the English epic as represented by Paradise Lost. In light of the importance of translations in defining and representing translation theories, Cary had one important precursor: the Revd Henry Boyd. His complete translation of the Divine Comedy, published in 1802, certainly influenced some of Cary’s choices and to some extent popularised a certain image of Dante before the success of The Vision.18 Critics have been highly critical of Boyd’s translation and have thus tended to neglect it: Toynbee defined it as ‘a paraphrase, in which it is often difficult to recognise Dante at all’.19 For the study of the reception of the poet, it is significant that nineteenth-century reviews were generally positive, praising his way of ‘dilating the scanty expressions of his author into perspicuous and flowing diction’.20 They affirmed further that ‘the dullness of Dante is often enlivened by Mr. Boyd with profuse ornaments of his own’.21 Tinkler-Villani was the first to praise the translation in modern times. Although her reading of Boyd is accurate and detailed, she tends to emphasise his role as a precursor: the fact that Boyd’s is the very first translation of the complete Divina Commedia … has its effect on the translation itself, which must be evaluated on that basis. Moreover … it is the absence of a morally valid model, as will be shown later, that affects Boyd’s text, in which Dante’s protagonist becomes something of a pius Aeneas.22 In fact Boyd could count on a number of precursors, although none of the complete translations of the poem survived. It is important to clarify that Boyd’s is a free or paraphrastic translation, according to Dryden’s definition, and must be judged as such. The opening stanza demonstrates Boyd’s freedom: I WHEN life had labour’d up her midmost stage, And, weary with her mortal pilgrimage,


Stood in suspense upon the point of Prime; Far in a pathless grove I chanc’d to stray, Where scarce imagination dare display, The gloomy scen’ry of the savage clime. (Inferno, I, i) It is difficult to identify Dante’s ‘selva oscura’ in Boyd’s first stanza. Like some of his eighteenth-century predecessors,23 Boyd increases the horror and gloom of Dante’s otherworld; the panther which prevents Dante’s ascent becomes ‘the grim tyrant of the woods afar’ (stanza vi), in Canto V ‘screaming, flittes by Eliza’s ghost, / Who on herself reveng’d her lover lost’ (stanza xii). Boyd also adds Gothic connotations to Dante’s Purgatorio: for example, Manfred’s wound expanded upon, ‘… half his manly face was steep’d in gore, / Which from his wounded brow incessant flow’d’ (Purgatorio, III, stanza xxi), and Dante’s symbolic ‘P’ s – seven times engraved on his forehead at the entrance to Purgatory – receive the same treatment as ‘Seven deep distinguish’d marks his trenchant blade, / Upon my gore-distilling front pourtray’d’ (IX, stanza xx). Boyd’s stanzas, with their ending couplet, inevitably evoke Pope’s satirical poetry. Tinkler-Villani believes that the translator establishes an association with Spenser’s Faerie Queene: The movement of Boyd’s stanzas is very similar, and this, added to the nature of his diction, indicates that Boyd was trying to ensure that the reader saw a major similarity between Dante’s poem and the only major allegory in English.24 The translation of the Inferno, therefore, tends to eliminate the autobiographical aspect of Dante’s journey and render it a less threatening romance narrative. Despite the fundamental limitations of Boyd’s chosen verse form, the translation also reveals some interesting solutions. For instance, Boyd is quite successful in portraying the relationship between Dante and Beatrice in the last Purgatorial cantos. Beatrice’s rebuke is correctly qualified as a mother’s: At me she cast a look, severely sweet: Ah! how I fear’d her angel eye to meet, Where dignity, with keen resentment, join’d! Calmly she spoke, but seem’d to keep at bay


The tempest of her wrath, with cool delay, And such a look, as threaten’d worse behind. (XXX, stanza xv) Boyd succeeds better than Cary in his treatment of Dante’s love for Beatrice. Dante’s remembrance of his early love is emphatically portrayed by Boyd: ’Twas my first Love! but still my mortal fight Not yet the Mistress of my Fate confest. My Heart, of old familiar to her charms, No rapture felt at first, no new alarms; As had I known the Fair, my soul had thrill’d: Yet, from the Nymph unknown a transient glow, Thro’ ev’ry nerve instinctive, seem’d to flow, Which, as I gaz’d, my heaving Bosom fill’d. (XXX, stanzas viii–ix) In his Paradise Boyd often decides to amplify and explain to the reader Dante’s theological discussions. Thus, for instance, he translates Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of the working of Divine love: If love eternal, with immediate hand, Upon the mass its genuine stamp expand, The Image of Perfection there is found; Thus the primeval earth with vernal joy Return’d the smile of the benignant Sky, And heav’nly choirs the PREGNANT MAID renown’d. So far you judg’d aright, that mortal Man Ne’er match’d this Pair, since first the world began; But then you ask, How then could ISRAEL’s SAGE EXCEL the Sons of every age and clime? To end th’enquiry, recollect the time Men heav’n vouchs’d to give the peerless pledge. (XIII, stanzas xv–xvi) Boyd’s simplification of Dante’s theology is influenced by his ideological approach to the poem. As he explains in his three long preliminary essays, with his translation he intends to edify his reader. In the


‘Preliminary Essay to the Paradiso of Dante’ his purpose is to expound Dante’s Christian message: ‘In this Essay I shall confine myself to the illustration of an opinion, which often occurs in this part of DANTE’s poem … The opinion which I mean is, the idea of seeing all things in God.’25 Boyd’s two other introductory essays are similarly concerned to separate ‘the superstitions that led the Crusaders to rescue the Holy Land’, that is to say ‘Catholic’ superstition, from the underlying Christian message.26 Boyd thus feels the need to amend some of Dante’s ‘errors’ by suggesting alternative Protestant interpretations. Dante’s punishments are thus explained as ‘an enlarged view of the variety of obligations resulting from an high state of civilisation, and clearer notions of Religion’.27 Dante’s second realm, Purgatory, requires Boyd’s intervention as an explicitly Catholic belief. He thus explains it as ‘an allegorical representation of the means used by Providence in this life to purify the mind by a variety of trials’.28 The three supplementary essays are interesting evidence of a translator’s use of paratexts as a means of domestication of a foreign text. By foregrounding the allegorical dimension of Dante’s poetry, Boyd sees his role as ideological as well as literary: to render the source text acceptable to his Protestant readers. Cary, while distancing himself from Boyd’s work for its ‘latitude in its interpretation’ still admitted a debt to his predecessor ‘for the only view that has as yet appeared in English of the whole of the Divina Commedia’ (Inferno, viii). Cary followed Boyd in the practice of using paratexts as a means to control and influence readers’ understanding of the text: like Boyd, for instance, he prefixed his cantos with an ‘argument’ in the style of the classical epics and added a life of Dante to his translation. Although to some extent Boyd’s and Cary’s translations are fundamentally different in their respective approach to the source text, one must note that Boyd’s translation reveals his attempt to mediate between his readers and the source text: in doing so he was most successful in the translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso, the sections of the poem Cary translates less successfully.

Henry Francis Cary: the translator of Dante Who was Cary, the translator of Dante? As one of the most significant promoters of the reception of Dante in the Romantic period one is bound to enquire about the origin of his interest in the poet. A brief account of his life is therefore interesting in order to understand his


approach to translation and his decision to produce a new version of the Divine Comedy after Henry Boyd’s complete translation. The sources for Cary’s life are the Memoir published by his son, and W.J. King’s biography.29 The list of works cited at the end of this book includes the first comprehensive bibliography of Cary’s articles. Born in Gibraltar in 1772, Cary was educated at Uxbridge, Rugby and at Sutton Grammar School. At Rugby and at Sutton he formed his first literary friendships. At Rugby he befriended Walter Birch, a friend of Walter Savage Landor, and at Sutton he formed a long-lasting association with Thomas Lister and John Humberston. Lister and Humberston shared his interest in classical studies and Greek poetry and with Cary they planned a joint translation of the major Greek poets. The scheme did not go further, but by 1787 both Cary and Lister had begun to write and translate poetry. Cary’s first poems were published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787. They consist in a ‘Sonnet to a Sculptor, Occasioned by Seeing Some Ridiculous Ornaments in Church’ and two translations from Horace, Ode V.30 Both are signed ‘M.C.S.’, the abbreviated form of his nom de plume, ‘Marcellus’. However, the first poem to attract sincere interest in the author is the Irregular Ode to General Eliott, published in 1788 and reviewed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in July that year.31 The ode was occasioned by the return to England of the defender of Gibraltar. A footnote by Cary reveals the main influence: Anna Seward, the well-known eighteenthcentury poetess from Lichfield.32 He dedicated to her his first collection of poems, Sonnets and Odes published in 1788.33 The volume includes thirty-eight sonnets and three odes: they show Cary’s debt to Seward’s style in their heavy use of poetic diction and personifications. The correspondence with Seward is interesting in facilitating an understanding of the evolution of Cary’s aesthetics. A letter of 20 July 1788, for example, reveals Cary disagreeing with Seward on the question of what constitutes a good translation: The first object of translation is to give you the clearest and most intimate acquaintance with the original. For this reason the strictest version may justly be called the best … There are not many expressions in the dead languages which may not in ours be rendered almost literally, and in an adequate manner. To effect this, indeed, demands the nicest skill and the happiest precision. My assertion will, I trust, soon be reduced to example by the immortal author of ‘The Task’. If he answers my expectations, and you still continue to prefer Pope, you must be content to prefer him to Homer.34


Cary’s preference of Cowper to Pope is already indicative of his later similar choice of blank verse for his translation. In fact at the time Cowper’s blank-verse translation of Homer was still under way, but in August 1785 he had published an attack on Pope’s version in the Gentleman’s Magazine which set out the programme for his own: Instead of Homer in the graceful habit of his age and nation, we have Homer in a straight waistcoat … The Iliad and Odyssey, in his hands, have no more of the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them … Pope resembles Homer just as Homer resembled himself when he was dead. His figure and his features might be found, but their animation was all departed.35 Furthermore, Cowper’s project was widely known by the end of the year because he was selling his translation by subscription; he had also published a specimen, with introductory ‘Proposals’ in the New Review in March 1786.36 As Cary’s letter shows, he followed the project throughout its development and Cowper’s approach to translation had an important impact on The Vision. Cary’s study of Italian began at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, where he completed his secondary education. His tutor was an Italian emigrant, Angelo Vergani, whose literary taste reflects the English predilection for Italian opera and the neglect of Dante: his literary anthology devotes about seventy pages to Metastasio’s poetry and only four to Dante.37 Under his tutoring Cary produced his first translation from Italian, a sonnet by Giuliano Cassiani published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789.38 In Oxford, where he moved in April 1790, Cary pursued his interest in European languages at Christ Church under the tutoring of a Mr Oliviero, to whom, however, no other reference is found.39 Cary’s contributions to the Gentleman’s Magazine during his college days reveal that his main focus at the time was both Italian and Provençal poetry.40 In 1791 he contributed to the magazine a translation from Bernardo Tasso’s letters; his introduction shows his increasing interest in Italian scholarship: ‘Any communication that serves to throw a light on the circumstances alluded to in this and the other letters, or on any subject of Italian Literature, will be thankfully perused by Yours, &c., M—s.’41 By 1792 Seward had come to consider Cary’s study of Italian as too prominent among his interests. In a letter of February she complained


to a common friend that ‘his ear has been debauched by the luscious smoothness of Italian tones, till it delights no longer in the bolder and more majestic sounds of the English language’.42 She must have voiced the same complaints to Cary, who promptly reminded her that ‘our greatest English poets, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, have been professed admirers of the Italians’.43 He then concluded with his first indication of interest for the Divine Comedy: Give a few months to the acquisition of Italian; go and see the wonders of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso; remember what a vast interval of time there is between Homer and him; remember in what a state the country and the age in which he lived, and how pure the language in which he wrote, and then abuse him if you dare.44 Cary’s correspondence with Seward led to his first prose translation of the Divine Comedy which consisted of two similes from Purgatorio, III and V, probably intended to convince Seward to read Dante’s poetry. Cary opts for a word for word translation of the text. His versions stand out for their use of plain language and simple syntax, especially if compared with his later blank-verse ones: As sheep come out of the fold, some alone, others in pairs, others three together, the rest stand fearful, putting their eyes and noses to the ground, and whatever the first does, all the others do the same, crowding at her back, if she makes a stand, simple and tranquil, and yet do not know the reason why they stop, so this crowd of spirits stopt at our approach. (Purgatorio, III, 79–84) I never saw the lighted vapours at the beginning of the night cut the serene air so swiftly, nor when the sun is setting, the clouds of autumn. (Purgatorio, V, 37–9)45 Cary showed the same preference for the Purgatorio when he started his translation. Before attempting the project, he devoted a long time to collecting notes and illustrations of Dante, as he wrote to Seward: ‘I am infinitely delighted with Dante, as an historian of his own time; so that I am collecting anecdotes, so plentifully interspersed among his works, for my amusement.’46


At the end of his Oxford days Cary entered the church and moved with his wife to the vicarage of Abbots Bromley. The comfort and tranquillity of his vicarage gave Cary plenty of time to continue his studies: his son’s Memoir reproduces the literary journals that he started keeping from 1797. They include useful information on his reading. The journal entry of 16 January 1797 informs us of the beginning of Cary’s translation of the Purgatorio.47 The translation of the Divine Comedy continued, with short interruptions, until 1814, the year of its publication. The different phases of composition will be explained in more detail below. Cary carried on revising the translation throughout his life, and witnessed the publication of the revised 1844 edition only a few months before his death. In 1794 he had published The Mountain Seat, a blank-verse descriptive poem in the manner of Cowper’s Task that shows his progression from Augustan to voguish meditative poetry.48 The translation of the Inferno was published in 1805 and 1806, while the complete translation of the Divine Comedy was published at Cary’s own expense in 1814. The meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 proved momentous for the success of his translation: Coleridge contacted a new prestigious publisher and discussed the translation in his lectures at the London Philosophical Society. By the 1820s Cary was generally known as the English translator of Dante, as an amusing episode related by his son shows: Henry went yesterday to lay out part of his fee in a bookseller’s shop in Piccadilly, and I must indulge a translator’s vanity so far as to relate what there befell him. ‘I have some old College books that I should like to exchange,’ said Henry. ‘They would be of no use to me,’ said the man, ‘but if you have any standard works I should like to take them.’ ‘What do you mean by standard works?’ says H., when the man beginning ‘Cary’s Dante, Sir!’49 In June 1826 he became the Assistant Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, a post which he occupied till December 1837. Cary left it as a result of his disappointment at not having been appointed Keeper of the Printed Books. The post went instead to the Italian Antonio Panizzi, now remembered for the extensive reforms that he introduced in the organisation of the library: Cary’s reaction shows that he still subscribed to the old view that a senior place was a reward for long service or special merits. In the expanding library, however, a position like Panizzi’s involved special qualities of determination, enterprise and energy.50


From 1821 to 1823 Cary published regularly in the London Magazine. This collaboration put him in contact with Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, John Clare, Alan Cunningham and other writers and critics of the London literary scene. Through Lamb he also met John Keats. The articles published in the journal were later collected by his son as the Early French Poets and as the Lives of English Poets from Johnson to Kirke White.51 The Lives are interesting in gaining an appreciation of Cary’s approach to contemporary literature: for his biographies he singles out Mason, Hayley, Darwin and the Wartons, while Anna Seward is excluded from the collection as well as the poets Thomas Gray and William Cowper. Cary’s articles on the Early French Poets are notable for their scholarship. The collected volume deals with twenty-two poets, from Clément Marot to Pierre Gringore and provides biographies as well as translations from their poems. Cary’s last literary efforts were the translation of Aristophanes’ Birds and Pindar. Both publications were positively received. As with Dante’s Purgatorio, Cary’s preference was for texts that had hardly been translated into the English language, and again he chose blank verse. However, his preface reveals a greater awareness of the intervention needed to render the text acceptable to English literary norms: It is trusted that the present version will be found, in the dialogue part, tolerably close to the original, except where one of the following cases seemed to warrant a departure from it; first, when the grossness of the poet is such as our manners would not admit of, which happens in two or three instances; next, when there is some play on words, which it would be impossible to preserve exactly in another language; and lastly, when the names of birds are introduced, in which latter case it is sometimes not known what birds are meant … Throughout the lyrical parts in general more liberty has been taken.52 In the translation of the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno Cary applied a similar approach: self-censorship and bowdlerisation. His preface, however, is less explicit in foregrounding his intervention. On 23 August 1841 Cary received the grant of his pension from Lord Melbourne’s ministry, mainly thanks to Samuel Rogers’s interest. Three years later Cary was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, as the national translator of Dante. This homage shows that translations were progressively seen as a national contribution.


The Vision In the Memoir Henry Cary published his father’s literary journals: although they were not compiled regularly, they are a precious source for the establishment of a chronology of the translation. Cary recalls his father’s beginning on 16 January 1797.53 By 18 March he had translated the first five cantos of the Purgatorio.54 He then devoted some study to the edition of the Divine Comedy by Venturi, an eighteenthcentury commentator whom Cary came to consider ‘generally acute and lively’ but also ‘impertinent and injudicious’.55 His choice of the Purgatorio as the first canticle for his translation shows his preference for this over the Inferno, which was often assumed to be, however mistakenly, the most representative part of the poem. As King suggests, Cary must have also been stimulated by the idea of breaking new ground since the only translation from the Purgatorio published so far had been Huggins’s short translation from Purgatorio, II (1760).56 Cary then interrupted the translation from April 1797 to May 1800, nominally to devote some time to the study of commentaries of the Divine Comedy. This approach was progressively to make Cary a critic as well as a translator of Dante and was criticised by John Taaffe, in his A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The next entry concerning the Divine Comedy is dated 23 May 1800 and records that Cary resumed with Inferno, I.57 There are few entries in the literary journal concerning his progress: they record him working on the canticle for one month, from 23 May to 6 June 1800.58 Henry records that his father completed the translation of the Inferno towards the end of 1804.59 It appeared in two volumes: the first, comprising the first seventeen cantos, was published in early 1805, the second the following year. This first edition included facing Italian text, some explanatory notes at the end of each volume, and was prefixed by a ‘Chronological View of the Age of Dante’. The publication of the original text alongside the translation has a special significance since this was the first complete canticle of the Divine Comedy in Italian to be printed in England. There are no records concerning the subsequent progress of the translation, but on 8 May 1812 his literary journal records that it was complete.60 Cary’s letter to Thomas Price of 8 April 1813 mentions that in the previous year he had worked mainly on revision and compilation of the notes.61 By October he was able to inform Price: My time is at present fully occupied in printing my translation, and in transcribing and amending my notes for it. The whole of the first


volume, and the second part of the second is printed. I wish I could have your revisal [sic] of the whole before it went to press. But the thing had been so long in my mind that I found it necessary to make an effort to get rid of it: and I have taken so much pains to compare mine with other versions, as, I think, to have escaped any gross error.62 The complete translation was printed in three ‘diminutive volumes’, as Cary referred to them, at his own expense. Another letter to Price mentions the agreements Cary stipulated for the publication: The book is a cheap one, if the quantity alone be considered. The price is only twelve shillings for three volumes in boards; and though they are diminutive in size, yet they contain letter-press in abundance. They will come out on the first of the next month. I have employed Bagster, in the Strand, and Colburn, in Conduit Street, as my agents for the sale of them … There are a few alterations made in the version of the Inferno, and more in the notes, for I have taken your advice in adding to the number of the parallel passages.63 This version, though later revised, remained the basis for Cary’s later editions. The second edition of July 1819, published by Taylor and Hessey, thanks to Coleridge’s support, included the ‘Life of Dante’ in a revised form; the notes were extensively revised and expanded, but the text, except for few revisions, remained the same. The edition of 1831 was a reprint of the previous one. It was only the 1844 edition that included further revision, but Cary was again especially concerned with the notes: In the hope of rendering the Life of Dante and the Notes on the poem less imperfect, I have consulted most of the writers by whom my Author has been recently illustrated. Whenever an omission or an error in the translation has been pointed out to me, I have done my best to supply the one and to correct the other; and my obligations in all these instances are acknowledged in the Notes. (The Vision 1844, p. ii)

Cary’s approach to translation: the critic Cary’s The Vision has received contradictory criticism ever since its publication. Thus Toynbee praised Cary’s achievement, maintaining


that he ‘revolutionised the methods of English translators, and discredited once and for all the tradition of loose paraphrase’.64 De Sua, on the contrary, places The Vision between the eighteenth-century practice of loose paraphrase and the modern demands of literalness: ‘Cary’s method lies somewhere between Augustan paraphrase and Victorian metaphrase. Cary completely abandons the tercet division, for example, his unit being the blank verse period or paragraph.’65 Gilbert F. Cunningham agrees that Cary’s method is somewhat ambiguous, but uses equivalence as a means of evaluating the translation: ‘Cary followed the via media … His matter is essentially that of Dante, with only negligible omissions or additions; the manner differs considerably from that of the original, for Cary was resolved to write English poetry.’66 Tinkler-Villani carries out an interesting comparison between The Vision and Boyd’s translation. While recognising Cary’s scholarship, she concludes that ‘the difference between Cary and Boyd is only a question of degree’.67 These approaches demonstrate the essential ambiguity of Cary’s position. As Crisafulli points out, The Vision both confirms and contradicts Venuti’s broad category of translators’ ‘invisibility’: first, Cary’s large use of critical paratexts highlights the translator’s critical and translating practice; secondly, and more importantly, Cary’s practice of domestication is less striking when set against the contemporary expectations of a translation’s conformity to contemporary literary norms. Cary’s paratexts, and in particular his prefaces are significant in understanding his perception of his role as cultural mediator. According to Crisafulli they ‘embody a complex strategy of authorial control which restrains or mitigates the effects of the stylistic choice in the main text’.68 In the ‘Preface’ to The Inferno Cary alerts the reader to his search for literalness and at the same time demonstrates his desire to produce a work of some literary value: In the ensuing pages I have aimed at not only adding to the original text a translation so faithful, as, with the assistance of the notes, to enable one moderately skilled in the Italian tongue to understand my author, but at producing a work which shall not be totally devoid of interest to the mere English reader. (The Inferno, I, vi) The translator’s first commitment – to achieve a basic equivalence with the source text – is a reaction to Boyd’s ‘latitude’ of ‘interpretation’ (The Inferno, I, viii) as well as to Rogers’s inaccurate translation.69 As has


been pointed out, Cary also followed the example of William Cowper, who presented his blank-verse Odyssey as more ‘faithful’ than Pope’s.70 Cary’s paratexts, while foregrounding the literalness of the translation, are also aimed at presenting a particular reading of the Divine Comedy. In the introductory ‘Life of Dante’, Cary significantly dismisses the problem of defining the genre of the poem and encourages the identification with the category of the sublime: ‘Some have termed it an epic poem; and others, a satire: but it matters little by what name it is called. It suffices that the poem seizes on the heart by its two great holds, terror and pity’ (The Vision, 10). It is evident from this statement that Cary’s aesthetic is founded both on Burke and on the Pseudo-Longinus’ definition of the sublime. In 1792, in an article on Winkelmann, Cary embraced PseudoLonginus’ rejection of visual illustrations of poetry: ‘the illustrious critick is right when he says that some of the sublime images of Milton are not to be delineated on canvas; but the same remark is [e]qually applicable to Homer and Dante’.71 It is significant that in this earlier contribution Cary extends to the poetry of Homer and Dante the linguistic sublimity typically attributed to Milton. In the preface to the translation he instead introduces a distinction between Dante and the English poet: His [Dante’s] solicitude, it is true, to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them distinctly within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, sometimes renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity. (The Vision, 10) Here Cary’s preoccupation is less with Dante’s realism than with the intention to minimise the relevance of the Infernal cantos in which the poet uses a low linguistic register and introduces scatology and comic realism.72 These could seem difficult to accommodate in the light of the English approach to the epic and especially by comparison with Paradise Lost. The contamination of different styles and genres is an essential characteristic of the Divine Comedy, as Dante emphasizes, for instance in his explanations of the term ‘Comedy’ in De Vulgari Eloquentia, II. iv, 5–6.73 Cary does not emphasise the problematic inclusion of the poem in one particular genre, but uses the new antiquarian interest in the Middle Ages to stress its diversity. Dante’s ‘hard and uncouth phraseology’ (The Vision, 11) comes from the effort to


give ‘a permanent stamp and character to the language in which he wrote’ (The Vision, 11). Dante’s Catholicism and the religious significance of his allegory are toned down on the same grounds. The Divine Comedy, according to Cary, ‘comprises a description of the heavens and heavenly bodies; a description of men, their deserts and punishments, of supreme happiness and utter misery, and of the middle state between the two extremes’ (The Vision, 10). Cary’s survey dangerously echoes Boyd’s utter rejection of the concept of purgation of the souls, but his comment is less explicit in suggesting that the poem should be read primarily for its moral and religious content. Although one could find such an implication in his choice of the title ‘The Vision’, as Ralph Pite has pointed out, Cary seems to have endorsed the eighteenth-century meaning of the word as fiction or dream rather than as ‘religious experience’.74 This implication is also supported by Cary’s use of the word ‘fiction’ to describe Dante’s poem (The Vision, 10). Cary’s translations are also accompanied by notes. These, however, become significant only in the last edition of The Vision. Their scarcity in all the previous editions of the translation confirms Cary’s desire to promote the domestication of the text. Also significant for this purpose are his indications of echoes from Dante in Italian and English authors, as he points out in the preface: If there is anything of novelty in the notes which accompany the following translation, it will be found to consist chiefly in a comparison of the Poet with himself, that is, of the Divina Commedia with his other writings … As to the imitations of my author by later poets, Italian and English, which I have collected in addition to those few that had been already remarked, they contribute little or nothing to the purposes of illustration, but must be considered merely as matter of curiosity, and as instances of the manner in which the great practitioners in art do not scruple to profit by their predecessors. (The Vision, 12) These quotations tend to consolidate the impression of the literary qualities of the translation as well as presenting the Divine Comedy as a text already present in the English tradition. Cary will reinforce this impression by borrowing extensively from English canonical authors, especially Shakespeare and Milton, and by acknowledging his debts in the footnotes.


The limited length of the paratexts conveys the impression of a certain reluctance on Cary’s part to accept the role of critic as well as translator of Dante. In fact, as Crisafulli cogently points out, the two roles are difficult to separate in any translation of the Divine Comedy completed before Petrocchi’s authoritative edition (1966–67): by referring extensively to the four main commentators of the poem available in his day, Landino, Vellutello, Venturi and Lombardi, Cary shows that ‘in his view the task of critical editor and commentator go hand in hand’.75 It is significant however that his explicit critical interventions in the early editions of The Vision are relatively few for a text as complex as the Divine Comedy: only in the last edition of the translation did Cary more assertively assume the role of textual commentator and critic.

Cary’s translating practice In order to understand Cary’s role in the literary reception of Dante the stylistic characteristics of his translation are of central importance. Although I take into account the indications of descriptive translation studies, my approach will focus more on Cary’s stylistic choices than on his translating strategies or processes, of greater interest to the historiography of translation than to reception studies. My focus is on The Vision as a ‘hypertext’ at the same time replacing and incorporating the Divine Comedy. The first important stylistic aspect of The Vision is the use of blank verse, often qualified as Miltonic by contemporaries and by later critics. As has been shown, earlier translations of the Divine Comedy are characterised by a variety of verse forms. Cary’s notes to The Inferno show that he had reservations, for instance, concerning Hayley’s six-line stanzas.76 It seems that he was sceptical concerning the possibility of using the terza rima, despite its presence in the poetry of Wyatt, Sydney and Milton.77 An interesting explanation is included in a letter to William Parsons of 26 February 1844; praising his choice of the quatrain for his translation of the Inferno, Cary adds that ‘the terza rima would often be found totally unmanageable’.78 Cowper’s translation of Homer is certainly the most obvious example that directed Cary towards the choice of blank verse. In keeping with Tytler’s vague principle that ‘the style and manner of writing in a translation should be of the same character with that of the original’,79 Cowper justifies his choice of versification as the only one possible as ‘a translator of HOMER, therefore, seems directed by HOMER himself to the use of


blank verse, as to that alone in which he can be rendered with any tolerable representation of his manner in this particular’.80 Cowper does not intend to recreate the cadence of the Greek language, but to produce a translation in conformity to the English norms or expectations for epic poetry. He thus chooses blank verse in the manner of Milton, frequently employing inversions, postponement of the subject and of adjectives, and subordination. A short passage exemplifies his approach (emphasis added): When thus I had implored With vows and pray’r, the nations of the dead, Piercing the victims next, I turn’d them both To bleed into the trench; then swarming came From Erebus the shades of the deceased, Brides, youths unwedded, seniors long with woe Oppress’d, and tender girls yet new to grief. Came also many a warrior by the spear In battle pierced, with armour gore-distain’d, And all the multitude around the foss Stalk’d shrieking dreadful; me pale horror seized.81 Most noticeable here is the consistent postponement of adjectives and the emphatic position of the verb at line 8 and the anticipation of the object pronoun in the last line. While Cowper’s syntax is modelled on Milton’s, his vocabulary stands out for the use of archaisms, often foregrounded and explained in the notes. While Cowper’s Miltonic blank verse was criticised by contemporary reviewers,82 Cary’s was singled out as one of the chief merits of his translation. Coleridge’s evaluation in a letter addressed to Cary is indicative of the contemporary appreciation: I still affirm, that to my ear, and to my judgment both your Metre and your Rhythm have in a far greater degree, than I know any other instance of, the variety of Milton without any mere Miltonisms … Of the diction, I can only say that [it] is Dantesque, even in that in which the Florentine must be preferred to our English Giant – namely, that it is not only pure Language, but pure English.83 In what way does Cary’s blank verse endeavour to appear ‘Miltonic’? Coleridge was one of the most strenuous advocates of Cary’s


Miltonism. In a letter to Cary he introduces a significant distinction between The Vision and recent long blank-verse narrative poems: Since my last, I have read more of your translation, and have carefully compared it with my distinctest recollections of every specimen of Blank Verse I am familiar with that can be called Epic, Narrative or Descriptive … – with Cowper, Armstrong, Southey, Wordsworth, Landor (the author of Gebir) and with all of my own that fell within comparison as above defined, especially the passage from 287 to 292, Sybilline Leaves. And I find no other alteration in my judgement but an additional confidence in it. I still affirm that, to my ear and to my judgement, both your Metre and your Rhythm have in a far greater degree than I know any instance of, the variety of Milton without any mere Miltonisms.84 Among twentieth-century critics, Cooksey speaks of Cary’s attempt at maintaining the high seriousness that Dante shared with Milton,85 King sees his diction as moving from Milton back to Elizabethan poetry.86 In fact, like Cowper, Cary’s debt to Milton is evident in his use of English syntax and in his reorganisation of the English sentence so as to bring it closer to the Italian model. This is accomplished by way of caesuras and inversions, as well as by the postponement of the subject; the result, as in Milton, is a sentence that pushes its Latin origins as far as the English language allows. From Milton, Cary derives a preference for the double negative (litotes) even where Dante uses the affirmative form. Thus in Paradise, XVII he uses ‘E’en such was I; nor unobserved was such / of Beatrice and that saintly lamp’ (The Vision, XVII, 6) for Dante’s ‘e tal era sentito / e da Beatrice e da la santa lampa’ [and such was I perceived to be, both by Beatrice and by the holy lamp]. Cary, furthermore, eliminates any division in tercets choosing, instead, to introduce blank-verse paragraphs, which he creates or defines entirely at his discretion, although generally following the pauses in the narrative. This approach has the advantage of following closely the paratactic structure of the Italian language. Some examples from the three canticles illustrate Cary’s method. In The Vision, passages with complex syntax often respond to a precise stylistic effect: that of emphasising Dante’s tragic style. This typically corresponds to the significance of particular episodes. Among the damned, for instance, Dante reserves this treatment for Brunetto Latini,


Ulysses, Guido da Montefeltro, Farinata degli Uberti and Ugolino della Gherardesca. The following excerpt from Ulysses’ speech to his companions exemplifies Cary’s extensive use of subordination, caesura and inversion (my emphasis): ’O brothers!’ I began, ‘who to the west ‘Through perils without number now have reach’d; ‘To this the short remaining watch, that yet ‘Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof ‘Of the unpeopled world, following the track ‘Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang; ‘Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes, ‘But virtue to pursue and knowledge high’. (Hell, XXVI, 110–17) The flexibility of Cary’s blank verse, has the advantage of establishing the illusion of a symmetrical correspondence with Dante’s use of the higher style. In fact the relationship between Cary’s and Dante’s syntax can be described as analogical: complexity corresponds to complexity, but Cary’s frequent inversions are only occasionally a solution to Dante, as the following examples illustrate (my emphasis): ’O full of pity she, who undertook My succour! and thou kind who didst perform So soon her true behest! With such desire Thou hast dispos’d me to renew my voyage, That my first purpose fully is resum’d. Lead on: one only will is in us both. Thou art my guide, my master thou, and lord.’ So spake I; and when he had onward mov’d, I enter’d on the deep and woody way. (The Inferno, II, 133–41) Of the old flame forthwith the greater horn Began to roll, murmuring, as a fire That labours with the wind, then to and fro Wagging the top, as a tongue uttering sounds, Threw out its voice, and spake (The Inferno, XXVI, 85–9)


’O VIRGIN Mother, daughter of thy Son! […] Here thou to us, of charity and love, Art, as the noon-day torch (The Vision, Paradise, XXXIII, 1, 11–12) These three examples of postponement respectively of subject and verb, do not correspond to similar forms in the Italian text, but can be considered examples of stylistic ‘compensation’.87 Cary’s blank verse cannot avail itself of the dynamic effect of Dante’s tercets, conveyed by the rhyming of the central line with the first line of the following terzina, (aba, bcb, cdc and so on). He thus resorts to the emphatic reorganisation of syntax that results in a predominance of run-on lines over Dante’s end-stopped ones. Crisafulli distinguishes alliteration as an additional compensatory feature of The Vision. In this case Cary uses an additional stylistic device to replace the loss of some original stylistic traits. For instance, according to Crisafulli, ‘in both Inferno XIX and Purgatorio IX Cary turns to alliteration with the aim of underscoring the Pope’s authority’.88 On the whole, however, Cary does not use alliteration as consistently as he does syntactical emphasis and caesura. The relationship between sentences and verse in The Vision further illustrates the overall effect of Cary’s blank-verse paragraphs. Since Cary intends to maintain a satisfactory degree of equivalence, a comparison with the source text is useful to ascertain whether in this case his translation is adopting a foreignising approach. Studies of the correlation between syntax and verse in the Divine Comedy unanimously show the general coincidence of the two. According to G. Lisio the proportion of rupture between verse and grammatical pause is around one in seventeen, with an increase in the last cantos.89 Concerning the coincidence between sentence and tercet, Lisio registers the highest proportion in the Inferno and the least in the Paradiso. According to his calculations, the 4711 tercets of the poem correspond to 3422 sentences of which only 208 do not end with the metre.90 The exceptions are 101 in the Inferno, 63 in the Purgatorio and 44 in the Paradiso. The apparent contradiction between Lisio’s two calculations finds its explanation in the prevalence of long speeches in the last canticle which can be more easily encompassed within the structure of the tercet.91 Dante’s need to overcome the unit of the tercet and of the canto creates in the Paradiso what Mario Fubini has described as an alternation between moments of vision and explanation.92


The Inferno is a paradox in Dante’s poetic world: if love is the prime mover of the journey, what kind of poetry can ever give expression to its negation? The poetical expression of the absence of divine law is one of confusion and chaos. The Inferno is the only canticle that comprises 34 instead of 33 cantos. The difference in the length of the cantos is the highest among the three canticles. According to Joan Ferrante’s calculations, there is a range of 42 lines between the longest and shortest canto of the Inferno (115 to 157 lines).93 A further indication of a greater lack of stylistic uniformity is the distribution of narrative, dialogue and speech. Ferrante’s study shows that the Inferno has the greater number of cantos divided between narrative and dialogue and the lowest number of speeches.94 The verses are less often broken by enjambment, with fewer than fifteen per canto, and they tend to be a unit.95 According to Lisio’s study, The coincidence between sentence and tercet is least frequent in the Inferno.96 One can infer from this that Dante perfects his ability to enclose his thought within the tercets in the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Cary’s blank verse derives its forward movement by enjambment. His verse most typically starts in half line. This tendency reduces the effect of the less frequent enjambments in Dante’s Inferno. Cary’s further adoption of blank-verse periods is less suited to reproduce the frequent variation between speech, description and dialogue. A brief analysis of Inferno, V and XXXIII illustrates Cary’s approach. Cary divides Inferno, V into nine paragraphs. This division does not in itself impair the structure of the canto, which naturally falls into thematic units: the canto moves from the atmosphere of the Infernal circle to the most famous souls, to the meeting with Francesca da Polenta. Cary’s division emphasises this progression in the text, as well as the division between narrative and dialogue. One additional paragraph in The Vision marks the discussion of the nature of love in Francesca’s speech. Dante extends the syntactic division beyond the tercet only five times and the canto includes approximately 18 enjambments, just a few above the average for the infernal cantos.97 In The Vision the enjambments are approximately 60, and in two cases they divide subject and verb: ‘who / are these’ (lines 50–1), ‘that heart-struck / I’ (lines 136–7). Cary’s use of enjambment makes the poetry more uniform; the paragraphs are thus necessary to create a division in the narrative. Cary divides Inferno, XXXIII into eight paragraphs. The speech of Dante’s Ugolino, which extends for 74 verses, contains as many as 38 enjambments in the space of 75 verses, while the entire canto contains


approximately 70 enjambments over 155 verses. Their increased number is a sign of Dante’s elevation of style. The same number of breaks can be found, for instance, in Inferno, XXVI, dominated by the character of Ulysses, and in Inferno, XIII, which gives voice to Pier della Vigna: approximately 34 in the first and 31 in the second. Cary tends to respect Dante’s proportions, introducing an enjambment approximately every other line. What this suggests is that Cary tends to use the same sustained style throughout the translation, thus eliminating the fundamental variety of the Divine Comedy. His translating approach bears out the emphasis on the ‘epic’ genre of the poem identified in the paratexts and the neglect of Dante’s comic and lyric styles in favour of the tragic one. The analysis of Cary’s vocabulary further supports this view. Cary’s lexical choices are particularly relevant to an understanding of his approach to translation. As with his blank verse, his diction, too, has been defined as Miltonic. However, unequivocal echoes from Milton are few. Most of the alleged Miltonic words or phrases identified are equally found in Shakespeare or in other pre-Miltonic poets. In the few notes included in The Inferno Cary acknowledges his debt to Milton for the word ‘grunsel’, from Paradise Lost, I, 460 (The Inferno, vol. I, 143n). One should therefore speak more generally of archaisms. These have been documented by King and more recently by Crisafulli.98 Despite its pre-Miltonic origin, Cary’s archaic vocabulary reinforces the effect of a style in the manner of Milton and contributes to elevating the register. In order to achieve this, Cary applies various strategies to attenuate the taboo language and the lower register of the ‘comic’ infernal cantos. As Crisafulli illustrates, Cary’s strategies range from bowdlerisation to euphemism, or less frequently to omission (or zero translation). Thus, for instance, Dante’s description of the flatterers in ‘sterco / che dalle uman privadi parea mosso’ (Inferno, XVIII, 112–13) is translated as ‘ordure, that appeared / Draff of the human body’ (XVIII, 109–114) where the words ‘ordure’ and ‘draff’ are archaic and less scatologic than Dante’s.99 In the same canto ‘col capo sì di merda lordo’ (line 116) is reduced by Cary to ‘head so grimed’ (line 113). Although these interventions are not surprising, as translators of all times have often felt the need to reduce or modify taboo language, colloquialisms or scatology, it is interesting that in a letter to Seward, Cary denied any intervention on this aspect of Dante’s poem.100 Cary’s other inventions at the level of diction are not justified by reasons of decorum and have consequently received less attention by critics. The Vision reveals Cary’s intervention on the sections of the


Divine Comedy that draw on the linguistic conventions of Dante’s earlier love poetry, the so called ‘dolce stil novo’. In his translation of Inferno, V Cary emphasises Francesca’s awareness of her sinful love: (my emphasis): ’One day, For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Oft-times by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter’d cheek. But at one point Alone we fell. When of that smile we read, The wished smile so rapturously kiss’d By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er From me shall separate, at once my lips All trembling kissed. The book and writer both Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day We read no more.’ (The Vision, Hell, V, 123–35) The verb ‘fell’ that anticipates the two lovers’ destiny in the afterlife introduces a moral connotation,101 and so does the qualification of the book and the writer as ‘love purveyors’ (line 134) that replaces the more ambiguous reference to Lancelot du Lac’s Galehaut.102 Similar interventions concern the last purgatorial cantos in which Dante reintroduces Beatrice as his guide. Cary’s choice of vocabulary tends to reduce the complex representation of Dante’s muse as spiritual, earthly and poetic love. As critics have pointed out, in his second canticle Dante reinterprets his early love poetry and re-directs it in the light of Beatrice’s new role as theological guide and instructor.103 Cary generally translates without any particular intervention the vocabulary of Dante’s early poetry,104 but reduces Dante’s celebration of the feminine, which occupies such an important place in the Earthly Paradise cantos, into a hierarchical one. Thus in Purgatorio, XXX, 36, Dante’s ‘stupor’ [awe] gives way to ‘shuddering dread’ (The Vision, 35), Cary twice translates ‘donna’ [woman] as ‘virgin’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 32; 62), thus maintaining a higher register, and in Purgatorio XXIX he similarly translates ‘tre donne’ – Dante’s allegorical three theological virtues – as ‘three nymphs’ (line 116). In Purgatorio, XXX he again modifies register


and connotation by translating ‘vista’ [sight] as ‘vision’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 39). Cary’s surprising interventions can be ascribed to his domesticating strategy: the absence of a similarly important female figure in the British epic tradition must have prompted his decision to intervene on this aspect of the Divine Comedy. Considering Cary’s use of archaic words and words of Latin origin, it is worth exploring whether his diction introduces any Italian neologisms, thus applying, in this case, a foreignising translating strategy. In fact, even this approach to The Vision reveals his conservatism: Cary does not introduce neologisms, even when rendering Dante’s. For most of his alleged loanwords or calques there is a correspondent use in the English poetic tradition. For example, Cary uses the phrase ‘fell repast’ as translation of ‘fiero pasto’ in The Vision, Hell, XXXIII, 1; Milton’s Paradise Lost offers an important precedent ‘[They] … howle and gnaw / My Bowels, their repast’ (Paradise Lost, II, 799–800). The use of the verb ‘lave’ as a rendering of ‘lavare’ [wash] in Purgatory, I, 96, or XXXI, 104, occurs in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (III, ii, 33) and Milton’s Lycidas.105 Similarly, the adjective ‘chary’ as a possible calque for ‘caro’ [dear] in Paradise, XVII, 4, occurs both in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (VI, 175) and in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXII. Among the less documented words, one finds ‘imparadise’ for the Italian ‘imparadisa’ (Paradise, XXVIII, 3), already used by Milton in Paradise Lost (IV, 506), ‘carols’ for ‘carole’ (Paradise, XXV, 99) and ‘lustre’ in the sense of lightening for the Italian ‘lustro’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXIX, 16). Another lexical choice that is worth mentioning is the extensive use of ‘serene’, both as adjective and noun. This use occurs, for instance, in The Vision, Purgatory, I, 14; V, 37, Paradise, XXIX, 60; XXVIII, 76; XXXII, 88. The adjective is again well documented in Milton (Comus, 4), in Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.i.I.V), as well as in Gray (Song, 9). The noun is found in Cowper (Charity, 132) and Byron (Child Harold, II. lxx). Cowper’s use points out the significance of this author for Cary.106 Finally, Cary’s domesticating strategies are also evident in some clear attempts to introduce vagueness – an aspect of the Miltonic sublime – or, occasionally, to emphasise or introduce the Gothic aspect of Dante’s poem. Both interventions tend to encourage the reader to associate the Divine Comedy with an established English genre. Thus the ‘selva oscura’ [dark forest] of Inferno, I, becomes a ‘gloomy wood’ (The Vision, I, 2); in Inferno, VI Ciacco informs Dante of the other Florentines ‘al fondo’ [at the bottom] (Inferno, VI, 82), in Cary they are in ‘the dark abyss’ (The Vision, VI: 88); Dante’s ‘versi strani’ [strange


verses] (Inferno, IX, 63) are, in The Vision, his ‘mystic strain’ (line 64). Cary translated with suggestive vagueness and with the insertions of poeticisms Dante’s meeting with the Harpies in Inferno, XIII (emphasis added): Broad are their pennons, of the human form Their neck and countenance, arm’d with talons keen The feet, and the huge belly fledge with wings. These sit and wail on the drear mystic wood. (The Vision, XIII, 14–17) Gerione, by Dante called ‘la fiera’ [the beast] (Inferno, XVII, 1) is, in The Vision, ‘The Fell monster’ (line 3). The diction of Cary’s translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso also reveals his preoccupation with using a uniform poetic register. Cary consistently uses ‘cry’ to translate ‘say’ thus introducing pathos.107 Dante’s devotional beating of his breast in Purgatorio, IX becomes suggestively mysterious in The Vision where he ‘fell / Thrice on my bosom prostrate’ (lines 100–11). In Paradiso, VII, ‘l’abisso’ [the abyss] (94) becomes ‘the dread abyss’ (The Vision, line 92), ‘periclo’ [danger] (Paradiso, VIII, 1) becomes ‘peril dark’, and at the climax of his experience, Dante’s mind ‘Hover’d the brink of dread infinitude’ (Paradiso, XXXIII, 80–1) (my emphasis). However, if we consider a certain need of padding to accommodate the difference between the Italian ‘endecasillabo’ and the blank verse, Cary’s Gothicisms are not considerable: contemporary critics, for instance, did not perceive a Gothic quality in The Vision. More evident is Cary’s ambition to give his translation, as far as possible, uniformity of tone and of style.

Concluding remarks A stylistic analysis of The Vision confirms that the translation is beset by an inherent tension: it is innovative for its attention to textual criticism that foregrounds the importance of the source text, but conservative for its domesticating strategies. This ambiguity partly explains the positive critical reception of The Vision, and its popularity both among the general public and the Romantic literary establishment. Cary’s contribution to the reception of Dante, however, must be assessed in conjunction with his chief reviewers and promoters: Ugo Foscolo and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As the next chapter intends to show, the


success of The Vision is an episode that anticipates modern advertising and publishing strategies in which author, critic and publisher cooperate in promoting a translation they perceive as marketable.

3 Dante and High Culture: the Romantic Search for the Epic

Epic poetry is the art of being as long as possible in telling an uninteresting story: and an epic poem is a mixture of history without truth and of romance without imagination … I am persuaded that the reason why so exceedingly few have succeeded, is from the absurdity of the species … why has everybody failed in this but the inventor Homer? … Virgil … has accomplished but an insipid imitation … Milton, all imagination, and a thousand times more sublime and spirited, has produced a monster … Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam [italics added]. Ariosto was a more agreeable Amadis de Gaul in a bawdy-house, and Spencer [sic], John Bunyan in rhyme. Tasso wearies one with their [sic] insuperable crime of stanza and by a thousand puerilities of that dull dignity which is demanded for the epic; and Voltaire who retained his good sense in heroics, lost his spirit and fire in them. In short, epic poetry is like what is first celebrated, the heroes of a world that knew nothing better than courage and conquest. It is not suited to an improved and polished state of things. It has continued to degenerate from the founder of the family, and happily expired in the last bastard of the race, Ossian. (Horace Walpole to William Mason, 25 June 1782)1 In his letter Horace Walpole aims to discourage William Mason from devoting himself to epic poetry.2 Walpole represents an exception among British art connoisseurs for his lack of interest in Dante. According to Tinkler-Villani, Walpole’s neglect suggests that to the enthusiasts of the Gothic, Dante’s poem was a disappointment; Anna 56

Dante and High Culture: the Romantic Search for the Epic 57

Seward, too, a fond reader of Gothic novels, perceptively complained that ‘the poet, being his own hero, involves by necessity an unpleasant quantity of egotism’.3 In fact Walpole’s cursory disparagement of Dante must be understood in the context of his overall rejection of the epic: Homer being the unreachable ideal, no later attempt to frame an epic poem in any European literature is satisfactory. Walpole’s assessment, despite its superficial and hasty dismissal, is a significant document of the eighteenth-century British reception of Dante. It shows that before the publication of the complete English translations of the Divine Comedy the British literary establishment had already accepted the poem’s inclusion in the European epic tradition. Walpole identifies Voltaire as the source of his approach to the epic. To readers well acquainted with the work of the French thinker, his dislike of Dante was well known. However, to the wider British reading public the pamphlets published by Voltaire’s Italian detractors were equally responsible for focusing attention on his few statements on the Italian poet. They criticised Voltaire’s neglect of Dante in his 1728 Essay upon the Epick poetry of the European Nations from Homer down to Milton.4 The essay occasioned many responses from Italian critics, but three of the most significant ones were published in Britain.5 The first riposte was Paolo Antonio Rolli’s Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay on the epick poetry of the European nations, published in two translations; the French translation was by the Abbé Antonini (1728) and the Italian translation was by Rolli himself. It was published in Verona in 1730 with the first four books of his translation of Paradise Lost.6 A second riposte was published in London by Giuseppe Baretti in 1753 with a more ambitious aim declared in the title, A dissertation upon the Italian poetry, in which are interspersed some remarks on Mr. Voltaire’s Essay on the epic poets.7 At this time, Baretti was still trying to establish his reputation in London, where he had arrived in 1751; his intention, therefore, was to become a populariser of Italian literature and to establish a European reputation as a critic. Rolli, on the other hand, a pupil of the Italian critic Gian Vincenzo Gravina and a friend of Metastasio, was already one of the most important representatives of the Italian literary establishment in Britain. According to George E. Dorris, ‘for thirty years he represented the Italian literary tradition in England, teaching, writing, translating and editing’.8 It is significant that, after attacking Rolli in a letter to Jacob Verner (14 September 1733), Voltaire proceeded to revise the essay in accordance with many of his suggestions;9 Voltaire also felt compelled to reply to Vincenzio Martinelli’s more aggressive and personal attack in his Lettere familiari e critiche (1757).10


These were also first published in London, and later in Paris as a preface to Biagioli’s influential edition of the Divine Comedy.11 Baretti’s essay is the most significant from the viewpoint of the British reception of Dante. According to David Williams, Through Baretti the debate in English literary circles over Dante, as well as the broader issue of the status of Italian literature in general, intensified in the middle years of the eighteenth century, prolonging and reinforcing as a consequence the impact of Voltaire’s Essay through more than three decades of English literary criticism. So tenaciously influential was Voltaire’s early indifference that resistance to Dante in England was to continue for some considerable time after Baretti’s efforts to counteract it.12 Although he did not receive Voltaire’s open acknowledgment, Baretti might have influenced his later interest in Dante. Voltaire included a positive evaluation of the poet in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations in 1756,13 but by the late 1750s his meeting with the Italian critic Saverio Bettinelli had strengthened his opposition to Dante14 and resulted in a forceful dismissal of the poet in an article included in his Mélanges de Littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (1756). His supposed ‘divinity’, it claims, is a result of his unreadability: Les Italiens l’appellent divin, mais c’est une divinité cachée; … sa réputation s’affermira toujours parce qu’on ne le lit guère. Il y a de lui une vingtaine de traits qu’on sait par cœur: cela suffit pour s’épargner la peine d’examiner le reste.15 This forceful statement concerning the contemporary lack of interest in the Divine Comedy was echoed throughout the eighteenth century in Britain and in Europe. It was undoubtedly better known than his Italian reprimands.16 However, despite Voltaire, the debate in Britain succeeded in associating the name of Dante with the epic tradition. Although it was Cary’s translation that introduced a Miltonic reading of Dante in the second half of the eighteenth century, one often finds the implicit or explicit comparison between the two poets because of their common epic ambitions. Thus Henry John Todd’s edition of the Poetical Works of John Milton includes the poet’s debts to Dante, as noted also by the long review article in the Quarterly Review.17 Baretti even suggested that ‘Milton took the first Hint of his Paradise Lost from a noble and famous Epic Poet’, that is to say, Dante.18


In the thirty-four years between the publication of Boyd’s translation of the Inferno and of The Vision 1819, one finds frequent references to Dante and the Divine Comedy in the growing number of literary magazines that fought for the control of public taste.19 Political as well as literary considerations determine the editors’ choices. Recent criticism has pointed out that the British reception of Dante was mostly controlled by the Whigs.20 Crisafulli cogently emphasises the role of Whig critics in promoting a Protestant reading of Dante inspired by his antipapal invective.21 According to Alison Milbank: Italian taste had a directly political dimension in the 1700s, as the preferred style of the Whigs in their Palladian villas, which were adorned with the classical statuary and Italian paintings brought home from the Grand Tour … Italy for the Whigs was a source (with Greece) of their aesthetic and political inheritance.22 The wider European interests of the Whigs was certainly responsible for their leading role in the support and promotion of Italian culture. However, the political appropriation of Dante as documented by literary magazines is less prominent before the 1820s, the decade when the Whigs became more closely involved in the Italian anti-Austrian riots. Most magazines reviewed Simonde de Sismondi’s De la Littérature du Midi de l’Europe. Sismondi treats European national literatures within the framework of his theory of the division between southern and northern literatures, derived from Montesquieu’s analysis of the relationship between climate and moral behaviour.23 He emphasises the importance of Dante as the shaping genius of the Italian language and the poet of the Inferno and introduces a terza rima translation of the Ugolino episode. His approach to Dante is a positive one and Dante is singled out as the shaping ‘genius’ of Italian thirteenth-century literature. The conservative Quarterly Review reviewed the volume in 1812 while William Hazlitt reviewed it in 1815 for the Edinburgh Review.24 Hazlitt’s review embraces Sismondi’s approach to Dante only partially; while he accepts the description of Dante as the southern Gothic poet of the Inferno, the analysis wavers between admiration and criticism. Occasionally his evaluation echoes Voltaire’s in claiming that ‘there are occasional striking images in Dante – but these are exceptions’, but he also qualifies Dante’s defects as a sign of his modernity: Dante is a striking instance of the essential excellencies and defects of modern genius … Dante, as well as Milton, appears to have been


indebted to the writers of the old Testament, for the gloomy tone of his mind, for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry. But there is more deep-working passion in Dante, and more imagination in Milton.25 The comparison with Milton, to the English poet’s advantage, is the most significant aspect of the Romantic assimilation of Dante. Hazlitt would further develop his analysis of the poet in his 1818 lectures, as will be discussed later in this chapter, but his early contribution prefigures the content of the later lectures. The antiquarian interest in Medieval literature is a further source of references to Dante from both sides of the political divide. For instance, Villani’s Croniche were treated in the Quarterly Review in the July 1813 issue and the article considers them especially as Dante’s most important source.26 These references to Dante, however cursory, confirm the progressive canonisation of the Italian poet by the turn of the century.27 The name of Dante in fact occurs in some British literary histories, such as John Watkins’s A Universal Biographical and Historical Dictionary (1800), Alexander Chalmers’s The General Biographical Dictionary (1813) and John Colin Dunlop’s The History of Fiction (1814).28 Robert Southey and Thomas Campbell’s interest in Dante certainly played a significant role in the process. According to Tilottama Rajan, their anthologies contributed to the construction of British national literature later consolidated by literary histories and critical essays. 29 Thomas Campbell devoted a section of his lectures on poetry to the comparison between Tasso’s better known poetry and Dante. 30 Southey, apart from mentioning Dante in his anthology Specimens of the Later English Poets,31 authored a long review article on the Memoirs of William Hayley that acknowledged the rebirth of interest in European and Italian literatures and its significance for a change in British literary taste away from the French neoclassical model towards the Romantic sensibility: But at this time a revival was beginning; it was brought about, not by the appearance of great and original genius, but by awakening the public to the merits of our old writers, and of those of other countries. The former task was affected by Percy and Warton … the latter task it was Hayley’s fortune to perform.32 Southey shows a considerable familiarity with Hayley’s and Cary’s translations of Dante, which he praises for avoiding the couplets of


Pope’s Homer, ‘unfitted … for comprehending the excellencies of Dante’s severe and perfect style’.33 The reception of the Italian poet by British high culture was already well under way by the end of the century despite the lack of complete translations of the Divine Comedy. Boyd’s and Cary’s translations thus responded to an already existing demand for publications on Dante, but their reluctance to envision their role as critics testifies to their perception of the subservient role of translation within the literary establishment.

The early reception: reviews of Boyd’s and Cary’s translations Previous studies of the reception of Dante have paid some attention to the period before 1818, but in general this early phase still calls for further analysis. Crisafulli’s detailed study of The Vision, however, considers reviews of Cary’s translation before and after 1818 in order ‘to explain why reviewers praised (and determined the success of) The Vision’.34 Debts to his detailed overview will be acknowledged throughout. I also follow Crisafulli’s practice in outlining three phases of the reception of Dante: the year 1818 marks the division between the first two, while the third in fact covers the 1820s and 1830s. Having decided to focus my analysis on the Romantic age, I will give only few examples from this later phase, more fully treated by Crisafulli.35 The difficulty in analysing the reviews of the first two British translations of Dante lies in the nature of eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury reviewing: the articles typically include long passages from the introductions of the works reviewed, some evaluation on the author translated and, few, if indeed any, statements on the translation. Crisafulli identifies in them a strong emphasis on the notion of ‘fidelity’ , however variously defined. As discussed previously, the late eighteenth-century preference tended toward more ‘literal’ translation. However, this requirement must be understood as a question of degree: domestication is still required by both critics and reviewers, thus confirming Venuti’s insistence on the translator’s invisibility in the British tradition.36 Boyd’s Inferno was widely reviewed, but critics on the whole focused more on Dante’s poem than on the translation. The reviewers tend to emphasise the primitive nature of Dante’s imagination as typical of the Italian Middle Ages.37 A first analysis of Boyd’s translating practice emerges in the Gentleman’s Magazine: aware of a disparity between the


original text and the translation, the reviewer claims that ‘this version … will therefore please an English, more than an Italian, reader, who compares it with the original’.38 Boyd’s complete translation of the Divine Comedy encountered a less favourable treatment. Reviewers generally pointed out his freedom of interpretation, although with different aims.39 Robert Morehead, who reviewed the poem for the Edinburgh Review is the most outspoken in criticising Boyd’s ‘obscure phrases’ and calls for a prose translation.40 Demands on translators are quite high in the first half of the century, as is shown by the reviewer for the Literary Journal. Introducing a comparison between Cary’s translation and Boyd’s, the reviewer laments that ‘either the verse must appear harsh and rude, or it must be far from literal’.41 Cary’s translation of the Inferno was widely reviewed. His early collaboration with the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine accounts for the announcement and review of almost all the editions of The Vision. The review of The Inferno relies heavily on the preface: the translation is praised as ‘serviceable to the cause of literature, and the interests of virtue’ and considers Dante ‘one of the most sublime and moral, but certainly one of the most [obscure] writers in any language’.42 The Literary Journal outlines the complexity of the Divine Comedy, compared to Virgil’s Aeneid, but eventually eludes the argument by simplification: The outline of the story is the same with that of the sixth book of the Eneid, only with this difference, that in the Eneid the hero visits the world of spirits, whereas here the poet himself undertakes the journey, and is accompanied a certain way by the writer of the Eneid as his guide.43 Cary’s friendship with Thomas Price explains the extensive treatment of his translations in the Critical Review. Price wrote two long articles that draw extensively from Cary’s introduction and from the notes appended to the translation, but he also quotes from Tiraboschi’s edition of the Divine Comedy. Price rightly envisages the need to enforce the association with Milton, and credits Milton as the exemplary source for Cary’s excessive use of inversion: … the rigid exactness with which Mr. Cary has adhered to the very words of the text and their collocation, has at times imposed a degree of restraint and hardness of construction upon his version … Into this he was probably led by the example of Milton, whom he


has in several passages as closely imitated, as Milton before him imitated Dante.44 Price uses the evaluative canon of literalness and finds that The Vision stands the test, because ‘Mr Cary is literal to a degree, which we think has never been exceeded in any poetical, and scarcely in any prose translation which has hitherto appeared in the English language.’45 Lockhart Muirhead (1765–1829), Professor in Natural History at Glasgow University and teacher of Italian and French, reviewed The Inferno for the Monthly Review (April 1808). He too focuses his brief but enthusiastic praise of The Inferno on its ‘fidelity’ and its ‘poetical and harmonious’ versification.46 Cary’s The Vision 1814 received less notice than his earlier translation. Price’s withdrawal from the editorship of the Critical Review accounts for the shorter and less informative reviews that the journal later published. Henry Cary records that Price had actually written an article for the occasion, but it was refused by the new proprietors.47 The new reviewer now complains that although ‘the subject [of Dante’s poem] is sublime – not so the prevailing language of the translator’.48 Lockhart Muirhead’s review of the complete translation for the Monthly Review, while confirming the earlier praise of Cary’s fidelity, now concentrate on his use of archaic expression (my italics): As to the translation itself, it is evidently the work of no ordinary pains and diligence, and may safely, we think, aspire to the praise of fidelity; at least, it is not often that we would venture to dissent from Mr. Cary’s interpretations. The uniform gravity, too, the occasional harshness, and the antiquated quaintish air of many of his lines, singularly harmonize with the kindred qualities of his celebrated exemplar. If, in short, we overlook the absence of rhyme, the present version appears to be a close approximation of the original, and to breathe much of its peculiar and singular spirit.49 With the exception of Foscolo’s article in the Edinburgh Review, the 1819 edition of the translation was not reviewed again by the major journals with the exception of the Eclectic Review and the British Critic; both published very positive articles on the new edition, commending the choice of blank verse and the importance of the translation for British readers.50 However, Coleridge and Foscolo’s reviews of Cary


introduce a qualitative change in British critical approaches to Dante: disparaging criticism of the poem is replaced by studies on its nature, its background and its times. This change was helped by the popularity of Cary’s translation, as the sales of the poem show, and by the publication of three new translations: in 1812 Joseph Hume’s blankverse Inferno, in 1840 Ichabod Charles Wright’s six-line stanza Comedy, and in 1843 John Dayman’s terza-rima Inferno. Crisafulli notes that in the 1830s and 1840s, perhaps also due to competing translations, critics are less overwhelming enthusiastic about The Vision, but in general ‘most reviewers, despite their critical attitudes, did not challenge the canonical status that The Vision enjoyed in the receiving tradition’.51 A stronger demand for the use of terza rima, as noted by Crisafulli, can be interpreted as a proof of the higher reputation enjoyed by the source text. I think further circumstancial evidence supports the claim; the publication of more detailed and critically informed articles on Dante and his translations are the consequence of the availability of reviewers with a greater knowledge of Italian literature and culture.52 Thus, the historian Eyre Evans Crowe (1799–1868) visited Italy in 1822 and the following year he published a notable article on Dante and his times in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.53 William Stewart Rose, too, became a translator from the Italian and a reviewer of related subjects after his 1814 trip to Italy. Although more interested in Gian Battista Casti’s parodic epics, Rose also commented on Cary’s translation in his review of J.H. Wiffen’s translation of Tasso; Rose praises Cary’s work despite the ‘diffuseness’ of his blank verse and acknowledges that ‘the renewal of our intercourse with Italy has revived the public attention with regard to the great poets of that Peninsula, of many attempts to translate them’.54 Lockhart Muirhead similarly promoted an interest in Italy from the beginning of the century to 1815–16 with reviews, translations and articles of Italian interest both for the Monthly Review and the Edinburgh Review.55 These British connoisseurs of Italian literature promoted British readers’ acquaintance with Dante, as did the Italian poet and critic Ugo Foscolo’s productive career as a reviewer. 56 Their approach is not univocal, but on the whole the British contributions do not support Foscolo’s and the Whig political reading of the poet. Crowe, for instance, openly rejects their interpretation of Dante as ‘the apostle of liberty’ and emphasises his parochial support of his party and his town, describing him as ‘full of that mean, municipal prejudice’.57


Dante and British Romantic criticism Thomas L Cooksey summarises the significance of the year 1818 for the British critical reception of Dante: That 1818 should mark this transformation of Dante’s fate is in part a result of the cultural ambience of that time, but it is also in part the result of the popularizing work of three men: Henry Francis Cary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ugo Foscolo. In a very real sense, these men were not Dante’s promoters or propagators as much as they were his creators. They conditioned the Florentine’s nineteenth-century reception by transforming him into their own images, fabricating a ‘Romantic’ Dante.58 Whatever the intention of Cooksey’s use of the adjective ‘romantic’, this book uses it in a chronological sense, as suggested by recent developments in Romantic studies. From this perspective one is bound to question to what extent other critics also contributed to the British Romantic assessment of Dante. In fact, William Hazlitt gave a lecture on Dante and Milton in 1818; although derivative, his contribution to the critical debate cannot be ignored. Other Romantic critics made only sparse comments on Dante. Charles Lamb, for instance, expressed his own views on what ‘Dantesque’ poetry might be in a letter to Coleridge in 1796, well before reading the Divine Comedy: With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed. I had not presumed to expect any thing of such excellence from Southey … an exquisite combination of the ludicrous and the terrible,- I have not read either, even in translation, but such I conceive to be the manner of Dante & Ariosto.59 Leigh Hunt took a special interest in the historical background to Inferno, V, which forms the inspiration for the poem The Story of Rimini, but his later Stories from the Italian Poets (1846) show that his critical opinion on the Divine Comedy was not in line with contemporary approaches to Dante and, on the contrary, reflected reservations more commonly expressed in the eighteenth century. Thus he finds fault with Dante’s use of different genres and especially with the fact that ‘in one and the same poem, [he] speaks of the false gods of Paganism, and yet retains much of its lower mythology’.60 Hunt’s rejection of Dante’s system of Infernal punishments, however, finds him in


agreement with Shelley and Blake, and like them he reproaches Dante: ‘But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of cruelty itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge and produce in him the bad passions he punishes.’61 William Hazlitt’s approach to Dante shares with Coleridge a debt to Friedrich Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur (1815). In his first lecture on the English poets delivered at the Surrey Institution in the winter of 1818, Hazlitt reworked Schlegel’s study of Dante with interesting results.62 While expanding his previous article on Sismondi’s Literature of the South, Hazlitt pays homage to Dante, unequalled in his writings as ‘the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering’.63 He associates him with Homer, the Bible and Ossian: Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection … He stood bewildered, not appalled, on the dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world.64 In the article as well as in the lecture Hazlitt compares Dante with Milton.65 The comparison results in the recognition of Milton’s power, and his ability to overcome the Catholic prejudices ‘of which Tasso and Dante have availed themselves’.66 Milton and Dante, however, share the eloquence of arguments derived from their partisanship. ‘In this respect’, Hazlitt concludes, ‘Milton resembles Dante, (the only modern writer with whom he has any thing in common).’67 He thus reverses Schlegel’s distinction between the sublime poetry of Milton and the classical poetry of Dante. Milton’s verse acquires the qualities of sculptural realism traditionally attributed to the Italian language.68 According to Judy Little, Hazlitt’s claim is notable for its desire to question commonly held approaches to Milton: His [Hazlitt’s] discussions of Milton in particular challenge the assertion – current at least from William Gilpin’s era and soon to be echoed by Coleridge – that Milton was fundamentally a ‘musical’, not a ‘picturesque,’ poet. Although Hazlitt attacks Greek sculpture itself at the beginning of his 1818 lectures, sculpure set in a visual field becomes both a dominant and a praiseworthy characteristic of Milton.69


While Milton’s poetry is qualified by statuary imagery, Dante’s is characterised by emotions usually associated with the sublime or the pathetic sublime:70 ‘He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings.’71 Hazlitt’s contribution is especially significant because it represents the first significant appreciation of Dante by a Romantic critic. Hazlitt’s neglect in Cooksey’s analysis is therefore surprising and is probably the result of Cooksey’s desire to emphasise the fundamental role played by translations in literary reception. Cary, Coleridge and Foscolo must certainly be assessed in conjunction because of the ways in which their contributions are interwoven. To this extent they can be credited with having created a certain image of Dante for British Romanticism. On 27 February 1818 Coleridge devoted his tenth public lecture at the London Philosophical Society to the Divine Comedy. In the same month Foscolo published a lengthy article on the epic poem, introduced as a review of Biagioli’s edition of the Divine Comedy and of The Vision. Both Coleridge and Foscolo linked their contribution to Cary’s translation, but their intentions were exactly opposite: Coleridge intended to promote what he considered Cary’s outstanding achievement, Foscolo wanted to advance his own reputation in England by associating his work with that of an English translator. While Coleridge’s contribution consists mainly in having placed Cary’s translation within the tradition of English blank-verse poetry, Foscolo supplied the English reading public with a new critical approach to the Divine Comedy that was to inaugurate a new era in Dantean studies. Despite their different cultural and literary backgrounds, the two critics were well versed in the vanguard movements of their respective countries and shared a common interest in European literature. Francis Jeffrey identified such traits in Foscolo’s style: I am not so ignorant of Mr. Foscolo’s character as to feel any surprise at the vivacity of his fancy or the graces of his style – but I confess I was not quite prepared for a taste so little marked with any national peculiarity as to appear even in this distant land not so much a foreign as an European one.72 It is not surprising, therefore, that Coleridge’s and Foscolo’s criticisms of the Divine Comedy reveal interesting similarities; far from being


derivative, these are the result of the two poets’ common sources in European literature and thought: the writings of August and Friedrich von Schlegel, the philosophy of Giambattista Vico and the poetry of James Macpherson and of Homer. Foscolo found in Vico’s philosophy the link between the three poets: for Vico, Dante is another Homer, the voice of a new age of heroism and imagination. As he explains more clearly in a letter: Just as we, in the New Science, proved Homer to be, for the above reasons, the first certain Greek author to have come down to us, so is he without doubt the prince and father of all poets who flourished afterwards in the learned times of Greece which followed him, but rather a long time afterwards … On account of such poverty of vernacular speech, Dante, in order to unfold his Comedy, had to assemble a language from those of all the peoples of Italy, in the same way that Homer had compiled his, using all those of Greece.73 Foscolo found in Vico the origin of his Romantic cult of personality, the importance of history in the Divine Comedy, as well as the celebration of the primitive imagination which lies at the origin of myths. Coleridge approached the same themes by way of his assimilation and discussion of Friedrich von Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling: they too saw in Dante a unique shaping personality, the expression of Nature, History and Art, according to Schelling’s threefold interpretation. It seems that Foscolo and Coleridge did not meet. Although in the 1820s they shared common friends and acquaintances – John Hookham Frere, Samuel Rogers, Francis Jeffrey, William Stewart Rose and John Cam Hobhouse – no acknowledgement of their acquaintance can be found either in Coleridge’s or in Foscolo’s writings and letters. The journals and records of Thomas Moore, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers similarly show their missed opportunities for meeting. The reasons for missed encounters between the two may have been because of Foscolo’s strong ties with Lord Holland’s Whig circle, with whom Coleridge had only a formal acquaintance.74 Samuel Rogers represents the closest link between the two. Rogers, who first met Coleridge during a tour in the Lake District, became his regular correspondent soon after his return from Italy. 75 In 1811 he attended Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare and Milton.76 In 1818 and 1819 he attended both lectures on Dante and took notes of the second.77 A letter by John Allen of September 1817


shows that by then Rogers was a close friend of Foscolo; 78 he wrote part of the review of The Vision to be included in Foscolo’s article. 79 Rogers’s contribution reached the Edinburgh Review some time after March 1818, and the February issue of the journal was in fact published in April.80 One wonders whether his contribution was written under the influence of Coleridge’s recent talk on Dante. Rogers claimed the opposite to be true. According to Alexander Dyce, he protested that Cary’s popularity owed more to Foscolo’s essay than to Coleridge’s lecture: I was present at that lecture by Coleridge, during which he spoke of Cary’s Dante in high terms of praise: there were about a hundred and twenty persons in the room. But I doubt if that did much towards making it known. It owes some of its celebrity to me; for the article on Dante in The Edinburgh Review, which was written by Foscolo, has very considerable additions by Mackintosh, and a few by myself.81 The notes he left on Coleridge’s second lecture show an essential difference in background: while Rogers’s contribution is limited in scope and is typical of reviews at the time, Coleridge’s talk is grounded in the German critical approaches to the Middle Ages. Dicki A. Spurgeon’s evaluation of the circulation of the Edinburgh Review confirms the importance of Foscolo’s article in favouring the popularity of The Vision: by 1818 it was selling 13,000 copies.82 Compared to this widespread circulation, the attendance at Coleridge’s two lectures on Dante was modest; Rogers’s figure of 120 people offers a good estimate of the popularity of the course. Rogers claimed that he was instrumental in exposing The Vision to Coleridge’s attention, but this seems unlikely, and is refuted by Henry Cary’s account of the meeting between his father and the poet.83 Coleridge’s three letters to Cary of October and November 1817 confirm their recent acquaintance.84 One must also disagree with King’s conclusion that Moore, Wordsworth, and Rogers himself all owed their knowledge of The Vision to Coleridge.85 This may be true of Wordsworth, but Moore and Rogers met frequently with Foscolo in 1817, and surely exchanged views on the projected article.86 The British Romantic reception of Dante is thus characterised by an interesting palimpsest: Foscolo and Coleridge’s critical contributions overwrite Cary’s own interpretation of Dante, thus supporting and furthering his domesticating strategy.


Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s criticism of Dante Coleridge was already acquainted with the Divine Comedy before his meeting with Cary in 1817. The meeting, in fact, saw him already prepared to evaluate and appreciate Cary’s scholarship. Henry Cary reports in the Memoir: ‘Coleridge was able to recite whole passages of the version of Dante, and, though he had not the original with him, repeated passages of that also, and commented on the translation.’87 The encounter with Cary revived the poet’s interest in the Divine Comedy. The two letters Coleridge wrote to Cary in autumn 1817 confirm his commitment in promoting the translation. On 29 October 1817, his words, though full of praise, are still cautious concerning the practical possibilities for furthering Cary’s cause.88 His second letter, dated 6 November 1817, contains a confirmation of his admiration for the translation and an offer to place copies of The Vision in the hands of Murray and other prominent booksellers.89 There is little doubt, therefore, that Coleridge spoke enthusiastically of the translation in his 1818 lecture.90 In a note to the second essay of The Friend, he acknowledges the progress achieved in bringing The Vision to public attention: But when I recollect, that a much better and very far more valuable work, the Rev. Mr Carey’s incomparable translation of Dante, had very nearly met with the same fate, I lose all right, and, I trust, all inclination to complain: an inclination, which the mere sense of its folly and uselessness will not always suffice to preclude.91 Coleridge devoted two lectures to the Divine Comedy: the first one, as already recorded, took place on 27 February 1818, a few months after his meeting with Cary, and the second on 11 March 1819 at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. The problem concerning the overlapping of Coleridge’s notes for these two lectures has been approached by Kathleen Coburn, who first printed them in full in the Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge under the heading March 1819.92 According to her findings, the annotations that Henry Nelson Coleridge printed in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as relating to Lecture 10 of the 1818 series are more likely to belong to the later lecture.93 Evidence for this dating is offered by Coleridge’s indirect reference to Henry Hallam’s View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, published only in June 1818, as well as the heading of the notes with the date ‘11 March 1819’.94


No reports of Coleridge’s first lecture have been found. The announcements and advertisements for the lecture published in the Courier were the following: DANTE AND MILTON. – Mr. COLERIDGE’S subjects for To-morrow Evening are, the Object, Plan, and characteristic Beauties; first, of DANTE’s Hell, Purgatory and Paradise; and secondly of the Paradise Lost; with a sketch of the lives and moral grandeur of these two great masters of heroic song, as Men. By permission of the London Philosophical Society … at a quarter after Eight precisely, attention to which is particularly requested for this Lecture. Admission Five Shillings …95 The advertisement in The Times, reported almost verbatim in the Morning Chronicle, speaks of Coleridge’s subject as ‘the Object, Plan and characteristic Beauties of Dante’s divine Comedy and of the Paradise Lost, with a sketch of the lives and moral grandeur of these two Great masters as men and citizens’.96 The only comment on the lecture is Henry Crabb Robinson’s note in his diary for 27 February: Coleridge’s lecture was ‘one of his very best. He digressed less than usually and really gave information and ideas about the poets he professed to criticize.’97 Coleridge’s lecture should be understood in the context of his reading of Dante’s works prior to 1818 as well as his annotations to Cary’s translation. In 1796 Coleridge had read Boyd’s translation and planned a ‘Poem in three one Books in the manner of Dantè on the excursion of Thor’.98 The Divine Comedy was at this time associated with the Edda, and thus seen as a saga most typically characterized by gloomy tones. In The Watchman Coleridge refers to ‘the gloomy Imagination of Dante’ and in a notebook entry in 1803 he quotes Dante’s admonishment on hell’s door.99 Coleridge’s study of Dante, conducted while he was in Malta, marked a substantial change in his approach to the poet. According to Edoardo Zuccato, ‘the journey to Malta was neither an escape nor the “voyage in vain” … : he set off for Malta with literary projects which led him to explore Italian poetry’.100 Before sailing for the island he had requested ‘Dante & a Dictionary’.101 Wordsworth provided him with G.B. Placidi’s edition of Dante’s works, which he used for his annotations during his long stay abroad.102 Coleridge’s notebooks show that he was again engaged on a systematic reading of Dante around May 1807, when he copied into his notebooks long passages from Dante as edited by the Jesuit Pompeo


Venturi.103 By 1807–1808 he had become acquainted with Dante’s prose works: & at the dawn of modern Literature read Dante’s prose intermixed with Poetry, Il Convito, Vita nuova, &c, & all the works of the old Italians prior to, contemporary with, or the immediate successors of Dante / then go to Bellay, &c in France / then to Chaucer &c &c104 This notebook entry sees Coleridge already engaged in placing Dante’s poetry ‘at the dawn’ of modern European literature: he considers the Divine Comedy the first modern allegorical poem, a genre then just born and soon due to decline after Spenser.105 A later entry shows Coleridge more concerned with the historical context of Dante’s works. The situation of Medieval Italy, politically and linguistically divided, is seen as the origin of Dante’s apparent provincialism, in a tradition of courtly literature: ‘Where there are few literary men, and the vast [9,9,9,9,9,9/1,000,000] of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, there will be a poetical Language – from causes, I need not here put down.’106 Coleridge’s notes on Dante show a constant interest in placing the origins of English poetry in its European context. It is this preoccupation that characterizes the lecture on Dante of 1819; as he writes in a preparatory notebook entry: My object in adverting to the Italian Poets is not so much for their own sakes, in which point of view Ariosto alone would have required a separate Lecture, but for the elucidation of the merits of our Countrymen … as to what extent we must consider them as fortunate Imitators of their Italian Predecessors.107 The same preoccupation with origins prompts Coleridge to give Dante a role in his Biographia Literaria. The following passage illustrates the three leading interests of Coleridge’s lectures and criticism in these years: Lastly, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of IMAGINATION in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of Fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite … But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespear and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.108


Both in the lectures and in Biographia Literaria Coleridge is seen as defining the role of each of the two greatest figures of English literature, at the same time claiming Wordsworth’s closeness to them. The position of Dante in Coleridge’s criticism is quite a privileged one: he stands out as the only non-English poet who is always referred to in connection with Milton and Shakespeare. In chapter XV of Biographia Literaria, for instance, to vindicate the fate of Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry, he compares it to Dante: I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted.109 In chapter X the political concern of Dante’s poetry is compared to Milton’s: ‘In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, &c. &c. we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation.’110 These scant references give an indication of two of the possible subjects of Lecture 10: the political involvement and partisanship of Dante and Milton and their different use of images. These two topics still engage Coleridge in his later lecture. According to the notes transcribed in Coleridge’s Notebook 29, his lecture of 11 March 1819 began with a general introduction on the age of Dante. Coleridge records in his notes: ‘Impossible to understand the genius of Dante, difficult to understand the Poem, without dwelling on the SCHOOL MEN, in reference to the preceding & following centuries.’111 His approach reveals the desire to come to terms with Friedrich Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur, which he had been using since 1811.112 He adopts Schlegel’s division of medieval poetry into love poetry, chivalric poetry and allegory, following Schlegel in stating the limited presence of chivalry in the Italian tradition.113 The origin of this discussion is the notebook entry of 1807–1808 in which he had explained allegory as a Christian development.114 In the lecture he develops the argument, borrowing Schlegel’s distinction between finite and infinite in the Greek and in the Christian world; while the ancient polytheistic religions express the need to use the finite for the expression of the absolute, the opposite


happens in Christianity: ‘Finites, even the human Form, must be brought into connection with the Infinite – must be thought of in some shadowy, or enduring relation – Soul, Futurity &c and – Hence two great Effects – a combination of Poetry with Doctrines.’115 With Schlegel and Hallam, Coleridge finds fault in the union of poetry with doctrine in the Divine Comedy: ‘in this’ he states, ‘Dante has failed, far more than Milton’.116 However, a contradictory relationship with his main sources emerges as, under the heading ‘Dante’s excellencies’, Coleridge reverses the limitations admitted as he purports to explain why Dante’s style is superior to Milton and ‘The wonderful sublimity of the (p.10) explained from the true nature of RELIGION. The reason + Understanding.’117 His use of Kant’s distinction highlights here his understanding of Dante’s Catholicism. If the two main sources for Coleridge’s lecture are to be identified in Hallam and Schlegel, what has not been stated so far is his selective use of them. Schlegel, who was to devote his 1802–1803 lectures to a much more profound critical study of the Divine Comedy, sees the Catholic dogma and the poet’s Ghibelline feelings as limiting: ‘The only reproach which we can find against him in regard to these things, is his perpetual Ghibellinism.’118 He then defines the Ghibelline party as ‘aimed at nothing but the establishment of merely worldly dominion’.119 Concerning the association of poetry and religion, Schlegel is assertive in criticising it in poetry throughout history: ‘We remark the defect in Dante, the first and oldest of all great Christian poets, and it is no less frequently to be observed in the works of his later followers Tasso, Milton, and Klopstock.’120 I believe this statement amounts to the disagreement between Coleridge and Schlegel hinted at in the third point of his notes and so far disregarded by critics.121 Schlegel’s discussion of medieval allegories is strongly linked with his discussion of religious poetry. Coleridge rejects Schlegel’s concept of allegory: in 1818 he feels the need to assert the importance of religion, and the Divine Comedy offers an example of the successful union of faith and verse.122 Dante is also the typical Christian poet for his use of allegory, since, according to Coleridge, ‘7. The comb. of Poetry with Doctrines one of the charact. of Xtn Poetry’.123 Coleridge’s second source, the historian Henry Hallam, shows a preference for the Inferno. Like most eighteenth-century commentators, in his View of the State of Europe, Hallam criticises the Paradiso, ‘a continual accumulation of descriptions, separately beautiful, but uniform and tedious’.124 The greatness of the Divine Comedy, for him, resides in its impassioned language and in its contribution to the Italian lan-


guage.125 As for the historical situation in which Dante lived, Hallam introduces an ambiguous approach by comparing medieval Italy to ancient Greece; the implications of the comparison are not entirely positive: ‘They [the Italian Towns] played over again the tragedy of ancient Greece, with all its circumstances of inveterate hatred, unjust ambition, and atrocious retaliation, though with less consummate actors upon the scene.’126 Hallam’s statement is thus not the only source for Coleridge’s praise of the Italian towns as ‘an afterbirth of eldest Greece’.127 A much more positive view was offered by Foscolo’s second article on Dante, which stated that ‘the enormous inequality of fortunes disappeared, and the weight of the capitalists was opposed to the ascendancy of the ancient nobles’.128 Foscolo’s article also contained reservations on Schlegel’s criticism of Dante, which could have strengthened Coleridge’s disagreement with it. If he read it, Coleridge certainly used it sparingly, as is demonstrated by the lack of any other significant reference to it. The assessment of Coleridge’s debt to his sources foregrounds his own contribution to the British critical approach to Dante: his interest in the characteristics of Christian poetry. Coleridge does not express reservations on the poet’s Catholicism, reflecting instead on his approach to allegory. Thus one year after his lecture, he made explicit another important link in his interpretation of Christian poetry: the Platonic quality of Dante’s poem. Defining Platonism as the philosophy that considers ideas to be ‘constitutive & actual’, Coleridge concludes that ‘Dryden could not have been a Platonist – Shakespear, Milton, Dante, Michael Angelo & Raphael could not have been other than Platonists.’129 Considering Coleridge’s interest in his own ‘magnum opus’ at this stage, Platonism now meant something different than adhering to Plato’s philosophy. As Thomas McFarland explains, ‘Kant and Plato … were both conceived by Coleridge as constituting logical prolegomena for the true system which, transcending its philosophical bases, was made complete in Christianity.’130 Only this broad approach to Platonism can accommodate Coleridge’s inclusion of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Raphael and Michelangelo in one all-encompassing category. One note in the lecture suggests Coleridge’s doubt about the allegorical character of Dante’s punishments: ‘The Poem is a system of moral political, and theological Truths with arbitrary personal exemplifications – .’131 I would argue that Coleridge is here expressing a genuine doubt concerning the interpretation of Dante’s use of divine retribution, not explicitly


explained in Cary’s ‘Life of Dante’. Coleridge’s most personal appreciation of Dante is related to his debate with Wordsworth over poetic diction. Thus in Dante: ‘2. Images not only taken from obvious Nature & all intelligible to all; but ever conjoined with the universal feeling received from them – opposed to the idiosyncrasies of some meritorious modern Poets.’132 Chapter XXII of Biographia Literaria, with its analysis of Wordsworth’s defects and merits, is clearly echoed in this passage.133 Coleridge’s criticism also stresses Dante’s concise style thus anticipating the Victorians’ approach to the Divine Comedy.134 Again, in the notes to the second lecture, he states: ‘Topographic REALITY – Dwell on this as Dante’s Charm, and that which makes him indeed a Poet – Nature worse than Chaos, a thousand delusive forms having reality only for the Passions, they excite: the Poet compels them into the service of the Permanent.’135 Macaulay will develop this point further by claiming that Dante’s realism makes him superior to Milton.136 Coleridge’s approach to Dante bears a resemblance to his approach to Shakespeare and Milton: his main concern is to vindicate the poetry over allegory and history, although his Dantean criticism is more informative and less in-depth.137 Coleridge, however, considered his contribution significant, as he expressed in a letter to the publishers Taylor and Hessey: It would be particularly pleasant to me: because I am vain enough to set more than usual value on the Critique, I have devoted to the names of Dante, Donne, and Milton (the middle name will, perhaps, puzzle you) and I mean to publish it singly, in the week following its delivery.138 In autumn 1819, soon after the publication of The Vision in July, Coleridge wrote some annotations on his own edition, now in the British Library.139 All of them relate to passages from the Purgatorio and Paradiso. They reveal how important religion had become in his interpretation of the poem. Referring to lines 12–17 of Paradiso, I, Coleridge writes: In Heaven alone true Reality subsists. In other words, the Poet says – Hitherto, the Poet & Moralist has sufficed; but henceforward the Philosopher must be added: my ‘Paradiso’ must be metaphysical. Yet how to make this compatible & co-present with the equally necessary Element of Poetry – hic labor est! Both the Powers of Intellect,


the Discursive & Sensuous, and the Rational Super-sensuous, must unite at their summits.140 For Coleridge the Paradiso represents that fusion of philosophy and theology which Christian poetry was aiming at. The Vision, he thought, had been able to respect this union. Of Paradise, I, lines 36–41, he writes: ‘Admirably translated. O how few will appreciate its value! … But it is Taste, Scholarship, Discipline, TACT, that must do it.’141 Despite the fact that Coleridge did not expand his notes in fully developed articles, his criticism of Dante is nonetheless significant, as pointed out by most studies on the reception of the poet. Kuhns, Cooksey and Crisafulli emphasise Coleridge’s crucial role as a populariser. Ralph Pite further claims a greater legacy of his study of Dante by investigating ‘significant parallels … between Coleridge’s and Dante’s work in two periods of Coleridge’s life: … between 1804 and 1807 … and secondly, around 1818, when he was occupied in rewriting his periodical, The Friend, for publication in its three-volume edition’.142 From the viewpoint of the British Romantic approach to Dante, Coleridge’s criticism significantly reinforced the eighteenthcentury association of the Divine Comedy with the epic tradition by attenuating the crucial issue of the poet’s Catholicism. Ugo Foscolo’s criticism achieved the same goal with an entirely different approach.

Ugo Foscolo and Samuel Rogers: the Ghibelline Dante Dante’s political allegiance has concerned critics and historians throughout the centuries. Was he a Guelf or a Ghibelline? Born in a family of long-standing Guelf tradition, Dante’s political career reached its apex during the time Florence was controlled by the White Guelfs, the party opposed to Papal intervention in the Italian peninsula. Dante’s post-exile works further show that at least in the first decade of the fourteenth century he tried to promote a stronger imperial control in northern Italy. His treatise Monarchia has often been interpreted as an expression of this endeavour as well as a proof of his neo-Ghibellinism. In nineteenth-century Italy political readings of the poet abound. As the historian Charles T. Davis has pointed out, interpretations range between two extreme positions that see Dante as the anticlerical scourge of the Pope or the supporter of the Empire, in a word, a neo-Ghibelline, or as the Catholic and patriotic Guelf.143 Foscolo’s anticlericalism made him a supporter of the first interpretation that was to


find many advocates in England and France as well as in Italy. Catholic, or neo-Guelf readings of Dante, on the contrary, developed mainly in Italy where to the followers of Gioberti, neo-Guelfism seemed a viable political way to independence with the help of the Pope. For Italian neo-Ghibellines and neo-Guelfs what was at stake was less the true nature of Dante’s own beliefs than the possibility of enlisting his figure for opposing camps of the Italian political divide. The process culminated with the conclusion of the wars of independence momentously coinciding with the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1865. The celebrations held in Florence, the capital of the new Italian kingdom, emphasised the symbolic canonisation of Dante as the prophet of Italian unity.144 Foscolo’s presence in England after 1816 was extremely influential in promoting a lay, or neo-Ghibelline reading of Dante. Crisafulli has pointed out the significance of Foscolo’s anticlericalism which made him particularly welcome in Lord Holland’s Whig circle and promoted his own and Dante’s reputation despite persistent opposition to Roman Catholicism.145 Foscolo’s role in promoting Italian literature in England has yet to be acknowledged. While the importance of his position within the field of Italian Dantean criticism has long been established, the value of his contribution to English Romanticism has still to be substantiated. The main studies devoted to the topic are essentially biographical: thus Vincent’s two studies on Foscolo in England focus mainly on his connection with Byron and Hobhouse, and rely on their correspondence. More significant are the articles by R.W. King and Charles Peter Brand investigating Foscolo’s influence on English scholarship and literature:146 as their analysis points out, Foscolo’s regular contributions to British journals, encouraged, and at the same time satisfied, the demand for information on Italy and Italian culture. From his arrival in England to his death, he contributed as many as twenty-eight articles to periodicals, twenty-three of which concern Italian literature and civilisation. His two articles on Dante for the Edinburgh Review had an important role in the promotion of The Vision, particularly because of the prestige and wide circulation of the journal. Foscolo’s first direct reference to his contributions on Dante dates from Spring 1817.147 A letter to Allen is crucial to understanding his initial approach to the article: Les articles seront motivés sur l’edition nouvelle de quelque Historien, Orateur ou poète italien depuis Dante jusque à Alfieri. Je


prendrai l’auteur classique dont il s’agira comme le pivôt de mes considerations; et j’y melerai des anecdotes politiques, morales, et litteraires concernant son siecle [sic].148 The letter shows that Foscolo intended from the start to devote some attention to Dante’s literary and historical background, however vaguely defined. A letter from the editor Francis Jeffrey reveals that he encouraged Foscolo to focus especially on his ‘historical or political speculations’.149 Foscolo must have interpreted his advice in a broader sense as an invitation to contextualise Dante’s work: the two articles, do not, in fact, introduce an overtly political reading of the poet. Foscolo’s earlier writings similarly reveal a non-politicised approach in avoiding the dangers of anachronism. To the Countess of Albany in 1814 he stressed the coherence of Dante’s political choices: ‘Dante era Guelfo, doveva egli per questo diventar Ghibellino perché i Guelfi lo avevano maltrattato?’ [Dante was Guelf, should he have become a Ghibelline for the reason that the Guelfs had mistreated him?].150 In the same year he was writing to Andrea Calbo advising him to avoid any comparison between his own and Dante’s spleen.151 Despite this, a few days later, in a letter to Quirina Mocenni Magiotti, he compared his own situation to Dante’s.152 These three references illustrate a characteristic of Foscolo’s Dantean criticism: his romantic identification with Dante. This created a tension between his correct historical understanding of the poet and the projection of Foscolo’s own patriotic feelings. Jeffrey’s request thus further encouraged the identification. The article, number IX in the issue for February 1818 of the Edinburgh Review, devotes some attention to Dante’s politics. Thus with his controversial treatise, Monarchia, the poet aimed to demonstrate ‘that all misfortunes of Italy sprang from the false doctrine, that the Popes had a right to interfere in temporal concerns’.153 Crisafulli points out Foscolo’s use of forceful language, some of which, however, could be attributed to the English editors of the article. In fact Foscolo’s correspondence reveals that the contribution was a collaborative venture that should have borne the names of at least two authors: Foscolo himself and Samuel Rogers.154 John Allen’s letter to Foscolo of April 1818, and a note by Mackintosh, followed by Jeffrey’s apology in May, reveal the mistake in the typesetting of the article: Rogers’s contribution was mistaken as the second part of Foscolo’s, and printed immediately after.155 As a result, Jeffrey offered to publish the remaining part of the article in a later issue, and Foscolo decided to have the new part translated by Wallace.156 Rogers’s role is revealed in


Jeffrey’s letter to William Allen of 29 April 1818 in which he explains that ‘Rogers’ part arrived under McIntosh’s cover and without one line of explanation and it has been printed accordingly as the sequel of the original critique leaving out the second part of Foscolo’s and without any notice of a hiatus.’157 Beatrice Corrigan has identified Rogers’s contribution to the overall article on the basis of Jeffrey’s correspondence: it begins with the first paragraph of page 469 and proceeds until the end of the article.158 Rogers’s contribution amounts only to one-third of the article and is mostly concerned with the review of Cary’s translation. Foscolo’s contribution opens with a review of G. Biagioli’s Dante, with a new Italian Commentary, published in Paris in 1818, but it is clearly aimed at directing the English public to an appreciation of Dante and his poetry.159 Foscolo received information about the commentary from Biagioli himself, whom he had met in Paris in 1804.160 By his own admission, his knowledge of it amounted to ‘the text of eight books of the Inferno, with the Commentary’.161 In the review he does acknowledge Biagioli’s ability to approach the text without infuential anxieties, despite the derivative nature of contemporary Dantean criticism. Foscolo’s evaluation finds consensus among contemporary critics. A. Vallone, for instance, makes a similar claim: ‘We believe that in Biagioli one can find a silent polemics against the flat and extensive erudition of the eighteenth century. Historical and literary references are never redundant and always respond to the needs of textual exegesis. These aspects and others … make him a romantic commentator of Dante.’162 Foscolo’s appreciation of Biagioli shows his desire to escape from the contemporary preoccupation with establishing a definitive text. Lamenting the absence of commentaries on the Divine Comedy available to the general public, he emphasises that its text was established as the standard edition of the ‘Accademia della Crusca’ (1595). According to Foscolo the editor’s duty now is to explain Dante’s references to contemporary events, his complex symbolism, and the special character of his poetry. The article is in fact organised according to these three principles, the only exception being the explication of Dante’s allegory: this was to become the inspiration for a complete commentary on the Divine Comedy that Foscolo left unpublished at his death.163 Like Coleridge, Foscolo emphsises Dante’s conciseness as one of the chief characteristics of his style, as the following passage shows: Virgil has related the story of Eurydice in two hundred verses; Dante, in sixty verses, has finished his masterpiece – the Tale of


Francesca da Rimini. The history of Desdemona has a parallel in the following passage of Dante. Nello della Pietra had espoused a lady of noble family at Sienna [sic], named Madonna Pia. Her beauty was the admiration of Tuscany, and excited in the heart of her husband a jealousy, which, exasperated by false reports and groundless suspicions, at length drove him to the desperate resolution of Othello. It is difficult to decide whether the lady was quite innocent; but so Dante represents her. Her husband brought her into the Maremma, which, then as now, was a district destructive to health … Dante had, in this incident, all the materials of an ample and very poetical narrative. But he bestows on it only four verses.164 Concerning the need for commentaries, Foscolo alerts his British readers that Homer and Shakespeare are no less complex than Dante. All three authors, therefore, pose major difficulties to translators, who must also become textual critics. Foscolo intends to alert his readers to translators’ and textual critics’ power to transform a poem, and Homer and Shakespeare offer significant examples: The Helen of Homer is always the same. The reasoning of the critics makes her different from herself. The slightest change in delicate features destroys the physiognomy –. ‘She scorned the champion, but the man she loved’. This is the illicit love of a modern lady of fashion; but it is not that of the amorous queen whom Homer saw in his imagination, and perhaps partly also in the manners of his age.165 In the same way Shakespeare’s beautiful rendering of Othello’s justification in front of the Senate is impaired by translations that themselves become commentaries, such as those of Delille: Shakespeare seems only to give Othello the characteristic features of a savage hero, who repays, with all his affection, those who love and admire him, and with all his vengeance those who betray or despise him. The Senate understood Othello. It may be doubted whether they would have understood, or at least felt the cold generalities which make the metaphysical commentary of Delille.166 Foscolo’s comparison of Dante with Homer and Shakespeare is the result of his historical approach to literature; his preface to his translation from Catullus’ Berenice’s Hair shows his debt to Vico’s philosophy;


this identifies the origins of literature with those of European civilisation. In a similar way, according to Foscolo, Dante’s, Homer’s and Shakespeare’s poetry can be called ‘primitive’ because they ‘sprang spontaneously from their historical periods’.167 According to Vico’s evolutionary approach to civilisation, epic poetry is the creation of a nation, as much as of a single man. In the same way Foscolo describes the Divine Comedy with an interesting metaphor ‘an immense forest, venerable for its antiquity, and astonishing by the growth of trees which seem to have sprung up at once to the gigantic height by the force of nature, aided by some unknown art’.168 History then becomes essential to the understanding of poetry. From this viewpoint he justifies the need to understand Dante’s politics: patriotic feeling and history coincide since, as he stated in the Sepolcri, from Homer’s times poetry was composed as a tribute to the heroes who died for their country (Dei Sepolcri, 279–95).169 In his article in the Edinburgh Review, Foscolo explicitly draws a comparison between Homer and Dante for their ability to portray passion: ’Oh Signor mio quando sarò io lieto A veder la vendetta che nascosa Fa dolce l’ira tua nel tuo secreto’. In this last verse we find a sentiment as old as Homer, who tells us, that ‘vengeance is the pleasure of the gods’ and that ‘a great king digests his wrath in his inmost parts, and hides it till the appointed time of its bursting on the enemy’ … in Dante, it is the passionate exclamation of a man who has long brooded over his own imagination.170 Coleridge also compared Dante to Milton for their civic concerns: in Biographia Literaria he states that ‘in Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, & c. & c. we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation’.171 Samuel Rogers’s five-page contribution focuses on The Vision, which he places correctly against its models. Rogers’s opening, despite some contradiction, typifies the English preference for transparency and adequacy in translations; from this viewpoint Cary’s translation is presented as a success: Of all the translators of Dante with whom we are acquainted, Mr Cary is the most successful; and we cannot but consider his work as a great acquisition to the English reader. It is executed with a


fidelity almost without example; and, though the measure he has adopted, conveys no idea of the original stanza, it is perhaps the best for his purpose, and what Dante himself would have chosen, if he had written in English and in a later day.172 Rogers’s reference to a divergence between Dante’s and Cary’s verse derives from the greater awareness of the importance of form in the Romantic period. Cary’s success is thus measured in comparison with Pope’s practice and Cowper’s theory, as Rogers explains: Cowper asserts it as his opinion, that ‘a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible’; and we must confess that we have never seen one. A translator has no occasion to forge fetters for himself … Mr Pope attempts to cover his with flowers; but he could not conceal them. Sometimes, indeed, he throws them off altogether; but then he ceases to be a translator of Homer.173 By the 1820s dissatisfaction with Pope’s Homer was a commonplace of translation criticism, but it is interesting to note that Rogers does not expand on possible similarities between Cowper’s blank verse and Cary’s. He chooses, instead, to complete his review with select passages from Purgatorio and Paradiso,174 concluding with an obliging reference to the episodes of Francesca da Rimini and Ugolino: ‘When such stories are recorded by such a poet as Dante, “the world will not willingly let them die”. Yet, not very long before he appeared, what a darkness prevailed over Europe!’175 Rogers’s advertising strategy shows his awareness of his public’s taste. By foregrounding the similarities between Dante and Homer and Shakespeare he tones down the chronological and cultural gap between the Italian poet and his British audience.176 Francis Jeffrey gave Foscolo the opportunity to complete his article and to expand it.177 This offer of redress resulted in a second article, published in September 1818 having been translated from the French by Roger Wilbraham.178 The starting point of Foscolo’s second contribution on Dante is F. Cancellieri’s Osservazioni intorno alla questione sopra la originalità del poema di Dante, but the article is clearly a continuation of the previous one. The brief apologetic note with which it opens is the only hint of the editorial mistake that had taken place in February.179 In the second contribution Foscolo clarifies his position concerning the two influential sources of the European approach to Dante: Ginguené’s Histoire littéraire d’Italie and Schlegel’s Lectures on


the History of Literature Ancient and Modern. In particular, Foscolo takes his stance from Schlegel’s criticism, whose views he contrasts with Hallam’s appreciation of Dante’s lyrics: [Schlegel] is graciously pleased to represent Dante as ‘the greatest of Italian and Christian poets’, – but observes, at the same time, that ‘the Ghibeline harshness appears in Dante in a form noble and dignified … His chief defect is, in a word, the want of gentle feelings’ … But the heart of Dante was naturally sensible and even tender; his poetry is full of comparisons from rural life; and the sincerity of his early passion for Beatrice, pierces through the veil of allegory that surrounds her.180 As noted by Francis Jeffrey, Foscolo shares his sources with Coleridge and Hazlitt.181 As for his knowledge of English literature, this dated from his early studies in Italy. He had read Thomas Gray’s poetry and Ossian and had completed his translation from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey by 1813.182 A letter of July 1817 shows that he was familiar with Milton.183 By November 1817 he was acquainted with the Spectator, and by the end of the year he was expressing his preferences on contemporary English literature: ‘e d’Inglesi non ammetterò che Shakespeare e Milton, e il vecchio Chaucer – se lo intendessi – Bensì per entro le lettere citerò versi di Crabb, e di Cowper, et de notre ami Rogers’ [and among the English I will accept only Shakespeare and Milton, and the old Chaucer – if only I could understand him – However, in the letters I will quote verses by Crabbe, and Cowper, and our friend Rogers].184 In his second article, Foscolo displays a direct approach to The Vision: not only are his quotations from the Divine Comedy accompanied by Cary’s translation, but he also comments on them. Referring to Dante’s use of the polite form, Foscolo notes the limitations of Cary’s translation: We believe it has never been remarked that Dante, who makes it a rule, in conversing with all others, to employ the pronoun tu (thou), uses the pronoun voi (you) in addressing his preceptor Brunetto, and his mistress Beatrice. Even Mr Cary has not seized this shade of distinction, and translates Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto – – by – Sir! Brunetto! And art thou here?185


The inadequacy here simply lies in the difference between the two languages; the same can be said for Foscolo’s second comment concerning Cary’s vocabulary. Here his objection is pertinent and addresses a limitation of the translation, as pointed out in the previous chapter: Cary’s difficulty with Dante’s love poetry. Referring to the episode of Dante’s meeting with the musician and friend Casella in canto II of the Purgatorio, Foscolo writes: Dante, in the words ‘amoroso canto’, asks his friend generally to sing him some strain that should excite in him feelings of tenderness and love; whilst in Mr Cary’s translation, the words ‘that song of love’, seem rather to indicate some particular song, and thereby destroy the beauty and delicacy of the poet’s idea; for the touch of courteous and gentle feeling which he imagines in his friend is, that Casella selects a song which Dante had himself written for Beatrice.186 Foscolo’s third and last reference to Cary’s translation concerns the episode of Francesca da Rimini. Here, again, he points out the limitation of an English translation of the poem. In a note to the verses ‘Questi che mai da me non fia diviso’, translated by Cary as ‘he who ne’er / From me shall separate’ (The Vision, Hell, V, 131–2), he comments: ‘We think the word questi, in the original, more evidently conveys the idea that Francesca, when she used it, turned her eyes towards her lover, who was ever by her side.’187 The limitations of Cary’s rendering of the episode of Francesca da Rimini have been illustrated in the previous chapter. Foscolo’s criticism of the translation is limited by its few examples and by the lack of overall discussion of Cary’s translating strategies. His inadequate knowledge of the English language, which he could understand but not write fluently, perhaps hindered his treatment. However, Foscolo’s lack of references to his own translations is surprising. His early experiments in giving the Italian language the cadence of Greek, and his translations from Greek, Latin and English testify to a preference for a foreignising translation, quite at variance from the English tradition.188 In their different approaches, both Cary and Foscolo were reacting to an earlier freer translation, but their understanding of readers’ expectations is of course different. Foscolo’s experiment, with its manifold revisions, shows his initial unhappiness with the process of translating and his reverence for the source text. However, his experience as translator progressively convinced him of the possibility and of the importance of


translations. In a commentary to his translation he opposes a ‘corpselike and literal translation’, such as might be compiled by the grammarian, to an ‘animated version’ as would be accomplished by the poet. This should be preferred, according to Foscolo, because ‘il poeta sarà sempre più fedele, perché poeta e grammatico non se la dicono sì bene tra loro come poeta e poeta’ [the poet will always be more faithful to a poet than the grammarian].189 Despite this approach to translation, Foscolo’s criticism of The Vision is quite moderate. Foscolo used The Vision again in his essay ‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’, published in May 1820 in his Essays on Petrarch.190 After quoting from Cary’s Hell, Canto V, he comments: This translator frequently contravenes the position of his author, who, chiefly depending upon the effect of his versification, says that ‘nothing harmonized by musical enchantment, can be transmuted from one tongue into another, without destroying all its sweetness and harmony’. – The plan of Dante’s poem required that he should pass from picture to picture, from passion to passion. He varies the tone in the different scenes of his journey as rapidly as the crowd of spectres flitted before his eyes.191 This analysis of the uniformity of Cary’s style and register is accurate. Foscolo, however, does not supply a comprehensive criticism of The Vision and prefers instead to provide short and well-known examples. Foscolo’s comments do not imply a consistent rejection of Cary’s translating approach; this is confirmed by a later comment in his short article for the New Monthly Magazine. Here, Foscolo turns to Cary for confirmation of his opinion: ‘In this perhaps we are wrong, since Mr Cary has thought them worthy, precisely for their pathos, to be inserted among those extracts of early poetry with which he has enriched his translation of Dante.’192 By this time, however, Foscolo must have felt a closer relationship with Cary: the translator reviewed the Essays on Petrarch and praised Foscolo’s illustration of the untranslatability of Dante’s poetry: There is no comparison in the nicety required in transferring his [Petrarch’s] poems or those of Dante into another language. The graces of Petrarch are subtle and evanescent: the beauties of Dante defined and palpable. Through the numbers of Petrarch there floats a sweet and brilliant music … Dante with his head erect, makes the tones wait on the unequal current of his own feelings; and they are


accordingly sometimes gentle and mellifluous, at others, impetuous, or austere and rugged.193 Cary’s comment can be seen as a reply to Foscolo’s criticism. Here, furthermore, he can be seen as differentiating the translator’s role from the critic’s. While a translator must be consistent in his choices, the critic is typically forced to notice that source and target text belong to two different literatures.

Across the Channel: The Vision, John Taaffe Junior and Italian reviewers Following Foscolo’s example the Italian ‘Romantics’ progressively rediscovered Dante in their literary querelle with the ‘classicists’. As Mario Fubini has pointed out, the definition of the word ‘Romanticism’ in Italy embraced very different positions.194 It evoked a Europeanminded attitude initially shared by the ‘classicist’. However, it soon became clear that Europe meant new nations and was thus a metonymy for a unified Italy. Italian patriots soon realised that in Dante they had the proof of the existence of an Italian culture as early as the fourteenth century. They could thus claim the superiority of their culture over Latin and Greek; as Pietro Borsieri wrote in the radical journal Il Conciliatore, ‘l’Italia è come la patria della storia moderna’ [Italy is in a way the fatherland of modern history].195 John Taaffe Jr plays a minor yet interesting role in the study of the Divine Comedy in Italy and England and his Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, published by Murray in 1822,196 was reviewed in both countries; significantly, the English reviewer was Cary. Despite its short period of circulation – six months – the Comment received four reviews. Of the two Italian reviews, one was published in Antologia and the second appeared in the Memoriale dell’Accademia di Lucca, a publication of smaller circulation.197 In England the work was reviewed by the London Magazine in March and April 1823 and by the Monthly Review as late as November 1823.198 The review in G.P. Vieusseux’s Antologia is not surprising; the journal, in imitation of the French journal Revue Encyclopédique, intended to offer a selection of articles translated from foreign reviews and among the authors translated there were Schiller, Byron, Stendhal, Chateaubriand and Scott.199 In the 1820s the journal was progressively acquiring a stronger political bias and this led to its suppression by the Austrian authorities in 1833. Benci’s review in number 19 of the


journal of July 1822, consists of two pages of praise for Taaffe’s work. Benci uses Taaffe’s introductory statements to foreground foreign appreciation of Dante: Tanto è famoso il nome di Dante Alighieri, e tanto meritevoli sono le opere sue, che anche gli stranieri vi attendono con sommo studio. In Germania e in Francia erano già commentate: ora un inglese le commenta a’ suoi concittadini. Questi dimora da molti anni in Toscana, e da Pisa manda il nuovo dono alla patria. [Dante Alighieri is so famous, and his works are so worthy of praise that even foreigners devote to him considerable attention. In Germany and France his works have already been commented; now an Englishman writes a comment for his countrymen. He has been living in Tuscany for many years, and from Pisa he sends his gift to his country].200 Benci quotes Taaffe to show how the Italian controversy over the importance of the Tuscan language is of no consequence to foreigners. Of the commentary itself he simply adds a moderate approval.201 In the same issue of the journal Benci contributed two articles on Dante: these show a sincere appreciation of the Divine Comedy and that he is clearly siding with the ‘Romantics’.202 Benci uses Dante’s poem for political ends: to emphasise the maturity of the Italian tradition and therefore the Italian right to independence. The equation Dante equals Italian independence in England finds its first great expression in Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante. In Byron’s dramatic monologue, supposed to take place ‘in the interval between the conclusion of the Divina Commedia and his death, and shortly before the latter event’,203 the exiled Dante gives way to nationalistic feelings as he reproaches the modern Italians: Oh! my own beauteous land! so long laid low, So long the grave of thy own children’s hopes, When there is but required a single blow To break the chain, yet – yet the Avenger stops, … What is there wanting then to set thee free, And show thy beauty in its fullest light? To make the Alps impassable; and we, Her sons, may do this with one deed – Unite!204


The question of Italian independence became prominent in Britain in the 1830s.205 Taaffe’s Comment in Britain was in fact mostly reviewed with reference to Cary’s translation. Of the two English reviews, one is Cary’s own reply, point by point, to Taaffe’s criticism. Taaffe’s emphasis on the weaknesses of The Vision provoked a scathing response. The second review, published in the Monthly Review, is clearly inspired by Cary’s, but takes a more moderate view. The treatment of The Vision in the Comment is an afterthought: Taaffe claims to have suppressed his own translation after reading Cary’s, since such an enterprise was no longer needed. Having dismissed Boyd’s paraphrastic translation, he confers moderate praise on Cary: Its fidelity is exemplary; and though somewhat of a paraphrase, it is far from loose. But whatever be its literal merits, it does not give, nor pretend to give any of the melody of its Original. Dante writes in rhyme and in a metre whose chief characteristics are pliancy and concision. Mr Cary in blank verse imitative of the stateliness and occasional prolixity of Milton.206 Taaffe’s comment is unlike Foscolo’s in his awareness of the limitations of any verse translation. His tone is, however, more critical, as he questions Cary’s role as a critic of Dante. To Taaffe’s comment that ‘If we are to argue from analogy, it will not follow that because he prefer’d rhyme in his native tongue, he would blank verse in ours’207 Cary replied with an interesting admission of his desire to be a ‘literal’ translator: An original writer is master of what he shall say next, and has sometimes a happy thought suggested to him by the rhyme itself. The translator has no such advantage and will be apt to employ the metre that will leave him most at liberty to make choice of such words as shall best convey the sense of his original.208 Taaffe further criticizes the choice of a different title for the poem,209 Cary’s occasional inaccurate explanation of Dante’s allegory,210 and, in general, his role as commentator. Thus, concerning Cary’s explanation of the allegorical meaning of the three beasts, he writes: ‘This, to be sure, is rather to be attributed to the commentators than to him.’211 While Cary protested his reliance on Dante’s commentators, denying


his role as interpreter, later editions of The Vision show an increasing use of notes to explain Dante’s allegorical meanings or the historical background: as pointed out in the previous chapter, he was now clearly seeing himself in the new role of critic as well as translator. As Ralph Pite points out, ‘Cary’s scholarship becomes perhaps more distracting than illuminating.’212 Despite his initial reluctance to accept his role as commentator, Cary interpreted A Comment as a personal attack and the article published in two parts in the British Magazine has the tone of a riposte. As Byron had predicted, Cary based his answer on Taaffe’s brief translations from Dante, as the opening of the first article shows: ’Percotevansi incontro’ Dante inf. c. 7, v. 28. ‘Both smote together’ – Cary ‘Ho! Charge, hurra, jolt, bound, rebound’. Commentator’s translation, p. 430. From the last of these lines, which we have selected as our motto, some of our readers will perhaps conclude that this book is a jocular performance, or, as it has been reviewed of late years, a hoax. But it was put into our hands very seriously, with a desire that we should review it, and it is our intention to treat it with all due gravity.213 In his consistently sustained tone Cary does not reply to Taaffe’s criticism, rather providing his own scathing review of the Comment. Although the Monthly Review published a more moderate study of the Comment, Taaffe’s work failed to attract readers’ attention.214 Murray’s correspondence shows that the publisher was lax in advertising the work as some gift copies sent to Foscolo, Sir Walter Scott and John Cam Hobhouse did not reach the intended recipients.215 Taaffe’s Comment is, however, interesting as it represents a strange attempt to place side by side neo-Ghibelline and neo-Guelf interpretations of Dante. For instance, Taaffe presages Gabriele Rossetti’s Comento analitico (the eccentric interpretation that won him a Professorship in Italian at King’s College, London) in his political interpretation of Dante’s three allegorical beasts;216 but he also emphasises Dante’s orthodoxy, in some of his comments as well as in his preference for Purgatorio and Paradiso.217 Taaffe’s own Catholicism could certainly have influenced appreciation of his Comment by English readers, although his unsatisfactory translation was the main fault of the project. His work, however, represents an interesting example of the Italian critical exploitation of the British Romantic appropriation of Dante.


Concluding remarks Contrary to what critics have often claimed, the canonisation of Dante by English critics started in the eighteenth century: as has been shown, this process involved the visual arts as well as literary criticism. However, the British Romantic contribution to Dantean criticism significantly starts with the first complete translations of the Divine Comedy. The analysis of Coleridge’s, Hazlitt’s and Foscolo’s criticism reveals that their rediscovery of Dante is part of a European phenomenon promoted by a group of polyglot critics: Friedrich Schlegel and Simonde de Sismondi are the authorities most often quoted in discussions on the poet. The most significant acquisition of Romantic criticism concerns the genre of the Divine Comedy: only early reviewers of Boyd’s translation comment on the unevenness of Dante’s poem and on the presence of a variety of styles not all consistent with the epic. Thanks also to Cary’s use of a uniform style, the poem is typically categorised as a medieval epic with some Miltonic qualities superimposed by the translator. The British Romantic approach to Dante is also typically characterised by the comparison between the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost: Dante and Milton are compared for their use of religion, the political inspiration of their writing and above all for the epic dimension of their works. As has been shown the comparison on the whole proved advantageous to the reception of the Divine Comedy. Foscolo’s neo-Ghibelline reading of Dante foregrounds the poet’s criticism of Catholic abuse thus indirectly encouraging a Protestant reading of the poet. Coleridge’s criticism focuses on the general characteristics of Christian poetry, thus again avoiding the issue of his Catholicism. From an ideological viewpoint, British Romantic critics thus subscribe to the neo-Ghibelline reading of Dante: as Crisafulli and Milbank have pointed out, this interpretation became prominent in the 1830s, with Gabriele Rossetti’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the poem and with the Whigs’ indirect involvement in the Italian fight for independence.


Part II Romantic Palimpsests


4 ‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’: Shelley on Dante and Love

Here vigour fail’d the towering fantasy: But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel In even motion, by the Love impell’d, That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars. (Paradise, XXXIII, 132–5) Dante’s journey ends in the confirmation of the primacy of love over any other conception of the deity. The average medieval reader would have understood the nature of such an adventure to be the ‘itinerarium mentis ad deum’, the journey of the mind to God. Yet, with regard to Dante’s lines, ‘mind’ does not appropriately translate ‘mens’. 1 In the light of its association with St Augustine’s theology, the phrase should be ‘mind and heart’, since the affections occupy a position of primary importance in his quest. St Thomas Aquinas similarly expands the metaphor when he states that ‘anima conjugatur Deo per intellectum et affectum’. 2 As a disciple of both philosophers, Dante maintains the need of both the affections and the mind to achieve the vision of God, but in Paradiso a hierarchy between the two is introduced when Beatrice explains the nature of contemplation: all Are blessed, even as their sight descends Deeper into the truth, wherein rest is For every mind. Thus happiness hath root In seeing, not in loving, which of sight is aftergrowth. (Paradise, XXVIII, 106–11) 95


Beatrice’s words gloss the meaning of Dante’s final vision: his acknowledgement of the power of Divine love implies that the vision itself has already vanished, lost because of the memory’s inability to retain it.3 When in A Defence of Poetry Shelley selects Dante as one of the greatest European poets he characterises him as a poet of love: ‘Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language.’4 His initial explanation of Dante’s love poetry is ambiguous: for Shelley the relationship between Dante and Beatrice is a romantic feeling that ‘feigns’ Dante’s ascent to God. Is then Dante’s ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’ entirely lost to Shelley? While Keats appreciated Dante’s epic without regard to the theological dimension of the Divine Comedy, Shelley certainly did understand the centrality of the scheme of salvation in the poem. Whether he was able to appreciate Dante’s poetry because of its theology or, rather, despite it, is a difficult question in the case of a poet like Shelley, increasingly divided between a belief in the necessity of atheism and the need for an all-encompassing ‘Other’ vaguely Platonic in nature. The work of critics ranging from Angela Leighton’s Shelley and the Sublime and Karen A. Weisman’s Imageless Truths to Tilottama Rajan’s Dark Interpreter and The Supplement of Reading, have shown how these two aspirations nonetheless coexist in the poet.5 Shelley’s approach to religion, however, should be understood in relation to his approach to poetry. One of the most sustained recent assumptions of Shelleyan criticism lies in the widespread belief that a reading of his poetry must take as its starting point his understanding of the function and nature of poetry. Shelley’s poetry has thus been noted for its central concern with politics and revolution, for its obsessive use of romance and for its frequent representation of conflict.6 His view of poetry has been identified accordingly as a revolutionary force, as the locus of conflict between the real and the ideal, the individual and society, or, alternatively as that of a conflict among genres, and as a philosophical statement. Poetry as the search for truth could in fact encompass all other positions. However, here, too, the conflict between early utilitarian approaches to poetry and Shelley’s later focus on the importance of the passions prevents an overarching understanding of his view of poetry. It is generally assumed that his belief underwent a transformation in the productive years of his stay in Switzerland and Italy. Traces of this evolution are embedded in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s most complex

Shelley on Dante and Love 97

and extensive treatment of the subject. As Simon Haines cogently explains: Here is Shelley’s Italian thinking of his simple utilitarianism, with Imagination as the God instead of Reason. The ‘Defence’amounts to a first attempt by Shelley to write his ‘great work’ of moral and political science, using Imagination, or ‘poetry in a general sense’, as the redeeming Power, the promoter of ‘true utility’ as against the ‘limited utility’ promoted by utilitarian ‘reason’ and praised by Peacock and the earlier Shelley.7 In A Defence poetry is celebrated as a necessary expression of humanity. Despite, or rather, because of his atheism, Shelley qualifies poetry as ‘religion’ and the two terms become interchangeable: in fact, the identification implies that religion becomes poetry rather than the reverse. According to Shelley, poets best fulfil religion’s ministry: They are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.8 Could poets then take on the role of the Biblical prophets? In his first reference to Dante, Shelley apparently suggests such an identification when he groups his Paradiso with Aeschylus’ choruses and the Book of Job as examples of poetical prophecy.9 Aside from its pre-Christian references, this definition unexpectedly echoes Dante’s assertion that poetry should be read like the scriptures. In keeping with most medieval poets, Dante acknowledges the importance of the ‘anagogical’ reading of poetry (Convivio, II, i, 2–6). Shelley’s approach, however, reverses Dante’s philosophical assumptions; his poets include the Hebrew or Christian prophets as far as they are poets. As he explains: ‘Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word … such is the pretence of superstition which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry.’10 Religion is only a temporal and limited manifestation of the prophetic mission of poetry. Its prophecy is an expression of the one spirit, but its message must be understood outside the constraints of time and culture. A Defence of Poetry affirms the existence of an ideal outside the real, however defined: ‘A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite,


and the one.’11 As the eternal acquires a clear religious significance, Shelley ascribes it to the domain of cultural history. In A Defence Dante is significantly paired with Milton: ‘The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealised, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.’12 Shelley’s well-known categorisation of Milton’s and Dante’s religion is not a dismissal; in fact, both poets are described as fighting to assert their individuality in opposition to the political conservatism of their times. While Dante displays his revolutionary spirit ‘observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments’, Milton does so in the creation of the powerful character of Satan.13 Here the word ‘revolutionary’ is used by Shelley in its most radical and positive sense, implying at once rebelliousness, anti-conservatism and the ability to introduce positive changes into society. Shelley thus considers Dante, like Milton, to be a truly revolutionary poet whose religion functions as no more than an accidental frame for discourse, a frame deriving from the circumstances of his time. Dante’s revolution, according to Shelley, consists in his ability to give new content and new form to the epic by redirecting its focus from war to love: ‘The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love … Love became a religion … And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art “Galeotto fù il libro e chi lo scrisse”.’14 For this appreciation of women, disparaged by the Greek authors and philosophers, Shelley claims that ‘Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet.’15 Corrado Zacchetti’s statement that A Defence of Poetry could be called a ‘defence of Dante’ has greater significance than a superficial reading might imply.16 The emphasis that Shelley’s treatise places on Dante begs further investigation. Why did Shelley single him out among the poets of the western tradition? The existence of a Dante fashion acknowledged by Shelley’s friend Peacock in his novel Nightmare Abbey would certainly have been of little relevance to a poet who took pride in the idiosyncrasy of his own literary tastes. Like Keats, Shelley’s special interest in Dante derives from increasing commitment to the epic genre. Just before leaving England for Italy, Shelley composed the revolutionary epic Laon and Cythna, title later revised as The Revolt of Islam, over the course of a few months. According to his cousin Thomas Medwin, the poem was part of a commitment undertaken with Keats: ‘Shelley told me that he and Keats had mutually agreed, in the same given time, (six months each) to


write a long poem, and that the Endymion, and Revolt of Islam were the fruits of this rivalry.’17 Shelley’s interest in the epic developed in the late years of his stay in Italy and found its most ambitious expression in the unfinished Triumph of Life. However, Shelley had already begun to focus on the epic genre in 1817. A Defence of Poetry explains that poets should both contribute and introduce innovations to existing genres. Having defined genre as ‘a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language’ produced by past ages, Shelley claims that ‘Every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification.’18 Shelley’s interest in Dante formed part of this need to introduce innovation to a genre that seemed to have exhausted itself with Milton. Indeed, many felt that the challenge of the epic could not be undertaken in the modern age. As discussed in Chapter 2, Voltaire’s restrictions on the epic also had a lasting influence in England. Despite his well-known reservations about Voltaire, Shelley’s A Defence shares with the French writer and Horace Walpole the disparagement of all epic poems in comparison with Homer’s: There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.19 In contrast to Voltaire and Walpole, however, Shelley singles out Dante as the only modern poet whose achievement should be compared to Homer’s. This particular predilection for Dante was the result of Shelley’s search for new forms for the modern epic.

‘Beneath that opening spot of blue serene’: Shelley’s early contacts with Dante In order to understand Shelley’s use of Dante, a clear assessment of his knowledge of the Italian poet needs to be established. That Shelley was reading Dante in 1818 is well documented in his letters and notebooks as well as in Mary Shelley’s journals. In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock dated 20 April 1818, Shelley writes about reading the Divine Comedy in ‘one solitary spot among these aisles behind the altar’ in the


cathedral in Milan.20 In 1819, after the death of his son William, he and Mary were again reading Dante.21 While engaged in the composition of Epipsychidion, Shelley made a translation from the first canzone of Dante’s Convivio, from which he transcribed two passages with short comments into a notebook.22 Meanwhile, his increasing interest in Dante led him to read the poet’s sources: Proverbs, The Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus.23 No clear attempt has been made to assess Shelley’s possible earlier contacts with Dante and there is still speculation regarding the editions he used at different stages of his reading. Moreover, primary sources have emerged that offer a new insight into Shelley’s relationship to Cary’s translation and the original Italian text. In a recent article Robert A. Hartley questions Shelley’s use of The Vision, claiming that he used an Italian edition.24 Despite our inability to trace Shelley’s copy, there is substantial evidence that he did possess The Inferno and that he certainly used, even if only temporarily, The Vision. Shelley’s mention of Cary’s translation occurs in two letters to Charles Ollier. In the first one, dated 7 December 1817 he forwards the following request: ‘Pray be so good as to send me if possible by return of coach, the “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” of Dante, in English and Italian, by Carey [sic] and what other books may be ready, also the “Dionysiaca” of Nonnus.’25 The second letter, dated 23 December, contains a reiteration of the same request, this time to the bookseller Lackington. Again Shelley explicitly asks for ‘Careys Dante, The Paradiso & the Purgatorio. I have the Inferno’.26 In a notebook in use in spring 1817 Shelley had included in what seems a reading list ‘Dantes Inferno Purgat & Paradiso by Cary’.27 Donald Reiman suggests that in fact Shelley might have purchased Cary’s The Inferno when still at Bracknell, by late 1814. His possession of Cary’s edition of 1805 is confirmed by the three references just quoted and by Medwin’s record in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley that Shelley had for the first time studied the original with the aid of Cary’s translation.28 As Reiman notes, Shelley’s assumption that the translation of the Purgatorio and Paradiso would bear the original on the facing page, like The Inferno, is a further confirmation of his knowledge of Cary’s first translation.29 As for Shelley’s request to Lackington, a letter of 2 January 1818 summarising his debts to the publisher shows that he did receive the two volumes by 29 December.30 These two copies, unfortunately, went missing. However, it is almost certain that Shelley used them since the influence of Cary’s text on his poetry can be identified among his references to, and in echoes of, Dante.


The Italian edition of the works of Dante possessed by Shelley was the five-volume complete works with commentary by the Jesuit Pompeo Venturi, praised by Cary in his notes to The Vision.31 Again, we do not know when Shelley bought them, but they were in his possession by the time he left for Italy. Reiman claims that the Purgatorio and Paradiso became separated from the rest when the poet left for Italy,32 but in fact, the opposite seems to be the case: Shelley’s quotations from Purgatorio, XX, in a notebook in use between the beginning of 1820 and the spring of that year,33 presuppose the edition by Venturi. This passage appears to owe some peculiarities to Venturi’s edition: the capital C in ‘Cristiana’ in line 44, the form ‘Ciapetta’ for ‘Ciappetta’ (line 49), ‘beccajo’ for ‘beccaio’ (line 52) and the normalisation of the ‘c’ to ‘g’ in ‘segreto’ (line 96). Since Shelley had been reading Dante since 1817, perhaps as early as 1814, the intertextual presence of the Divine Comedy should be found in the poems composed in this earlier period. At this stage, Shelley’s knowledge of Italian was still confined to little more than satisfactory reading skills, but his intense and continued reading of Dante in 1818 and 1819 testifies to his desire for further improvement both in the familiarity with the language and with Dante’s poetry. In 1817 his reading of the Divine Comedy seems to have focused on the search for selected passages that might stimulate his imagination. At the same time, this selective reading was to introduce a first shaping influence on his poetry. Ralph Pite suggests the presence of an early intertextual reference in Alastor, composed during the early months of 1816: in the description of the waning moon (Alastor, 654) he sees an echo of the arrival of the angel in Purgatorio II.34 This passage clearly became a favourite one with Shelley, who mentioned it to Leigh Hunt in a letter of 1819. Mary Shelley, too, recalled his love for the image in a letter written after the poet’s death.35 However, a more significant use of Dante can be identified in 1817, when Shelley’s preoccupation with writing his own epic became paramount: The Revolt of Islam reveals a more sustained use of the Divine Comedy to give form to a modern epic. No attention has as yet been paid to this aspect of Shelley’s use of Dante, no doubt due to the uncertainty of his knowledge of the Italian poet. The fact that the request for Cary’s translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso is included in the MS draft for the poem further confirms a special interest in the Divine Comedy during this period of composition.36 Significantly it is to these second and third sections of the poem that The Revolt of Islam owes some debts. The complexity of the symbolism of the first canto of Laon and Cythna has been the subject of speculation with regard to its relationship to the


rest of the poem. Baker called it ‘two poems, one within the other’.37 Brian Wilkie, in his study Romantic Poets and the Epic Tradition, points out the lack of studies on Shelley’s long narrative.38 Shelley himself, in a letter to his publisher, defined it as ‘in some measure a distinct poem’.39 The first canto represents Shelley’s response to the challenge posed by a modern epic: written in the form of a classical ‘proem’, the canto includes a series of visions witnessed by the first-person narrator with the help of a female, all-knowing ‘prophetess’. Precise echoes of Dante can be identified. And if recognition does not significantly alter our understanding of the poem, it does signal the presence of an allusive relationship that calls for an assessment. Having introduced the context – the horrors of the French Revolution – the poem opens with a suggestive depiction of the sky (my italics):

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IV For, where the irresistible storm had cloven That fearful darkness, the blue sky was seen Fretted with many a fair cloud interwoven Most delicately, and the ocean green, Beneath that opening spot of blue serene, Quivered like burning emerald: calm was spread On all below; but far on high, between Earth and the upper air, the vast clouds fled, Countless and swift as leaves on autumn’s tempest shed. V For ever, as the war became more fierce Between the whirlwinds and the rack on high, That spot grew more serene; blue light did pierce That woof of those white clouds, which seemed to lie Far, deep, and motionless; (Laon and Cythna)40

Shelley’s description of the sun that struggles with the clouds anticipates the fight between the eagle and the serpent that dominates the canto. Shelley echoes his favourite passage from Purgatorio, I in which Dante describes the impression the clouds produced on himself, a pilgrim escaped from the underworld: Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro, che s’accoglieva nel sereno aspetto


del mezzo, puro infino al primo giro, a li occhi miei ricominciò diletto (Purgatorio, I, 13–16) Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was spread O’er the serene aspect of the pure air, High up as the first circle, to mine eyes Unwonted joy renew’d, (The Vision, Purgatory, I, 13–16) Shelley’s passage has the same emphasis on colour found in Dante’s lines, although its horizon is enlarged to encompass the sea. However, the most striking similarity between Shelley’s and Cary’s texts is the qualification of the air as ‘serene’, which so peculiarly attributes a sense of peace to the scene – a word moreover, that Cary was particularly fond of, so as to introduce it both in its adjectival and in its less common nominal form. Shelley repeats the images in stanza VII where, again, the mood of serenity is qualified as an aspect of the weather: That spot grew more serene (Laon and Cythna, 165) A partial contribution to Shelley’s description of the storm is also offered by a simile in Purgatorio, V: Vapori accesi non vid’io sì tosto di prima notte mai fender sereno, né, sol calando, nuvole d’agosto, che color non tornasser suso in meno; (Purgatorio, V, 37–40) Ne’er saw I fiery vapours with such speed Cut through the serene air at fall of night, Nor August’s clouds athwart the setting sun, That upward these did not in shorter space Return; (The Vision, Purgatory, V, 36–40)41 Here, again, the air is qualified as ‘serene’, but the scene is similarly dominated by a storming movement of clouds, which constitutes the tenor of the simile.


In stanza VII Shelley describes his progressive vision of the two forms wreathed in flight, later identified as the snake and the eagle: VII Even like a bark, which from a chasm of mountains, Dark, vast, and overhanging, on a river Which there collects the strength of all it fountains, Comes forth, whilst with the speed its frame doth quiver, 185 Sails, oars, and stream, tending to one endeavour; So, from that chasm of light a winged Form On all the winds of heaven approaching ever Floated, dilating as it came: the storm Pursued it with fierce blasts, and lightnings swift and warm. An intertextual reference to Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner can certainly be acknowledged, as first observed by Neville Rogers; 42 however the tone of the passage recalls once again more clearly Shelley’s favourite description of the appearance of the ferrying angel in Purgatorio, II. Dante’s narrator perceives a light increasing in the same way as Shelley’s perceives the ‘winged form’ dilating in its approach: Ed ecco … cotal m’apparve, s’io ancor lo veggia, un lume per lo mar venir sì ratto, che ’l muover suo nessun volar pareggia. Dal qual com’io un poco ebbi ritratto l’occhio per domandar lo duca mio, rividil più lucente e maggior fatto. Poi d’ogne lato ad esso m’appario un non sapeva che bianco, e di sotto a poco a poco un altro a lui uscio. (Purgatorio, II, 13, 16–24) When lo! … A light, so swiftly coming through the sea, No winged course might equal its career. From which when for a space I had withdrawn Mine eyes, to make inquiry of my guide, Again I look’d, and saw it grown in size And brightness: then on either side appear’d


Something, but what I knew not, of bright hue, And by degrees from underneath it came Another. (The Vision, Purgatory, II, 13, 17–25) Cary’s translation amplifies Dante’s description of the swiftness of the light by using ‘swiftly’ as an adverb; he further adds the metaphor of a ‘wingèd course’ to Dante’s ‘muover suo’ [its moving]. Shelley’s ‘winged Form’ is described in positive, almost lyric terms that are quite at variance with the threatening aspect of Coleridge’s ‘shape’ or of Peacock’s dark ‘form’.43 It is contrasted with the menacing pursuit of the lightning and storm raging behind it and is supported by a ‘heavenly’ blast. The echoes identified lead to an exploration of more significant allusions to Dante. As in The Triumph of Life, these are not simply isolated echoes, but rather a complex series of solutions to narrative and structural problems posed by epic. The first among these is the female ‘prophetess’ of canto I. Many sources have been suggested for the female ‘shape’: her role resembles that of the fairy in Queen Mab, the Genius Aretina in Peacock’s Ahrimanes as well as the Genius in Volney’s Ruins and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium.44 Without dismissing the importance of any of these, the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso should be included among Shelley’s composite sources. Shelley’s female form, like Beatrice, retains her humanity – indeed Beatrice is referred to as ‘woman’, despite her nature as a blessed spirit. Like Dante, Shelley insists on the prophetess’s beauty and on the effects of her smile and of her voice (Laon and Cythna, I, xxi–xxii), thus incorporating the topoi of Provençal and early Italian love poetry. Her role, however, is not sustained beyond the first canto, suggesting that Dante only guided Shelley in initiating narrative depth in his poem’s structure. Shelley borrowed another significant element from Dante to aid in the solution to the problem of creating a supernatural event: the representation of the woman’s speech. The Divine Comedy explores the implication of the Fall for human language in all its aspects: indeed, Dante’s poem can be seen to proceed from the lack of communication between the damned to the linguistic unity of the Purgatorio and Paradiso.45 However, while communication between the souls increases, for Dante language becomes progressively limited as a tool to convey his final experience. Similes and comparisons are the poet’s devices in his quest to overcome the impasse. Shelley must have realised the centrality of the Fall to the Divine Comedy as the first canto of Laon and Cythna betrays a certain awareness


of Dante’s lesson. Shelley repeatedly attributes supernatural qualities to the woman’s voice:

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xviii She rose, and on the gale Loosening her star-bright robe and shadowy hair Poured forth her voice; the cavern of the vale That opened to the ocean, caught it there, And filled with silver sounds the overflowing air. xix She spake in language whose strange melody Might not belong to earth.

Shelley does not introduce a Dantean simile nor does he introduce a metaphor: the divine nature of the woman’s language is expressed as merely a possibility. However, the device reveals the potential usefulness of Dante’s numerous and varied devices to describe the complexity of supernatural speech. This solution, as it will be shown in the next chapter, became a fundamental one for Keats in the move from Hyperion to The Fall of Hyperion. Although a similar interest in Dante could have directed Keats to the same solutions, Shelley first realised its potential in The Revolt of Islam and the poem should be considered one of Keats’s sources. Further intertextual references to the Divine Comedy are visible in the narrator’s meeting of the thrones of mighty men, which recalls Dante’s description of the saints’ thrones in Paradiso, XXXI,46 and in the use of whirling lights, in Dante the embodiment of souls or beings, in Shelley a supernatural device he would employ more significantly in Prometheus Unbound.47 While in The Revolt of Islam all echoes evoke the mood and tone introduced by Dante, Shelley’s later use of the Italian poet reveals a greater freedom, as images are borrowed for entirely different effects and purposes. Certainly Prometheus Unbound, the most significant poem composed in 1818, signals a different and more complex use of Dante. At the end of the first act of Prometheus Unbound Ione’s description of the arrival of two spirits echoes Dante’s Inferno (my italics): Ione. Behold’st thou not two shapes from the east and west Come, as two doves to one belovèd nest, Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere? (Prometheus Unbound, Act I, 752–5)


The two spirits reassure the bound Prometheus of the power of love. The initial vagueness of identification marked by the use of ‘two shapes’ follows Dante’s address to Virgil in which the souls are marked as ‘those two together coming’ (The Vision, Hell, V, 72). The final comment of Shelley’s narrator, ‘Tis despair / Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound’ finds a clearer contextualisation in Dante’s canto, dominated by the hopelessness of eternal punishment and the wailing of the damned. However, only readers well acquainted with the Italian poem would have appreciated the cryptic reference to the Infernal punishment. Prometheus Unbound thus prefigures Shelley’s later use of Dante, characterised precisely by complex echoes and allusions. Clearly, in Prometheus Unbound the challenge posed by the Greek myth is the controlling element of its inspiration. However, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound offers some analogy to Dante’s Inferno (the description of Prometheus’ sufferings), and Shelley chose to expand in Dantean terms the Aeschylean punishments. Aeschylus speaks of Prometheus’ ‘bonds of adamant’:48 his Prometheus shares the sufferings of Dante’s traitors, frozen and motionless in a wide lake of ice created by the movement of Satan’s wings. Although no precise evocation of the Divine Comedy is identifiable, in describing the punishment inflicted on Prometheus at the very beginning of the act, Shelley twice refers to ice-coldness (italics added):49 The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones … While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. (Prometheus Unbound, I, 31–3, 41–3) Shelley absorbs Dante’s association between punishment and cold; his reference to ‘the rage of whirlwind’ recalls more explicitly Dante’s depiction of the punishment of the lustful, already evoked in the first act (my italics): La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, mena li spirti con la sua rapina; voltando e percotendo li molesta. (Inferno, V, 31–3)


The stormy blast of hell With restless fury drives the spirits on, Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy. (The Vision, Hell, V, 32–4) If Shelley’s depiction of Prometheus’ punishments draws upon Dante’s Inferno, he composed the Titan’s revolutionary liberation in Act IV in a spell of enthusiastic absorption of Paradiso. Already in Act III the ‘Spirit of the Hour’ celebrates the arrival of a new heaven and a new earth dominated by love. Shelley’s use of Dante becomes explicit as he openly refigures the first act as an Inferno overthrown: No more inscribed, as o’er the gate of hell, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here’ (Prometheus Unbound, III, iv, 135–6) This acknowledgment points to an extensive use of Dante in the final act. The poem moves towards a more pervasive, but also more diffuse Dantean presence. As Steve Ellis has aptly stated: ‘Although specific reminiscences of the Paradiso – not all of them very convincing – have been pointed out here, the influence might be described as nothing less than the entire act itself.’50 Shelley’s debt to Dante consists in his extended use of metaphors focusing on the presence of light and music. As the ‘chorus of spirit and hours’ shows, music and light are aspects of Shelley’s Promethean Paradise: Then weave the web of the mystic measure; From the depths of the sky and the ends of the earth Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure, Fill the dance and the music of mirth, As the waves of a thousand streams rush by To an ocean of splendour and harmony! (Prometheus Unbound, IV, 129–34) All the blessed souls in Dante’s Paradiso communicate their joy by showing their brightness and following a common pattern of harmony. As Oscar Kuhns observed, Paradiso could be described in Shelley’s words as ‘an ocean of splendour and harmony’.51 Thus in


Canto XII St Bonaventura prepares for his tribute to St Dominique (my italics): Si tosto come l’ultima parola la benedetta fiamma per dir tolse, a rotar cominciò la santa mola; e nel suo giro tutta non si volse prima ch’un’altra di cerchio la chiuse, e moto a moto e conta a canto colse; (Paradiso, XII, 1–5) Soon as its final word the blessed flame Had raised for utterance, straight the holy mill Began to wheel; nor yet had once revolved, Or ere another, circling, compass’d it, Motion to motion, song to song, conjoining; (The Vision, Paradise, XII, 1–5) The blessed in Dante’s Paradiso are frequently described as a globe of light endowed with a whirling motion. In Canto XXIV, for instance, the souls of the ‘Empirean’ become ‘spheres / On firm-set poles revolving’ (The Vision, Paradise, XXIV, 11–12). Shelley’s central episode of the appearance of the earth with the spirit asleep within it integrates all the qualities attributed to Dante’s blessed (my italics): Panthea. And from the other opening in the wood Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres, Solid as chrystal, yet through all its mass Flow, as through empty space, music and light: Ten thousand orbs involving and involved, … and they whirl Over each other with a thousand motions, Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning (Prometheus Unbound, IV, 236–41; 246–8) An extensive borrowing of Dante’s imagery is evident: synaesthesia abounds as motion, light and music are intermingled to re-create the Dantean effect of a celestial celebration of love.


Shelley’s use of Dante in a poem so steeped in Greek literature poses an important question. As he explains in the preface, Shelley’s intention was to correct ‘the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim’. However, as Stuart Peterfreund has recently argued, Shelley’s aim was not limited to a rewriting of the Aeschylean plot: Shelley’s ‘correction’ is not so much directed at the plot of this Aeschylean trilogy as it is at certain habits of mind that Shelley takes the plot of the original to emblemize… Contemplating the retribution awaiting those who operate within theogonic time … Shelley’s Prometheus at once disowns the hate that kept him trapped within theogonic time and expresses sorrow for those who cannot disown their own hate.52 The correction is achieved by questioning Jove’s use of language as power, and restoring it instead to the condition of a ‘perpetual Orphic song’.53 The move is therefore, from the language of authority to the language of poetry. This movement reflects the difference between Dante’s Inferno and his Paradiso: while in the former sinners are reduced to speechlessness by Divine Justice, in Paradiso language is restored to pre-Babelic purity. Shelley’s scheme for an Aeschylean play followed in Dantean footsteps from the start: continuing the experiment undertaken in Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound represents a further stage in Shelley’s quest for a new epic based on myth rather than history, a myth in which poetry and language are the central subjects. With Epipsychidion and The Triumph of Life he continues the same undertaking, but by the time he composed these poems he had discovered the nucleus of his epic search in the image of the poet and his autobiography.

Epipsychidion and The Triumph of Life: Shelley’s palimpsests Shelley sent Epipsychidion to the publisher Charles Ollier on 16 February 1821. In the accompanying letter, he cryptically invited Ollier to keep the poem anonymous: ‘indeed’, he wrote ‘in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisement is no fiction’.54 In a later letter to John Gisborne he asks for the poem not to be circulated, expressing at the same time a confident defence of its value: ‘The Epipsychidion is a mystery … I desired Ollier not to circulate this piece except to the Ypí¡okf [cognoscenti], and even they it seems are inclined to approximate me


to the circle of a servant girl and her sweetheart.’55 A sense of failure or embarrassed self-revelation resurfaces again a year later in another letter to Gisborne of 18 June 1822.56 Shelley’s conflicting feelings about the poem give the impression of a hurried composition which brought together his most relevant interests and preoccupations of the time. The analysis of the manuscripts which contain the first drafts of the poem reveal something else. According to Tatsuo Tokoo the fragments in the Shelley manuscripts usually associated with Epipsychidion were in fact composed a year before.57 Tokoo believes that the fragments were rescued by Shelley at the time he met Teresa Viviani and conceived a poem inspired by her. These findings suggest that the poem was in fact ‘a deliberately calculated work of art’.58 The evolution of the first drafts of Epipsychidion from the unfinished and unsatisfactory Fiordispina reveals that Dante’s poetry was fundamental in helping Shelley structure the poem: the advertisement with its quotation from the Vita Nuova is immediately followed by the conclusion rich in Dantean allusions.59 Shelley thus chose two Dantesque passages to frame the poem; in fact I would claim that the use of Dante facilitated Shelley’s transition from the unfinished narrative to the new poem. Adamson, too, foregrounds the relevance of Dante for the genesis of the poem. She believes that Shelley’s composition was spurred by the decision to include a new introduction suggesting an autobiographical narration and by his reading of the Vita Nuova.60 As for the former, Shelley’s new opening is marked by the new start half way through page 61, where he wrote ‘She met me [stranger] reader’. By addressing the reader the narration becomes personal and the voice of the poem develops around this new focus. A reference to Dante’s beginning has generally been recognised in line 73: ‘She met me, Stranger, upon life’s rough way’.61 Virgil meets Dante in life’s ‘midway’. Manuscript evidence shows that ‘reader’ was Shelley’s first addressee and that he had crossed the word out and replaced it with ‘stranger’. The deletion could have been the result of Shelley’s awareness of its too evident Dantean origin as Dante repeatedly emphasises the reader as the addressee of his prophetic mission.62 No such commitment is to be found in Epipsychidion, which, like the Vita Nuova, is meant to be a private document destined for a close circle of friends. The poem thus more suitably addresses a ‘stranger’ called to listen to Shelley’s tale. Shelley’s reading of the Vita Nuova is recorded in Mary Shelley’s journal from 30 January until 12 February 1821.63 In the same period he was also interested in the Convivio, two passages of which are copied


in the same manuscript that contains the draft of the poem.64 Significantly, these two passages include Dante’s reinterpretation of the conclusion of the Vita Nuova: the ‘donna gentile’ who had comforted him after the death of Beatrice is explained as the allegory of his love for philosophy.65 These notes represent the backbone of the dialogic structure of Epipsychidion. Shelley’s interest in the Vita Nuova stemmed from his admiration of Dante as poet of love. In fact, Shelley is one of the few readers (together with Blake) to perceive the unity of Dante’s inspiration: love pervades the Divine Comedy just as it does the Vita Nuova. The difference is one of genre, not of inspiration. On the contrary, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion are different both in inspiration and in genre. The subject of Epipsychidion is the poet and his autobiographical aspirations. Dantean references acquire an essential role in the poem: more than creating a mood, they become part of the compositional structure. The dialogic relationship with Dante enables Shelley to introduce philosophical distancing from the lyric praise of the ideal. The ‘Advertisement’ is an important part in the dialogic structure of the poem. The writer’s death anticipates the final solution with the two lovers’ union in some sort of underworld. Shelley opens by defining his work in terms that echo those of Dante’s Vita Nuova: like the Italian poet he addresses a select few, who can understand his metaphorical language. For them, Shelley unveils the hidden meaning in Dante’s own words, allegories should be used only once their content is very clear to the poet: Not but that, gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento.66 The poem opens with a long-winded celebration of Teresa Viviani, the Emily of Epipsychidion. She is ‘Sister’, as she herself used to call Mary. Shelley is her ‘orphan’ brother, as the Italian drafts in the MS of the Mask of Anarchy show; she is a ‘captive bird’, as Professor Pacchiani used to call her.67 After the first three biographical stanzas, Shelley’s celebration of Emily assumes the language of medieval devotional poetry. Dantean echoes abound: she is a ‘Seraph of Heaven’, belonging to the highest of the nine hierarchies of angels according to the medieval order.68 The praise of Emily that follows is suffused with the language of Dante’s ‘new style’. Twice in Epipsychidion Shelley uses the


adjective ‘gentle’ (in lines 21 and 247), thus recalling Dante’s answer to Guittone D’Arezzo and his subsequent development of the concept of a soul’s nobility in his Rime.69 The second metaphor used by Shelley brings us even closer to the universe of Dante’s Paradiso. Emily is thus described: Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman All that is insupportable in thee Of light, and love, and immortality! (Epipsychidion, 22–24) Dante’s experience of the Paradiso is marked by his perception of the light that surrounds the blessed souls. Beatrice’s eyes repeatedly defy his sight. Thus, in Paradiso, IV, 139–42 he is almost forced to lower his eyes, overpowered by her splendour. In Paradiso, XIV, 79–81 the smile burning in Beatrice’s eyes is the occasion for Dante’s mystical joy. In Paradiso, XVIII Dante devotes lines 1 to 21 to the description of the effect of her beaming sight. Finally, in Paradiso, XXV, 136–9, after the loss of sight caused by the contemplation of the light of St John, Dante fears that he has lost her. Shelley’s praise resembles Dante’s not only in its evocation of a love expressed as light. His celebration of Emily contains a further echo of Dante in his description of this light as a garment enveloping the blessed soul. In Paradiso, XIV the distinction between appearance and substance emerges clearly from Dante’s doubt: Diteli se la luce onde s’infiora vostra sustanza, rimarrà con voi etternalmente sì com’ell’è ora; (Paradiso, XIV, 13–15) Tell him, if the light, Wherewith your substance blooms, shall stay with you Eternally, as now; (The Vision, Paradise, XIV, 13–15) Solomon’s reply qualifies this light as the effect of love: ‘Quanto fia lunga la festa di paradiso, tanto il nostro amore si raggerà dintorno cotal vesta.


La sua chiarezza séguita l’ardore; l’ardor la visione, (Paradiso, XIV, 37–41) ‘Long as the joy of Paradise shall last, Our love shall shine around that raiment, bright As fervent; fervent as, in vision blest; (The Vision, Paradise, XIV, 37–9) Like the blessed souls garbed in light, Emily’s body is a physical embodiment of the divine qualities not otherwise perceptible to mortals.70 Shelley’s poem continues by developing one central metaphor of clear Dantean origin: the effect of the woman’s sight. One sonnet from the Vita Nuova of Dante is most closely related to Shelley’s argument: ‘Ne li occhi porta’. Here Dante attributes to the woman’s eyes the power to ennoble everything and everybody she looks upon: Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore, per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ella mira; ov’ella passa, ogn’om ver lei si gira, e cui saluta fa tremar lo core, sì che, bassando il viso, tutto smore (Vita Nuova, XXI) [In her eyes my lady bears Love, whence all that she gazes on turns gentle; wherever she walks, the look of every man she draws and the one she greets trembles in heart and lowering his eyes becomes pale]71 Shelley expands the metaphor, borrowing from Dante’s ‘envoi’ the reference to Emily’s eyes, invoked in order to make the poem immortal: I pray thee that thou blot from this sad song All of its much mortality and wrong, … Then smile on it, so that it may not die. (Epipsychidion, 35–6, 40) The introductory praise of Emily continues for one more stanza with an allusion to the ‘Song of Songs’: ‘O that thou wert as my brother,


that sucked the breasts of my mother!’72 Dante quotes from the ‘Song of Songs’ in Purgatorio, XXX where it announces Beatrice’s arrival. This canto, together with the following one, includes all the metaphors that Shelley repeats in this stanza: Beatrice is veiled, yet showing her radiance beneath, Dante is eventually able to fix his sight into her ‘beaming eyes’ (Purgatorio, XXXI, 119) which, by virtue of her gazing at the Griffin, contain a reflection of it. Shelley, in turn, calls Emily a ‘mirror’ endowed with a power greater than mere reflection (Epipsychidion, 30–2). Purgatorio, XXX opens with the description of the sight of the ‘polar light’, ‘which hath never known / Setting nor rising’ (Purgatorio, XXX, 1–3). In line 60 of Shelley’s poem Emily is addressed as ‘ A Star / Which moves not in the moving Heavens, alone’ (Epipsychidion, 60–1). The richness of Shelley’s allusions to Dante helps him to create a movement towards the ‘other’ that is then contrasted with the biographical and personal dimensions of the preceding and following stanzas. This movement from subjective to objective, from personal to universal, involves four main episodes: lines 21–40, which have just been analysed; lines 53–123; lines 160–89; and lines 345–83. Like Dante’s prose in the Vita Nuova, these lines function as Shelley’s commentary on his relationship with Emily. The poem thus expresses a younger self channelled into an idealised account of his life. Lines 53 to 123 are Shelley’s most sustained attempt to maintain a dialogue within the poem. The passage repeats the extended praise of the previous movement. Like Dante, Shelley conveys Emily’s power by affirming his own inability to communicate it: ‘Sweet Lamp! my mothlike Muse has burnt its wings’ (Epipsychidion, 53). Similarly, Dante finds himself incapable of describing Beatrice’s aspect when she unveils herself, diverting the reader’s attention towards the limitations of poetry: chi palido si fece sotto l’ombra sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna, che non paresse aver la mente ingombra, tentando a render te qual tu paresti là dove armonizzando il ciel t’andombra, (Purgatorio, XXXI, 140–4) who is he, So pale with musing in Pierian shades, Or with that fount so lavishly imbued,


Whose spirit should not fail him in the essay To represent thee such as thou didst seem (The Vision, Purgatory, XXXI, 140–3) Shelley continues with an attempt to locate an episode in his fictional autobiography. Line 72 is meant to evoke an event in the progression of his love. The critic Richard E. Brown compares this evolution to Dante’s threefold scheme in the Vita Nuova: the account of his love for Beatrice in youth, temptation and sway by a new love, and lamentation at Beatrice’s death.73 The similarity between Shelley’s scheme and Dante’s is only a superficial one because of the lack of real events in Epipsychidion: the autobiographical content of the poem comprises only Shelley’s present love for Emily and his desire to save his feelings from the world’s condemnation. While Dante tells us that he first met Beatrice at the age of nine Shelley fails to provide us with a date or a time scale and he uses, instead, Dantean allusions to imply the existence of both. Shelley turns to the Divine Comedy for one of the last metaphors of the passage: Emily is ‘a Splendour / Leaving the third sphere pilotless’ (Epipsychidion, 116–17). Dante celebrated the third order of angels in Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, quoted by Shelley in the ‘Advertisement’. According to Dante’s hierarchy in the Paradiso, the ‘Principati’ are the angels in charge of the sphere of Venus;74 the term ‘splendour’ is, however, Dante’s most common appellation for the saints.75 Lines 125 to 159 show the narrator of Shelley’s poem mourn his belated love. His concern remains the union he wishes to achieve with his beloved. He has not yet developed a sense of introspection or personal crisis. The passage paves the way for Shelley’s use of Dante to justify free love. In Purgatorio, XV, Virgil invites Dante to overcome the desire of earthly things that occasion division. In response to Dante’s doubt concerning the possibility of partaking in Divine love, he replies: Quello infinito e ineffabil bene che là sù è, così corre ad amore com’a lucido corpo raggio vene. Tanto si dà quanto trova d’ardore; … E quanta gente più là sù s’intende, più v’è da bene amare, e più vi s’ama, e come specchio l’uno a l’altro rende. (Purgatorio, XV, 67–70, 73–5)


The highest good Unlimited, ineffable, doth so speed To love, as beam to lucid body darts, Giving as much of ardour as it finds. … The more aspirants to that bliss Are multiplied, more good is there to love, And more is loved; as mirrors, that reflect, Each unto other, propagated light. (The Vision, Purgatory, XV, 64–7, 70–3) Virgil’s explanation, as he himself anticipates, is then developed by Beatrice in Paradiso, IV, where she explains how all the blessed reside in the Empyrean and partake of the same joy. Shelley’s metaphor is closer to Virgil’s speech, sharing with it a tone of rebuke and the comparison of love to earthly goods: True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. … Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, The life that wears, the spirit that creates One object, and one form, and builds thereby A sepulchre for its eternity. (Epipsychidion, 160–1, 169–73) The passage has been blamed for contradicting Dante’s theology in order to support an attack on the institution of marriage. Earl Schulze reads in Shelley’s distortion of Dante’s meaning a process of humanisation.76 Shelley’s allusive passage is in fact an overstatement. The longwinded celebration of Emily has carried Shelley away from the problem hinted at in lines 49–52. He is more concerned here with the sincerity of his affections, however diffuse, than with marriage itself. Considered out of context these lines appear humorous, a mocking imitation of Dante. If interpreted simply as Shelley’s criticism of marriage, they seem to contradict the progression of his fictional autobiography, which portrays the eternal search for an ideal. They make sense, instead, if understood as a direct address to Emily-Teresa, pleading for her affection and preparing for the final invitation to a journey. Teresa Viviani would certainly have understood and smiled at Shelley’s artful use of Dante. From a structural point of view, the passage, with its ironic attitude, brings to a climax his effort to maintain an objective


voice. As a result Shelley resumes the personal tone of a fictional autobiography. Significantly the narration reopens in the same way as line 72 but with a new Dantean allusion: She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, That I beheld her not. (Epipsychidion, 199–200) Dante sees Beatrice robed in the terrestrial Paradise and, as Shelley reflects in his episode, despite her veiled appearance his sight is confounded: Tant’eran li occhi miei fissi e attenti a disbramarsi la decenne sete. che li altri sensi m’eran tutti spenti. (Purgatorio, XXXII, 1–3) Mine eyes with such an eager coveting Were bent to rid them of their ten years’ thirst, No other sense was waking (The Vision, Purgatory, XXXII, 1–3) Shelley’s passage concludes with further references to Dante. He meets with Emily, whose path, like Matilda’s in Purgatorio, XXIX, is spread with flowers.77 She is compared to the sun, ‘when light is changed to love’ (Epipsychidion, 336). In Paradiso, III all three metaphors describe Beatrice’s ministration of truth: Quel sol che pria d’amor mi scaldò ‘l petto, di bella verità m’avea scoverto, provando e riprovando il dolce aspetto; (Paradiso, III, 1–3) That sun, which erst with love my bosom warm’d, Had of fair truth unveil’d the sweet aspect, By proof of right, and of the false reproof (The Vision, Paradise, III, 1–3) Shelley’s fourth and final effort to address the ‘other’ opens at this point: he now introduces Mary’s role in the poem, restating her position in the universe of his affections. The whole passage borrows its


structure from the cosmology of Dante’s Paradiso. In the sphere of Venus, Dante learns how the skies spread their influence on earth as an expression of the Divine Providence: Lo ben che tutto il regno che tu scandi volge e contenta, fa esser virtute sua provedenza in questi corpi grandi. … per che quantunque quest’arco saetta disposto cade a proveduto fine, sì come cosa in suo segno diretta. (Paradise, VIII, 97–9, 103–5) The Good, that guides And blessed makes this realm which thou dost mount, Ordains this providence to be the virtue In these great bodies … For nought, that lies Within the range of that unerring bow, But is as level with the destined aim, As ever mark to arrow’s point opposed. (The Vision, Paradise, VIII, 97–9, 103–5) Shelley addresses the ‘twin spheres of light’ who rule his affections. He then mentions a ‘Comet’ which will be nourished by the ‘Sun’ and welcomed by the ‘Moon’. In Dante’s Purgatorio the sun is identified with God, to whom the souls direct their longing.78 In Shelley’s poetical universe this sun is love or the imagination. In accordance with Dante’s world order, the sun’s influence moves through the heavenly bodies.79 From line 388 Epipsychidion abandons disquisition and addresses its real end: the achievement of a final union with Emily. The latter is entirely conceived in Shelleyan terms and can in no way be compared to Dante’s final meeting with Beatrice. The realisation that such a union can happen only in a fictional world, ‘an isle ‘twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea’ (Epipsychidion, 457) brings Shelley to his final crisis. Although the intertextual dialogue with Dante has sustained the rhetorical structure of Epipsychidion, the lack of Dante’s theology brings the poem to a reunion which is ‘one annihilation’ (Epipsychidion, 587). The Triumph of Life represents Shelley’s last attempt to introduce his own theology, a theology of the poet. It is no surprise, therefore,


that it combines uses of Dante tested in his earlier poems. It is important to understand Shelley’s last poem as a correction of epics such as Wordsworth’s Excursion, or The Recluse. The lack of the autobiographical narrative included in The Prelude, published only in 1850, meant that to the young Romantics Wordsworth’s epic tended to sacrifice the poet to ‘history’. As Peterfreund explains, The Excursion does not fulfil Wordsworth’s claim that his epic would celebrate the marriage between ‘man’ and ‘nature’: One of the darker aspects that the ‘Prospectus’ to The Excursion optimistically denies, is the resulting oppression – not just for the female object of that marriage, but for the male subject who presses for its consummation as well.80 In The Triumph of Life Shelley’s narrator is freed, like Dante’s, from such subservience, by his subjectivity: the encounter with the ‘other’ is always an exploration of and an encounter with the implicit danger that this ‘other’ is none other than an image of the speaking subject. The poem opens with a description of dawn that shares with Dante’s the desire to describe a mood of the spirit. The sun, celebrated as a classical deity, receives the tribute of all living creatures: & at the birth Of light, the Ocean’s orison arose To which the birds tempered their matin lay. … Isle, Ocean, & all things that in them wear The form & character of mortal mould Rise as the Sun their father rose (The Triumph of Life, 6–8, 16–18)81 The description of dawn with the musical touch of the singing of birds recalls the translation from Purgatorio, XXVIII that Shelley undertook in early 1822, from whence it derives the use of the verb ‘tempered’.82 Shelley’s allusion is meant to evoke the freshness of Dante’s earthly Paradise, but it also looks back to the first Purgatorial canto. Like Shelley, Dante is faced by dawn and sees ahead its reflection on the sea: L’alba vinceva l’ora mattutina che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano conobbi il tremolar de la marina. (Purgatorio, I, 115–17)


The dawn had chased the matin hour of prime, Which fled before it, so that from afar I spied the trembling of the ocean stream. (The Vision, Purgatory, I, 115–17) While Pite calls our attention to the analogy with Goethe’s Faust,83 one should also note a certain similarity between Shelley’s narrator and Dante at the beginning of his Purgatorial journey. Shelley’s narrator is undergoing a change in destiny of which he claims to be the centre. This analogy also applies to Dante the traveller, called to a unique experience on behalf of mankind. At the feet of the mountain of Purgatory he is literally at the centre of the universe. He can look back on the suffering he has just witnessed; he can look at the skies that hold his promise. For Shelley’s narrator, however, the Infernal experience lies ahead. While the scene-setting references to Dante’s Purgatorio evoke the atmosphere of bliss, at the appearance of the vision, echoes from the Inferno abound. There are only a few cantos to which Shelley repeatedly refers: Inferno III, V, XIII and XXVI. All four cantos are particularly marked out by being almost completely included within brackets in Shelley’s copy of the Inferno. Shelley draws freely from the first five cantos to create his own view of a Dantean Inferno: from his position along a ‘public way’ of Petrarchan origin, Shelley witnesses the procession of a multitude: they are compared to autumn leaves and their background is a raging gale inspired by Dante’s description of the whirlwind of lovers. The echoes are interestingly compounded as if to summarise Dante’s Infernal experience: Methought I sate beside a public way Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream Of people there was hurrying to & fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam, All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why He made one of the multitude, yet so Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky One of the million leaves of summer’s bier. – … And others as with steps towards the tomb Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath (The Triumph of Life, 43–51, 56–7)


The last line recalls Dante’s punishment of the indifferent, whose blood is drunk by worms crawling at their feet. The Infernal gale of Canto V is echoed by the raging dance into which the followers of the chariot are dragged (emphasis added): And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast The million with fierce song and maniac dance Raging around; … Wilder as it grows, They, tortured by the agonising pleasure, Convulsed & on the rapid whirlwinds spun Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure Was soothed by mischief since the world begun (The Triumph of Life, 109–11, 142–6) Cary’s translation emphasised the whirling motion of Dante’s storm – the same effect is found in Shelley’s Infernal storm. In Shelley’s fiction, Rousseau corresponds to Pier Delle Vigne. As in Dante, a supernatural punishment binds his soul to a tree: I turned & knew (O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!) That what I thought was an old root which grew To strange distortion out of the hill side Was indeed one of the deluded crew, And that the grass which methought hung so wide And white, was but his thin discoloured hair, And that the holes it vainly sought to hide Were or had been eyes. (The Triumph of Life, 179–88) While in Dante only a wailing voice betrays the soul imprisoned within the tree, Shelley, instead, recognises Rousseau’s features in the knots of the root, applying a miniature-like figurative approach similar to the one Blake will use in his illustrations of Dante. Both Shelley and Blake could have been guided by Cary’s translation, which foregrounds the Infernal transformation with a metaphor: Men once we were, that now are rooted here (The Vision, Hell, XIII, 37)


Pier della Vigna is one of the characters who embody the tragedy of Dante’s Inferno: praised and admired by the poet for his great human virtues he is nevertheless damned by his lack of the theological ones. In this sense his analogy with Shelley’s Rousseau has not been fully comprehended: Shelley admires Rousseau, but can understand his faults. As Peter Vassallo points out, Rousseau’s self-examination in The Triumph of Life betrays an origin in Shelley’s biography.84 ‘I was overcome / By my own heart alone’ (The Vision, 240–1) echoes Shelley’s analysis of his own fault in a letter to Mary Shelley of August 1821: ‘love far more than hatred – has been to me, except as you have been it’s object, the source of all sort[s] of mischief’.85 He is chosen by Shelley as guide for the visionary experience despite his failure: like Virgil he does not hold the key to the meaning of the pageant, but by virtue of his own fall can guide Shelley in the procession of the fallen. Shelley’s allusions to Inferno, XXVI similarly throw light on his conception of the figure of Rousseau. Ulysses’ sin is the most highly humanistic in the scheme of the Inferno: thirst for knowledge beyond human limitations. In the pursuit of knowledge Ulysses deceives his companions and forsakes his family: né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopé far lieta, vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto, e de li vizi umani e del valore; (Inferno, XXVI, 94–9) Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence Of my old father, nor return of love, That should have crown’d Penelope with joy, Could overcome in me the zeal I had To explore the world, and search the ways of life, Man’s evil and his virtue. (The Vision, Hell, XXVI, 94–9) Echoing Ulysses, Rousseau invites Shelley to avoid his own and his companions’ mistakes and to leave the pageant in order to listen to his own narration: ‘I will now tell that which to this deep scorn Led me & my companions, and relate


The progress of the pageant since the morn; ‘If thirst of knowledge doth not thus abate, Follow it even to the night, but I Am weary’ (The Triumph of Life, 191–6) Like Dante’s Ulysses, Shelley’s Rousseau cannot really answer the question the narrator asks him: ‘Then, what is Life?’ He too, is a victim, and one wonders to what extent Rousseau as guide could have led the poem forward. Was Dante at this point the most qualified guide for his own search? Shelley does not envision Dante in the poem, but the narrator qualifies the vision in Dantean terms: ‘Before the chariot had begun to climb The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme ‘Of him whom from the lowest depths of Hell Through every Paradise & through all glory Love led serene, & who returned to tell ‘In words of hate & awe the wondrous story How all things are transfigured, except Love;’ (The Triumph of Life, 469–76) According to Pite, Rousseau’s failure consisted precisely in not having been able to complete his own search to its fulfilment, as Dante had.86 Certainly, it is essential to distinguish between Rousseau’s interpretation of the procession and the real meaning of life for which the protagonist is searching. Although the poem is unfinished, its resemblance to Dante’s Inferno is clear. Its idyllic opening, however, seems more connected to Purgatorio. Rousseau’s vision, too, opens in the same bower and is described in terms of Dante’s earthly Paradise: In the April prime When all the forest tops began to burn ‘With kindling green, touched by the azure clime Of the young year, I found myself asleep Under a mountain which from unknown time ‘Had yawned into a cavern high & deep, And from it came a gentle rivulet


Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep ‘bent the soft grass (The Triumph of Life, 308–16) The Purgatorial background of Shelley’s scene has been recognised.87 Analogies have similarly been drawn between the deceitful ‘shape all light’ described in line 352 and Matilda from Purgatorio, XXVIII.88 The shape, like Matilda, performs the ritual immersion of her follower into Lethean waters: while for Dante the stream of forgetfulness enables him to bear the sight of Beatrice, Rousseau’s drinking prepares the way for the vision of the car and its captives. These are interestingly compared to ‘atomies that dance / Within a sunbeam’ (The Triumph of Life, 446–7), echoing Dante’s description in Paradiso, XIV, 112–15 of the ‘minuzie d’i corpi’ moving in a sunbeam. Cary first used the unusual word ‘atomies’ in the translation, representing Shelley’s most probable source: Così si veggion qui diritte e torte, … le minuzie de’ corpi lunghe e corte, moversi per lo raggio (Paradise, 112, 114–15) Thus oft are seen … The atomies of bodies, long or short, To move along the sunbeam (The Vision, Paradise, XIV, 104, 106–7) The Triumph of Life is thus entirely characterised by the continuous sequence of echoes from Dante’s three canticles. The switch from Purgatorial to Infernal scenes is part of the nature of Shelley’s vision: his hell, like Milton’s, is a place of the mind. Its imagery, to borrow Shelley’s own words, can thus be said to have been drawn ‘from the operations of the human mind’.89

Concluding remarks Critical approaches to Shelley’s use of the Divine Comedy have often emphasised his divergence from Dante’s theology of salvation. Thus M.H. Abrams contrasts The Triumph of Life with the Divine Comedy because Shelley’s poem offers ‘a vision of history as the almost


unrelieved tragedy of the defeat of human potentiality’.90 Harold Bloom, in Shelley’s Mythmaking, interprets Shelley’s title as the triumph of ‘Death-in-life’ over humanity.91 Earl Schulze similarly sees Shelley’s vision in Epipsychidion as an antithesis of Dante’s Purgatorio.92 Behind these attitudes perhaps lie attributions of influential anxiety influenced by T.S. Eliot’s approach to Dante as a central figure of European literary history. However, our study has shown that Shelley felt he was treading new ground with his use of Dante, and he was certainly free from the anxiety of influence. His use of Dante, therefore, must be understood in different terms. Ralph Pite finds that Shelley adopts the same attitude to his favourite European poets: Shelley, typically, does not try or fail to displace one writer with another; he uses eclecticism as a means of placing himself within a tradition of writers in order to change competition into emulation, imitation into co-operation.93 This cooperation, as has been shown, began with Shelley’s first epic, Laon and Cythna and runs through some of the most significant phases of his production. In Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life the allusive dialogue with Dante both evokes the mood of Dante’s three worlds and participates in sustaining the form of Shelley’s poems. Shelley’s intertextual practice further consists in what has been described as ‘holding conversation with other poets through the medium of his own poetry’.94 This is part of his constant aspiration to self-examination, an attitude that Tilottama Rajan identifies as typical of Romantic poetry in general.95 This chapter has illustrated the progressive richness and depth of Shelley’s allusions to the work of Dante. By the time he composed the Triumph of Life, Shelley had come to assimilate the Divine Comedy, helped by his own translation from Purgatorio, XXVIII.96 The choice of this passage is not difficult to understand: the episode of Dante’s encounter with Matilda in the Purgatorio introduces into the poem the mood of the Vita Nuova. The translation is surprisingly short considering Shelley’s long-lasting interest in Dante. As Timothy Webb suggests, Cary’s recently published translation and the increased interest in Dante must have made him feel that there was no need for him to promote the Italian poet in Britain.97 If we believe Medwin’s assertion, there was also a doubt as to his linguistic adequacy to the task.98 This can be understood within the context of Shelley’s ‘Italian Platonics’: although he was studying Italian as early as 1814 and even produced a


translation of two sonnets by Dante,99 the most significant application to composition in Italian must be identified with the friendship with Teresa Viviani. His frequent visits to her following their first meeting on 29 November 1820100 prompted Shelley to apply his usual method of choice for learning a language, translation, to his own poetry, producing it in Italian. With Teresa Viviani’s assistance Shelley produced three translations of his poetry into Italian, a translation from Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, one from Dante’s Convivio, a review in Italian of Tommaso Sgricci’s performance of ‘La Morte d’Ettore’, and a complete tale in Italian. The general time period suggested for each of these works is the winter of 1820–21, most probably between December and February.101 The abrupt end of the relationship seems to have brought Shelley’s writing in Italian to an end, with the exception of the translation from the Inferno. The close collaboration with Teresa Viviani confirms that for Shelley Italian was the language of lyric poetry, a language to be used in Dantean terms as the language of love, however defined.102 Despite his appreciation of Petrarch, for Shelley, Dante became the metonymy for love and love poetry: ‘Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch… . The latter [Paradiso] is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love.’103 Shelley thus found in Dante’s love poetry the modern answer to Homer’s epic. As the next chapter aims to demonstrate, Keats followed his example and his epic ambitions with very different results.

5 John Keats and Dante: Speaking the Gods’ Language

At foot Of a magnificent castle we arrived, Seven times with lofty walls begirt, and round Defended by a pleasant stream. … We to one side retired, into a place Open and bright and lofty, whence each one Stood manifest to view. (The Vision, Hell, IV, 100–3, 111–13) The issue of Dante’s precise relationship with Greek literature has been central to Dantean criticism. Giorgio Padoan notes that ‘in Dante’s works there is no single quotation from an ancient author that could stand out for its rarity’.1 Virgil and the Latin writers, Ovid and Statius in particular, together with the medieval allegories and legends about the classical world, were Dante’s introduction to the Greek heroes and myths, as Padoan explains: In Virgil’s Elysian Fields one finds Assaracus, Dardanus and their descent … the heroes, poets, and all those who brought civilisation to humanity with the arts and sciences … Dante adds on to Virgil’s suggestions, accepting them without any perplexity.2 Like Dante’s, John Keats’s approach to Greek literature was via translation:3 the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, by pointing out the important role of the translator, expresses Keats’s consciousness of the limitations of the process of recovering the past. Likewise, his understanding of the Divine Comedy was filtered and 128

Keats and Dante: Speaking the Gods’ Language 129

influenced by Cary’s ‘minute volumes’ first read during a walking tour in Scotland.4 This chapter aims to reassess Keats’s approach to Dante and move beyond readings based on Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. The legacy of this approach is strong, particularly because both Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom chose Keats as the primary example of a predecessor’s haunting presence.5 As Nicholas Roe has pointed out, Bloom’s reading tends to undervalue Keats’s ‘efforts to forge his identity in relation to the past’.6 The literary canon, in particular, did not only entice a negative influential reading for Keats, but was itself instrumental in fostering creativity and helping him find his own literary voice. Psychoanalytic or psychological readings influenced by Bloomian anxiety further reveal a quasi-subliminal relationship between reading and writing: composition being relegated to the domain of the subconscious, its relationship with reading become as mysterious as dreamwork. Shelley’s and Keats’s approach to Dante on the contrary shows a close relationship between their readings and their intertextual use of the poet. Both read Dante alongside Milton; they both moved from sporadic Dantean echoes to a sustained intertextuality in their long narrative fragments. Thomas Medwin, as pointed out in Chapter 4, claimed that Keats and Shelley had entered a challenge: ‘Shelley told me that he and Keats had mutually agreed, in the same given time, (six months each) to write a long poem, and that the Endymion, and the Revolt of Islam were the fruits of this rivalry.’7 While Shelley did read Endymion, Keats’s knowledge of Laon and Cythna is uncertain. Two letters document his interest: on 22 December 1818 he exchanged a casual remark to Haydon on Shelley’s struggles with the Olliers over the theme of incest and the irreligious tone of the poem;8 and on 21 February 1818 Keats mentioned to George and Tom Keats that he had not read Laon and Cythna, but wished to do so once a copy was sent to him.9 Textual evidence suggests that Keats must indeed have read Laon and Cythna and was directed by Shelley’s poem to explore Dante’s representation of Divine language.

Keats’s Italian readings: approaching the Divine Comedy In the sonnet Happy is England, probably written in the winter of 1816, Keats expresses an attitude to Italy that can be described in terms of Said’s category of ‘orientalism’ (italics added):10 Happy is England! I could be content To see no other verdure than its own;


To feel no other breezes than are blown Through its tall woods with high romances blent: Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment For skies Italian, and an inward groan To sit upon an Alp as on a throne, And half forget what world or worldling meant. Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters, Enough their simple loveliness for me, Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging: Yet do I often warmly burn to see Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing, And float with them about the summer waters.11 The experience of visiting a southern country is here described in all its ambiguousness as a satisfaction of male desire and as a physical experience. The first-person narrator envisages a complete union with the country that is contrasted with the playful romance offered by Britain’s ‘artless daughters’. Keats’s Italy is a feminine ‘other’ vaguely defined in terms of southern difference: this idealisation corresponds closely to Madame de Staël’s passionate and pathetic envisaging of Corinne’s Italian experience.12 In fact, from his earliest approach to Italian literature, encouraged by his tutor and mentor, Charles Cowden Clarke,13 Keats defines it in feminine terms, equating a genre, ‘romance’, with gender. In a letter to Fanny Keats of 10 September 1817 he expressed the wish that ‘the Italian would supersede French in every School throughout the Country for that is full of real Poetry and Romance of a kind more fitted for the Pleasure of Ladies than perhaps our own’. 14 Keats’s first indirect approach to Dante does not represent an exception to this perception of Italian literature: his first indirect knowledge of an episode from Dante’s Inferno is through Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini.15 Hunt expands the central episode of Paolo and Francesca into a poem of about 1700 lines. Inspired by Dante’s own reference to the fictional world of chivalry (Inferno, V), Hunt constructs a tale of romance. Dismissing Dante’s ever-present moral judgement, he celebrates the kiss between the lovers in Francesca’s own words: ‘Sacred be love from sight, whate’er it is’.16 Keats responds to his reading experience with On ‘The Story of Rimini’. The sonnet reviews the poem, echoing Hunt’s own diction: the episode narrated by Dante is a ‘sweet tale’, fit for he who ‘is prone / To moralise upon a smile or tear’ (On ‘The Story of Rimini’, III, 9–10).


Hunt’s poem offered to British Romantic readers a romanticised Dante that contrasts sharply with eighteenth-century Gothic readings of the Inferno. Byron was particularly attracted by this reading and praised Hunt’s experiment.17 Keats’s admiration for Hunt’s poem was displaced by his reading of Cary’s translation of the episode. Although he had read The Inferno by 1817,18 his reading of The Vision, which would prove more influential, took place during his Scottish walking tour with Benjamin Bailey.19 Three letters record his reading of the complete translation: on 10 June 1818 Keats replies to Bailey’s appreciation of a passage from Dante.20 The second reference is a playful one in a letter to the publisher Taylor: ‘Remember me to Hessey saying I hope he’ll Carey [sic] his point.’21 Again to Bailey on 22 July, Keats indicates his reading of The Vision, recalling the ‘fine passage’ about which Bailey had written to him.22 Keats’s reading of the translation typically originates new poetry that shows the displacement of Hunt’s interpretation. The sonnet As Hermes Once Took to his Feathers Light,23 captures the dramatic tones of Dante’s Inferno. Keats maintains the ambiguity of the episode: the narrator takes up both Dante’s and Paolo’s role: the sense of infringement is passed on to the need to let the ‘dragon-world’ sleep (line 5) in order to gain access to the experience. The last six lines of the sonnet echo the whirlwind of the lustful and the hail of Inferno, VI, as the narrator is transported by sleep, to that second circle of sad hell, Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell Their sorrows. (As Hermes Once Took to his Feathers Light, 9–12) The narrator then becomes Paolo and imparts the momentous kiss with which Francesca ends her narrative; like the two lovers he is dragged by the infernal storm: Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm. (As Hermes Once Took to his Feathers Light, 13–14) The sonnet further includes Keats’s reflections on the process of rewriting Dante’s episode as suggested by the narrator’s ambiguous ‘Delphic reed’ (line 3). In Keats reading and writing become one and the same thing: he can thus empower his own reading, undermining


interpretative anxieties imposed by literary criticism. In this sense Keats follows a tendency that is typical of Romantic approaches to reading, as pointed out by Lucy Newlyn: According to the logic of the writing-reading dialectic, every defence against the anxiety of reception involves a double bind; and the twinned ideas of posterity and repetition prove no exception to this rule. Repetition is both sought after, because the idea of a double offers hope of survival in perpetuity, and feared, because the irreducible identity – the ‘genius’ or ‘originality’ – of writers consists in their differentiation from others, past, present, and future.24 Newlyn’s fresh approach to Romanticism and reading sheds new light on Keats’s approach to literary tradition. Since the anxiety of rewriting the past is part of the consciousness of the possible future annihilation by posterity, a poet’s relationship with his predecessors becomes one of identification. In order to understand Keats’s approach to Dante, it is important, therefore, to analyse his readings from Cary’s translation. The existence of Keats’s annotated copy of The Vision transcribed by Gittings partly illustrates his selections from the poem and his interests.25 Gittings is positive in considering the annotations a direct testimony of Keats’s actual readings from the poem during the Scottish walking tour and attempts a tentative chronology. The limitation of this approach is now evident: it disregards the possibility that Keats might have started reading from the original at a later stage, and it does not take into sufficient consideration further testimony, provided for instance by Keats’s and his friends’ letters. John Saly, in his in-depth study ‘Keats’s Answer to Dante: The Fall of Hyperion’ provides a more probable reconstruction of his reading. Keats had already read Cary’s Hell by December 1817, as the review published in The Champion proves; he then most probably re-read the first cantos of the poem before leaving for his Scottish tour. These, in fact, are the most heavily underlined in the complete volumes. Saly explains: I think Mr Gittings is right in saying that the markings in the first canto, which is more heavily underlined than any other canto in the volume, most probably date from the weeks before the Scottish tour: they are most likely a sequel to the correspondence with Bailey, who was at this time about to be ordained.26


Gittings’ further claim that cantos IX to XV were read by Keats at Hampstead after his return from the walking tour are clearly contradicted by Brown’s reference to Inferno, XV in a letter from Inverness dated 7 August 1818: he states that they were ‘always moving – moving from one place to another, like Dante’s inhabitants of the Sulphur Kingdom in search of cold ground’.27 Despite their tentative chronology, Keats’s markings are valuable in understanding his early appreciation of the Divine Comedy. Keats’s explanation of the Miltonic echoes in the Fall of Hyperion provides an insight into his way of marking books.28 He invites Reynolds ‘to pick out some lines from Hyperion and put a mark X to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one || to the true voice of feeling’.29 Keats’s annotations to The Vision consist of horizontal underlining of passages and of single, double or triple vertical lines on the left-hand side of the printed text.30 The annotations are found in Hell, I, in Hell, IX to XV and XXII to XXVII. Gittings argues that the absence of annotations in Hell, II to VIII suggests that they were read during the Scottish tour. However, the regular progression of the markings, encompassing particular groupings of cantos, seems to me quite unlikely to be caused simply by Keats’s discriminative tastes, as the gaps in the markings could equally well have been determined, for instance, by his reading the cantos aloud with Brown. The first canto is heavily marked. A reference to the importance of beginnings is included in the copy of Paradise Lost that he was also reading on the tour. The association between Dante and Milton for Keats, therefore, is strengthened not only by Cary’s ‘Miltonic’ style, but also by his contemporaneous reading of and comparison between the two epics. Thus in the copy of Paradise Lost Keats writes: ‘there is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems – more particularly where the action begins – that of Dante’s Hell – of Hamlet’.31 Keats’s markings in the fourteen cantos he annotates testify his interest in the narrative sections as well as in Dante’s similes. In most of the cantos Keats underlines the extended similes: in Hell, IX he underlines the comparison between the fleeting souls and frogs (lines 76–81), in Hell, XIII the hunt of Lano and Jacopo da Sant’Andrea is compared to the boar hunt (lines 112–14), in Hell, XIV the burning sand of the sodomites is compared to a snowy plain (lines 28–30). Keats is also attracted by Dante’s use of similes to describe the Infernal landscape. These occur in Inferno, XIII, where the wood of suicides is compared to the thickets in Liguria (lines 7–9), in Inferno, XXVI, where the fires that encompass the souls are compared to the summer fireflies in the Italian hills (lines


25–30), and in Inferno, XXVII, in which Guido da Montefeltro describes his birthplace to Dante. Keats always underlines the poetic climax of the cantos he selects. Hell, XV represents a significant example of Keats’s markings. He underlines with double horizontal marks the two tercets in which Dante expresses his affection for his teacher and those in which the master commends to him his work: The dear, benign, paternal image, such As thine was, when so lately thou didst teach me The way for man to win eternity … ‘yonder I behold A mist new-risen on the sandy plain. A company, with whom I may not sort, Approaches. I commend my Treasure to thee, Wherein I yet survive; my sole request’. (The Vision, Hell, XV, 83–5, 118–22) Here Cary’s tendency to loftiness of tone reduces the intimacy of Dante and Latini’s conversation, as in line 84 Cary is unable to maintain the stress on ‘voi’ [you] created in the Italian text by an enjambment, and he eliminates the phrase ‘ad ora ad ora’ [time after time] (Inferno, XV, 84) that expresses the intensity of their exchange. However, the encounter is still one that evokes reading anxieties as Dante confronts his tutor and is reminded to find inspiration in his work. Keats’s reading of Milton alongside The Vision may explain his tendency to prefer passages that reveal Cary’s introduction of Miltonic indeterminacy: among the lines underlined both vertically and horizontally in the first canto – ten in all – five have a definite Miltonic touch in their suggestiveness and indeterminacy (my emphasis): ‘I look’d aloft, and saw his shoulders broad’ (The Vision, Hell, I, 15), ‘A she-wolf / Was at his heels, who in her leanness seemed / Full of all wants’ (lines 45–6), ‘the form of one, / Whose voice seemed faint through long disuse of speech’ (lines 58–9), ‘gloomy vale’ (The Vision, Hell, XII, 86), ‘An ancient form’ (The Vision, Hell, XIV, 99). In the light of Keats’s interest in classical myths, one should note also that the cantos concerned contain references to the following classical figures: the Furies (Inferno, IX), the Minotaur (Inferno, XII), the Centaurs (Inferno, XII), the old man of Crete – which also contains a reference to the myth of Saturn32 – and the phoenix (Inferno, XXIV), Hercules and Cacus, and Ulysses and Diomedes (Inferno, XXVI). Keats,


who had been first introduced to classical myths by dictionaries such as Andrew Tooke’s revised translation of Pantheon, and J. Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica: or a Classical Dictionary thus found in The Vision a surprisingly classical Dante.33 It is difficult to determine just how far Keats read after The Vision, Hell, XXVII and to what extent he read Purgatorio and Paradiso. The possibility that Keats might have read the last two cantiche in the original, initially rejected by Gittings, has recently been reconsidered by John Saly, who developed and expounded the investigations by Robert Bridges, J. Livingston Lowes and Dorothy Hewlett.34 Keats refers to his studies of the language in two letters of 1819; in September he writes to John Taylor: ‘Since I finish’d it I have finish’d Lamia: and am now occupied in revising St.Agnes’ Eve and studying Italian. Ariosto I find as diffuse, in parts, as Spenser.’35 A few weeks later he has clearly been pursuing his studies, as a letter to George and Georgiana Keats documents: ‘In the course of a few months I shall be as good an Italian scholar as I am a french one [sic] – I am reading Ariosto at present: not managing more than six or eight stanzas at a time … Also the reading of Dante in [sic] well worth the while.’36 In the context of this letter, these last lines could certainly imply that Keats was actually reading the text in Italian. Further evidence is offered by Leigh Hunt’s statement that ‘Keats had read Dante in Mr. Cary’s translation, for which he had a great respect. He began to read him afterwards in Italian, which language he was mastering with surprising quickness.’37 Saly suggests that Keats was helped in his studies by Charles Brown, his companion on the tour, who later in life translated five cantos of Orlando Innamorato. This approach to the Italian text signifies a second reading of Dante, one in which the text could further be inscribed with new reading/ writing. Keats’s reading generated occasional echoes from Dante in his poetry, some of which have been acknowledged by contemporary and later critics. Leigh Hunt, for instance, found a Dantean origin in Keats’s description of the statues in The Eve of St Agnes, 14–18.38 The most significant echo is perhaps in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, the sonnet that so ambiguously links literary tradition to historical narratives of conquest and depredation.39 In the climactic end of the first stanza, Keats expresses the immensity of his acquisition in Dantean terms: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: (On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, 7–8)


As pointed out in the analysis of The Vision, Cary’s use of the noun ‘serene’ represents one of its earliest nineteenth-century occurrences.40 More Dantean echoes could be identified in Keats’s poetry. Any new identification of possible echoes often generates different kinds of scepticism; in general, occurrences in the English tradition are more likely to be acknowledged and accepted by the literary establishment. Echoes, however, become significant once they signal an allusive relationship with Dante that contributes to poetic form. Cary’s intervention often re-inscribes Dante into the English tradition by emphasising earlier existing borrowings or by introducing quotations from English poets in his own translation. By doing so, however, with The Vision Cary simply gave the Romantics an interesting palimpsest that responded to their desire to rewrite/read the European epic. Like Shelley, Keats performs the act of erasure envisioned by De Quincey, but he does so only to write over Dante’s story of salvation his own account of the poet’s dream.

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: Milton’s ‘stationing or statu[a]ry’, ‘the brief pathos of Dante’ and the language of the gods It is generally assumed that the Divine Comedy played a central role in Keats’s attempt to escape the Miltonic influence he came to detect in Hyperion. John Livingston Lowes argued that ‘the structural background’ of The Fall of Hyperion is Dante’s Purgatorio.41 Both Kenneth Muir and Stuart M. Sperry agree with Lowes in defining The Fall of Hyperion ‘as very much a purgatorial poem’.42 According to Harold Bloom the structure of the new poem comes primarily from Dante.43 Thus studies of Keats’s use of the Divine Comedy in the Hyperion poems have focused on echoes. John Livingston Lowes underlined the first notable debts from The Vision and The Divine Comedy in 1936;44 Robert Gittings focused exclusively on the influence of The Inferno on the Hyperion poems.45 John Saly expanded the references to Dante more generally acknowledged by arguing that ‘it was not Cary’s version of the Inferno, but the original of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso that had the shaping influence on The Fall of Hyperion’.46 My approach proceeds from Saly’s assumption that the Divine Comedy in Italian was Keats’s reference. My interest lies more precisely in the way Dante’s poem helped Keats structure Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Ralph Pite has shown how Keats’s dialogue with Milton and Dante in the Hyperion poems can help us understand the struggle between ‘description and


representation … observation and participation’.47 In Keats’s two poems Dante’s poetry provides structural devices that cannot be tied down to a single derivative passage; however, while in Hyperion the Divine Comedy provides some specific solutions to the poet’s quest, in The Fall of Hyperion it becomes the architext to Keats’s project. Hyperion was begun in the autumn of 1818 and abandoned in April 181948 as documented by two letters. In the first Keats communicates to Haydon the qualities of the new poem in comparison with Endymion: In Endymion I think you may have many bits of the deep and sentimental cast – the nature of Hyperion will lead me to treat it in a more naked and grecian Manner [sic] – and the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating – and one great contrast between them will be – that the Hero of the written tale being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance; whereas the Apollo in Hyperion being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one.49 The second one is Woodhouse’s note on his copy of 1818: ‘April 1819. K. lent me the Fragment here alluded to for perusal … He said he was dissatisfied with what he had done of it; and should not complete it.’50 Keats’s interest in the fall of the Titans dates from the composition of Endymion, III. In lines 993–7, in fact, he refers to the character of Oceanus, while in Endymion, IV he announces the new theme: ‘Thy lute-voic’d brother will I sing ere long’ (line 774). In the ‘Preface’, furthermore, Keats openly avows the emergence of a new interest: ‘I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness: for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewell.’51 Keats’s approach to Greek myth has been explored in its varied combination of sources, from Hesiod’s Theogony, to Hyginus’ Fabulae, Tooke’s Pantheon to Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary. To these one should add Virgil’s Aeneid, read by Keats in his schooldays at Enfield, and Chapman’s Homer. In both Greek and Roman epic Keats would have encountered the classical topos of the council of the gods – transformed by Milton into the council of devils – which informs Book II of Hyperion; in both the Iliad and Odyssey Keats could find the first example in classical literature of an author’s description of divine speech: in three instances in the Iliad Homer provides the names of earthly things as they are called by men and by the gods, while in the Odyssey he lists only the divine equivalent.52 Plato’s Cratylus


summarises the classical approach to divine language; each human word, Plato explains, has a divine counterpart: Hermogenes: Why, Socrates, what does Homer say about names, and where? Socrates: In many passages; but chiefly and most admirably in those in which he distinguishes between the names by which gods and men call the same things. Do you not think he gives in those passages great and wonderful information about the correctness of names? For clearly the gods call things by the names that are naturally right. Do you not think so?… Do you not know that he says about the river in Troyland which had the simple combat Hephaestus, ‘whom the gods call Xanthus, but men call Scamander?’ (Plato, Cratylus) Dante, too, was deeply interested in the articulation of divine speech and posed the question in Biblical terms: what are the implications of the Fall for human speech?53 In Inferno, XXXI Dante answers this question by dramatising the meeting with the originator of languages, the giant Nemrot: ‘Raphél maí amècche zabì almi’ (line 67).54 Virgil explains to the reader that Nemrot’s words should be disregarded as nonsense and he refuses to explain the Titan’s language: ‘ché così è a lui ciascun linguaggio / come ’l suo ad altrui, ch’a nulla è noto’ (Inferno, XXXI, 80–1) – ‘for so each language is to him, / As his to others, understood by none’ (Hell, XXXI, 73–4). The difference between Dante’s and, for instance, Homer’s treatment of otherworldly language lies in the fact that Homer uses existing Greek words while Dante invents Nemrot’s cacophony. In fact, in describing the Titans’ speech Keats did not follow either of these models closely: he opted for a third solution which was inspired by Dante’s description of the language of the damned. The Miltonic influence of the beginning of Hyperion has been long pointed out. Saturn is described sitting ‘in the shady sadness of a vale’ (Hyperion, I, 1). In his annotation to Paradise Lost, I, 321, Keats refers to his fascination with Milton’s creation of vales in Heaven and Hell.55 However, Keats’s beginning in ‘medias res’ places the reader in an isolated environment that can be compared to the forest (selva) of Inferno, I. Keats’s description of this darkness recalls Dante’s specification of the time and day of his journey. Cary translates the passage: The hour was morning’s prime, and on his way Aloft the sun ascended with those stars,


That with him rose when Love divine first moved Those its fair works (The Vision, Hell, I, 35–8) Keats locates his vale ‘Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star’ (Hyperion, I, 3). Dante’s Comedy, although commonly termed ‘divine’, centres on the crisis of Dante–everyman. Inferno, XIV and XV are relevant to the whole climate of Keats’s opening.56 The dismal aspect of the ‘drear mystic wood’ (The Vision, XIII, 17) is soon followed by the ‘arid sand and thick’ (The Vision, XIV, 14) of the sodomites. Virgil and Dante walk along the margin to avoid the burning soil: dico che arrivammo ad una landa che dal suo letto ogne pianta rimove. La dolorosa selva l’ è ghirlanda intorno, come’l fosso tristo ad essa: quivi fermammo i passi a randa a randa. (Inferno, XIV, 8–12) There, on the very edge, Our steps we stay’d. It was an area wide Of arid sand and thick, resembling most The soil that erst by Cato’s foot was trod. (The Vision, Hell, XIV, 7–15) In Keats’s vale the steps along the sand are Saturn’s and their interruption tells the lack of progression in Hyperion: in the Divine Comedy a distinction exists between the eternal recurrence of the steps of the damned souls and those of Dante; no such distinction exists in Hyperion because of the absence of a witnessing narrator. The steps simply lead to the place where the god rests: Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, No further than to where his feet had stray’d, And slept there since. (Hyperion, I, 15–17) Keats’s description of the Titans’ sufferings at the change they have undergone borrows its tone and qualities from Dante’s ‘Malebolgie’, the eighth circle of Hell.57 In Hyperion metal imagery becomes the symbol of the loss of Saturn’s golden kingdom. In Book I, Hyperion


tastes ‘Savour of poisonous brass and metal sick’ (Hyperion, I, 188–9). In Book II Keats evokes the Titans’ suffering (italics added): Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon, Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge Stubborn’d with iron. All were not assembled: Some chain’d in torture, and some wandering. Cœus, and Gyges, and Briareüs, Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion, With many more, the brawniest in assault, Were pent in regions of laborious breath; Dungeon’d in opaque element, to keep Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs Lock’d up like veins of metal, crampt and screw’d; (Hyperion , II, 15–28) These verses focus principally on the Titans’ thrones. Iron, as opposed to gold, is now the material that prevails and Keats consistently uses iron imagery that conveys the coldness of the Titans’ limbs. Dante’s description of the eighth circle similarly combines stone and iron in the description of the abysmal region of hell: Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge, tutto di pietra di color ferrigno, come la cerchia che dintorno il volge. (Inferno, XVIII, 1–3) THERE is a place within the depths of hell Call’d Malebolge, all of rock dark-stain’d With hue ferruginous, e’en as the steep That round it circling winds. (The Vision, Hell, XVIII, 1–4) Keats shares with Dante the difficulty of defining the supernatural nature of his surroundings as well as of his characters. This is initially achieved by the use of sculptural imagery. Keats highlights the superhuman qualities of the Titans in general, and of Saturn and Thea in particular, by giving them a statuesque appearance. Saturn sits ‘quiet as a stone’ and his hand lies ‘nerveless, listless, dead’ (Hyperion, I, 4, 18); Thea is more clearly defined in terms of the qualities of Egyptian statuary:


Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestal’d haply in a palace court, When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore. (Hyperion, I, 31–3)58 After their outburst Thea and Saturn are compared for their lack of motion to ‘natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’ (Hyperion, I, 86). Both Dante and Milton may have introduced Keats to this use of ekphrasis. In his annotations to Paradise Lost, VII, 420–3, Keats notes Milton’s propensity for the ‘stationing or statu[a]ry’: He [Milton] is not content with simple description, he must station – thus here, we not only see how the Birds ‘with clang despised the ground,’ but we see them ‘under a cloud in prospect.’ So we see Adam ‘Fair indeed and tall – under a plantane’ – and so we see Satan ‘disfigured – on the Assyrian Mount’.59 One can identify in Hazlitt the origin of Keats’s approach to Milton’s statuary verse. In The Round Table Hazlitt explicitly links Milton’s art to the nakedness and simplicity of Greek sculpture: The persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, etc. are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture … The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue.60 In 1818 Keats attended the first of Hazlitt’s ‘Lectures on the English Poets’ delivered at the Surrey Institution.61 He thus heard Hazlitt’s qualification of Dante as ‘the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering’.62 As discussed in Chapter 3, Hazlitt connects Dante and Milton for their ‘partisanship’, but discriminates between them for Milton’s sculptural realism and Dante’s ability to portray emotions.63 Keats’s annotations to Paradise Lost reveal that his approach follows Schlegel: in the note to Paradise Lost, II, 546–61, Keats identifies Milton’s excellence in the ‘sublime pathetic’: ‘in Demons, fallen Angels, and Monsters the delicacies of passion living in and from their immortality, is of the most softening and dissolving nature’.64 In the comment to Book IV, 268–72, Keats distinguishes Milton’s intensity of feeling from Dante’s, to whom he ascribes ‘brief pathos’, as contrasted to the ‘very extraordinary beauty’ of Paradise Lost.65


Keats’s Hyperion shares with the Divine Comedy the supernatural translation of divine speech into human words. The Romantic poets often express the problem of communication as central to artistic experience. This is frequently translated in terms of the debate on the ‘sister arts’: thus Wordsworth’s desire to recapture the painter’s means in Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, or Coleridge’s longing to recapture the melody sung by the Abyssinian maid in Kubla Khan.66 Keats’s Hyperion poems share with Paradise Lost the problem of relating superhuman language. Milton’s God is absolutely anthropomorphic in his expression: the only consciousness of the objective limitation of human speech is the poet’s invocation to the Muse expressed in the form of a celebration of the Trinity in Paradise Lost, II, 1–55. Like Dante, Keats uses language as one of the means to stress the uniqueness of the experience recounted and the divine nature of his characters. Thus Keats relates Thea’s first speech to Saturn (italics added): and to the level of his ear Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake In solemn tenour and deep organ tone: Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents; O how frail To that large utterance of the early Gods! (Hyperion, I, 46–51) Hyperion’s thought similarly gives way to words as if impelled by some internal might: His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb, To this result (Hyperion, I, 226–7) Coelus’ voice reaches Hyperion like a whisper (Hyperion, I, 306–8). In addressing the Titans, Saturn’s voice rises ‘like organ’ (Hyperion, II, 126). The god of the sea’s language is described as pouring forth speech for the first time ‘In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue / Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands’ (Hyperion, II, 171–2). Keats’s invention in rendering divine speech touches its peak in Clymene’s account of her experience; the goddess expresses her newly


experienced woe into a shell, only to hear the echo of her melody transformed: Oh, melody no more! for while I sang, And with poor skill let pass into the breeze The dull shell’s echo, from a bowery strand Just opposite, an island of the sea, There came enchantment with the shifting wind, That did both drown and keep alive my ears. I threw my shell away upon the sand, And a wave fill’d it, as my sense was fill’d With that new blissful golden melody. (Hyperion, II, 272–80) The shell announces to Clymene Saturn’s defeat by Apollo. The knowledge she gains is one ‘Of joy and grief at once’ (Hyperion, II, 289). Here one can find an important analogy between Dante and Keats’s treatment of impaired communication: Dante’s infernal souls cannot speak because their denial of God has degraded them to the level of beasts. Similarly, the Titans’ speech is impaired by their denial of knowledge, which in the poem equals suffering. However, as Dante cannot fail in communicating his vision to the reader, no lack of communication can occur between Apollo and Mnemosyne; her message is not even touched by the ambiguities of language: Mute thou remainest – mute! yet I can read A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. (Hyperion, III, 111–13) In Hyperion hermeneutics are constrained by the limitations of language. Keats is involved in the effort to create the dimension of a divine utterance. In The Fall of Hyperion language regains the power of salvation as Keats assumes the Dantean role of the pilgrim. His words, like Dante’s, are the means through which a superhuman experience is humanised. As Dante states in the Paradiso: ‘Trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria’ (Paradiso I, 70–1). For Bloom, Keats’s introduction of the poet in The Fall of Hyperion renders the poem Dantesque in comparison with the Miltonic quality of Hyperion.67 I believe that both poems make use of Keats’s recent reading of Milton and Dante; their debt to the two poets is different, as are their themes: while Hyperion


centres on the problem of the relationship between knowledge and suffering and knowledge and language, The Fall centres on the quest for the poet’s identity and his mission towards humanity. Keats revised Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion in the period between July and September of 1819. His letters show that he was reading the Divine Comedy during August–September 1819. The most significant document is the letter of 5 September 1819, in which Keats mentions his attempt to master the Italian language by reading Ariosto.68 The letters that deal with The Fall of Hyperion do not, however, suggest any special attention to Dante’s poetry. The shaping influence of the Divine Comedy emerged by way of expanding the original Hyperion into the new narrative. Rather than ‘an answer to Dante’, as Saly suggests, The Fall of Hyperion is Keats’s answer to the existence and mission of epic poetry. Keats had started his investigation on the nature of the poet’s role in the letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818. Here his question was: … whether Miltons apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion[s], and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song.69 Keats answers that times do make a difference in helping a poet achieve a greater insight into humanity and that thus Milton ‘did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done’.70 By October 1818, the ‘poetical Character’ is seen by Keats as distinguished from the ‘wordsworthian [sic] or egotistical sublime’: What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation … Might I not at that very instant [have] been cogitating on the Characters of saturn and Ops?71 At this stage Keats’s avowal of the protean nature of the poet implies that his mission is to include in his canvas evil and good, suffering as well as happiness, Iago as well as Imogen.72 By the time he composed The Fall of Hyperion the realities of evil and suffering were calling for a greater moral commitment. In the letter to his brother of 21 April 1819 Keats develops his own personal approach to human suffering:


Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making’. Then you will find out the use of the world … Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!73 In June 1819, Keats expresses to Sarah Jeffrey his hope of having progressed in the development of his own soul and achieved a greater poetic maturity: I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb.74 Within the scheme of the development of the Hyperion poems, Keats’s greater involvement comes from the insertion of the poet–witness called to make sense of the vision for the reader. This development, however, is closely modelled on the Divine Comedy: the issue is not one of inspiration or sources, but one of genre. As will be shown, Keats legitimates the epic structure of his poem by invoking Dante’s poem as his ‘architext’. The Fall of Hyperion opens with a meditative introduction that represents the Romantic poet’s personal contribution to the epic genre. The wood described in the beginning of Hyperion is now replaced by a terrestrial paradise of Miltonic inspiration. In terms of Dantean imagery one soon realises that the Purgatorio and the Paradiso are now Keats’s referents. In the Purgatorio the otherworldly atmosphere of the Inferno is restored to reality by the description of the earthly mountain and the alternation between day and night. Dante sleeps and dreams. His sleeping, however, not unlike his swooning in Inferno, becomes a further device to emphasise the transcendent nature of the journey. In Purgatorio, XIX and XXVII he receives divine revelations. In Purgatorio, IX Dante is thus overpowered by sleep: quand’io, che meco avea di quel d’Adamo vinto dal sonno, in su l’erba inchinai là ’ve già tutti e cinque sedavamo. … in sogno mi parea veder sospesa


un’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’oro, con l’ali aperte e a calare intesa; (Purgatorio, IX, 10–12, 19–21) When I, who had so much of Adam with me, Sank down upon the grass, o’ercome with sleep, There where all five were seated. … Then, in a vision, did I seem to view A golden-feather’d eagle in the sky, With open wings, and hovering for descent; (The Vision, Purgatory, IX, 9–11, 17–19) Like Cary, Keats uses the verb ‘sink’ to describe his narrator’s swoon. As in Dante’s poem, the narrator in The Fall has ‘a vision’ (line 17). In the preceding verse Cary describes the minds of men receiving ‘holy divination in their dreams’ (The Vision, Purgatory, IX, 16). Here Cary has introduced loftiness of tone over Dante’s more realistic description as Dante’s text speaks of a ‘dream’, the significance of which the poet later discovers.75 At his awakening, Dante also finds himself confronted by a new scene and by Virgil’s account of how St Lucy carried him up the mountain (italics added): Non altrienti Achille si riscosse, li occhi svegliati rivolgendo in giro e non sappiendo là dove si fosse, … chi mi scoss’io, sì come da la faccia mi fuggì ’l sonno, e diventa’ ismorto, come fa l’uom che, spaventato, agghiaccia. (Purgatorio, IX, 34–6, 40–2) As erst Achilles shook himself, and round him roll’d His waken’d eyeballs, wondering where he was, … E’en thus I shook me, soon as from my face The slumber parted, turning deadly pale, Like one ice-struck with dread. (The Vision, Purgatory, IX, 31–3, 37–9)


The experience of Keats’s narrator is the same as that of Dante the pilgrim. His toil is a life-threatening experience and his ascent is characterised by steps: Prodigious seem’d the toil; the leaves were yet Burning, – when suddenly a palsied chill Struck from the paved level up my limbs, And was ascending quick to put cold grasp Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat: I shriek’d; and the sharp anguish of my shriek Stung my own ears – I strove hard to escape The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step. Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart; And when I clasp’d my hands I felt them not. One minute before death, my iced foot touch’d The lowest stair; and as it touch’d, life seem’d To pour in at the toes. (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 121–34) Keats’s ascent is dominated by steps, the essential feature of Dante’s Purgatorio. Moneta’s altar is ‘To be approach’d on either side by steps’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 90) and she warns the poet of the consequence ‘If thou canst not ascend / These steps’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 107–8). In the verses just cited Keats also uses the word ‘stair’. The dominating feature of Dante’s Purgatory is its division into ‘cornici’ [terraces].76 However, the ascent itself is characterised by the appearance of more or less regular steps. In Purgatorio, IX, Dante describes them as ‘gradi’ [steps] (line 93), in XIII, 1 and XXIV, 8 he uses ‘scala’ [stair], both translated as ‘scale’ in Cary; in Purgatorio, XXVIII, 67 he describes an ascent of ‘scaglion’ [steps], translated as ‘stair’ by Cary. Of considerable relevance to assess Keats’s reading of the Italian text is his use in The Fall of the uncommon form ‘pavement’ for ‘floor’. This form occurs in The Fall, I, 113, 153, while in I, 123 Keats refers to the ‘pavèd level’ and at I, 234 to the ‘paved floor’. As Lowes first pointed out, Cary uses alternative translations for the Italian form.77 The identification between Keats’s narrator and Dante is more clearly foregrounded by the even stronger association between Moneta and Beatrice. Despite being characterised as a pagan goddess, her relationship with the narrator is portrayed in Dantean terms. Like Beatrice at her appearance in Purgatorio, XXX, Moneta is described four times as


veiled (I, 141, 194, 216, 252); like Beatrice, she parts her veils to disclose the benign power of her eyes to the poet: But yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils, that from her brow Hung pale, and curtain’d her in mysteries That made my heart too small to hold its blood. This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand Parted the veils. (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 251–6) Like Dante, Keats exploits the complex relationship between a female ‘prophetess’ and a male protagonist: having rejected the romantic element of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, Keats ascribes to the goddess maternal qualities. In response to Keats’s fear Moneta parts her veils ‘As near as an immortal’s sphered words / Could to a mother’s soften’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 249–50); after scolding Keats she looks at him with ‘benignant eyes’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 265). Moneta’s function is also the same as Beatrice’s in imparting divine knowledge: both reply to the protagonist’s doubts ministering the power of vision. This ability more clearly links Keats’s prophetess to the Beatrice of the last Purgatorial cantos and of the first ones of the Paradiso. Unlike Shelley’s Rousseau of The Triumph of Life Moneta does not share Saturn’s fault in his fall; she can thus impart to Keats the lesson of the Titans’ fall: My power, which to me is still a curse, Shall be to thee a wonder; for the scenes Still swooning vivid through my globèd brain, With an electral changing misery, Thou shalt with these dull mortal eyes behold, Free from all pain, if wonder pain thee not (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 243–8) Like Beatrice she introduces the poet to the view of the fallen Titans and helps him to humanise their divine speech: ‘Mortal, that thou may’st understand aright, I humanise my sayings to thine ear, Making comparison of earthly things;’ (The Fall of Hyperion, II, 1–3)


Here lies, I believe, the central difference between Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: divine speech is now twice removed from the reader. The process of recounting it is achieved in two ways: firstly Moneta humanises her speech and secondly Keats’s senses grow stronger and more apt to receive the message. Both processes are at the basis of Dante’s Paradisiacal experience. This centres on the contrast between Dante’s humanity and his ability to understand the divine mind. Beatrice assists him in the task and explains to him the presence of different skies as a divine drama: Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, però che solo da sensato apprende ciò che fa poscia d’intelletto degno. (Paradiso, IV, 40–2) Thus needs, that ye may apprehend, we speak: Since from things sensible alone ye learn That, which, digested rightly, after turns To intellectual. (The Vision, Paradise, IV, 40–4) Dante’s faculties, too, need to adapt to the new experience. At the conclusion of Paradiso, II and V, Dante describes his dismay at Beatrice’s brightness (Paradiso, III, 127–30; IV, 139–42); in Paradiso, VII and XV Beatrice’s shining eyes reassure Dante of his ascent (Paradiso, VII, 13–15; XV: 34–6). Keats similarly endows his pilgrim with an increased ability to perceive and to remember the divine events he witnesses (italics added): Whereon there grew A power within me of enormous ken, To see as a God sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade. (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 302–10)

Concluding remarks There are interesting similarities between Keats’s and Shelley’s approach to Dante: both read the Divine Comedy early in their careers. For both Keats and Shelley, reading and writing became mutually


exchangeable processes because of their special concern for present and future readership. More importantly, both poets found in Dante the closest ‘modern’ equivalent to the ancient epic. Shelley was the first to draw from Dante’s treatment of divine language, only to be later attracted by the introduction of love into the epic form. Keats’s Hyperion poems continue the allusive dialogue with Dante that Shelley established in Laon and Cythna. Both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion share with the Divine Comedy structural devices and thematic preoccupations. Hyperion shares with Dante’s poem the preoccupation with the contrast between human and supernatural language. In The Fall of Hyperion the narrator’s experience is associated with Dante-thepilgrim’s experience of the second realm: in Keats’s poem Purgatorial rites prepare the narrator for a redeeming journey guided by a maternal prophetess. Alone, among humanity, he will experience ‘What ‘tis to die and live again before / Thy fated hour’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I, 142–3). His journey thus echoes Dante’s: ‘and I alone / Prepared myself the conflict to sustain, / Both of sad pity, and that perilous road, / Which my unerring memory shall retrace’ (The Vision, Hell, II, 3–6).

6 William Blake: the Romantic Illustrator of Dante

Having spent the Vigour of my Youth & Genius under the Oppression of S r Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment … Fuseli, Indignant hid himself, I [was] hid. (Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses) Se mai continga che ‘l poema sacro al quale ha posto mano cielo e terra sì che m’ha fatto per più anni macro, vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra dal bello ovile ov’io dormi agnello, nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra; con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte del mio battesmo prenderò il cappello; (Paradiso, XXV, 1–9) If e’er the sacred poem, that hath made Both Heaven and earth copartners in its toil, And with lean abstinence, through many a year, Faded my brow, be destined to prevail Over the cruelty, which bars me forth Of the fair sheep-fold, where, a sleeping lamb, The wolves set on and fain had worried me; 151


With other voice, and fleece of other grain, I shall forthwith return. (The Vision, Paradise, XXV, 1–9) The two passages above are typical examples of the lampoons that both Blake and Dante addressed to their supposed enemies, the Florentines for Dante and the British artistic establishment for Blake. It is hardly surprising that Blake was to become the most imaginative and at the same time the most innovative British illustrator of Dante. There are many interesting terms of comparison between the two. Both wrote under the pressure of felt injustice. Their works include such detailed reference to contemporary political events as to render their political views part of their aesthetics. Both found their deepest inspiration in the religion of their choice and were striving to express their own visionary experience in poetic form.1 Yet, despite these interesting similarities, Blake’s approach to Dante is complex and full of contradictions. While for Albert S. Roe, ‘Blake considered Dante’s vision partial’, according to Tinkler-Villani ‘to the end of his life Blake seems to have been of two minds, condemning Dante’s lack of radicalism in religion and politics, but still accepting the validity of his vision as a poet’.2 As both critics point out, Blake’s approach to the Italian poet is the result of his evolving political and aesthetic views. As a reader of Dante, Blake, however, seems to have been particularly dissatisfied with one aspect of his ideology: his celebration of the Holy Germanic Empire. One of the central tenets of Dante’s ideology consists in his vision of a unified Italy under the supervision the European power of the Emperor. Like many at the time, Dante believed that Henry VII of Luxembourg should have reclaimed his right to control the Italian peninsula and be anointed by the Pope. Henry VII’s Italian journey in 1310 represented the closest hope for a realisation of this vision. The emperor’s death in 1313 marked the end of Dante’s hopes in a political solution to Italy’s internal wars and his withdrawal from the political scene.3 Political readings of Dante became increasingly prominent in the 1820s. Ugo Foscolo, as discussed in Chapter 2, presented Dante as the ‘Ghibelline’ and the patriot; Lord Byron established in clear terms the association between Dante and the Italian revolutions in his poem The Prophecy of Dante (1821). It is extremely difficult to understand Blake’s position within the contemporary British debate on Dante. None of his comments refers explicitly to Foscolo’s influential essays and nowhere does he suggest

William Blake: the Romantic Illustrator of Dante 153

any association between Dante and revolutionary energy and ‘liberty’. While his contemporaries followed the Italian fashion of anachronistic readings of Dante, Blake’s few statements and annotations on Dante are all extremely personal responses to the poem and its translations. They reveal Blake’s personal engagement with the politics of the Divine Comedy and with Dante’s intertextual use of Virgil and classical literature. As Blake’s latest work, the illustrations also reveal a complex relationship with his overall artistic production. Irene Tayler defines his practice in her study of his illustrations to Thomas Gray: It need hardly be said that for Blake illustration was no servile art, never merely a matter of following the dictates of another mind and never a purely commercial enterprise. Rather it was vigorous critical interpretation: an encounter – in Eternity, he might have said – of one visionary experience with another, the dramatic confrontation of two images of the truth.4 Blake’s visual interpretation of Dante epitomises the contradictions of his iconology. As will be shown from the analysis of the illustrations, while some illustrations and their annotations substantiate a criticism of Dante as the medieval warlike supporter of the Empire, others foreground Blake’s role as a ‘literal’ illustrator of Dante.

Interpreting Dante: the ideology of the Ghibelline Blake’s early contact with Dante originates from the eighteenthcentury visual interpretation of the poet by British artists and connoisseurs analysed in Chapter 1. His early knowledge of the Divine Comedy was limited to particular sections of the Inferno, the Ugolino episode being the most notable one. Jonathan Richardson’s translation of the Ugolino episode is a possible source consulted by Blake and he was certainly acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting (see Figure 1). Blake’s interest in Dante was further encouraged by his friendship with Flaxman and Fuseli.5 At the time of their acquaintance, Fuseli had just returned from Rome with his six wash drawings of the Divine Comedy. Flaxman was about to leave for Italy with Thomas Hope’s commission for his illustrations. In the Public Address Blake claimed his contribution to the designs for Homer and for Dante: ‘How much of his Homer & Dante he will allow to be mine I do not know as he went far enough off to Publish them even to Italy. but the Public will know & Posterity will know.’6 Whatever the nature of the reciprocal influence between


Flaxman and Blake, their discussions on Dante must have taken place in the 1780s, just before Flaxman’s departure in 1787. Blake’s earliest documented interpretation of Dante dates from the 1780s. He included a design of Ugolino in the dungeon in his engraved work For Children: the Gates of Paradise.7 The engraving was completed in 1793, but two preliminary drawings for the same illustration, according to Martin Butlin, should be ascribed to the years 1780–85.8 The caption testifies to Blake’s objection to the God of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Does Thy God O Priest Take Such Vengeance As This?’ This comment shows that Blake understands Dante’s ‘contrapasso’ in terms of revenge by the Old Testament God. However, despite the negative implications of the statement, for the illustration Blake uses a symmetrical composition he would later use to illustrate the concept of holiness.9 Blake’s later reworking of the same illustration for Plate 21 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell reveals that his opinion of Dante was not entirely a negative one. In this work Blake associates Dante with Shakespeare and Swedenborg for power and inspiration.10 Furthermore, by including the Ugolino episode within his framework of contraries, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Dante’s Inferno becomes the ‘evil’ that is necessary to create progression.11 I would like to claim that Blake always retained this ambiguous approach to Dante, characterised by forceful condemnation but also by perceptive understanding of the Italian poet. During his stay at Felpham, William Hayley further encouraged Blake’s interest in Dante and commissioned a portrait of the Italian poet.12 In Hayley’s library Blake annotated two of Boyd’s ‘Supplementary Essays’ from his translation of the Inferno.13 Both the annotations and the portrait are important in order to understand Blake’s early attitude towards Dante. In the portrait (Figure 4) the poet’s features follow the traditional iconology, easily available to Blake through Paolo Fidanza’s engraving of Raphael’s Disputa.14 Dante’s stern expression evokes the association between the poet and Infernal punishment typical of the eighteenthcentury British reception of Dante. To the right-hand side of the picture is a reproduction of Blake’s group of Ugolino and his sons. The chain at Ugolino’s feet, Blake’s most typical symbol of enslavement, dominates the composition, while Mediterranean oak leaves, suggesting Druidic rites, surround Dante’s head. Blake’s annotations of Boyd comprise his first perceptive comments on Dante’s ideology. Some of Blake’s attacks concern the translator’s moralising stance. To Boyd’s surprising statement ‘we cannot sympathise with Achilles for this loss of his Mistress, when we feel that he gained her by the massacre of her family’,15 Blake replies indignantly


Figure 4

William Blake, Portrait of Dante for William Hayley’s Library (c. 1800)

‘nobody considers these things when they read Homer or Shakespear or Dante’.16 Before venturing on his own interpretation, Blake thus challenges the translator’s exposition of Dante’s poetry: ‘Every Sentiment & Opinion as well as Every Principle in Dante is in these Preliminary Essays Controverted & proved Foolish by his Translator If I have any Judgment in Such Things as Sentiments Opinions & Principles.’17 The annotations explicitly referring to Dante reveal that Blake does not follow contemporary opinion in considering him the apostle of liberty. According to Blake, ‘Dante gives too much to Caesar he is not a Republican’ and that he ‘was an Emperors Man’.18 As for Blake’s republicanism, according to Gilchrist this was an idealised attitude that could not entirely correspond to any one specific historical example: He loved liberty, and had no affection for statecraft and standing armies, yet no man less resembled the vulgar radical. His sympathies were with Milton, Harrington, and Marvel – not with Milton as to his puritanism, but his love of a great ideal scheme of republicanism; though I never remember him speaking of American institutions: I suppose Blake’s republic must always have been ideal.19 Foscolo’s definition of Dante as ‘il ghibellin fuggiasco’ in his poem I sepolcri (1806)20 best represents the nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the poet’s support for the Holy Germanic Empire in view of Dante’s desire for a unified Italy. Dante’s imperialism, however, also comprehended his admiration for the Roman Republic and its civic virtues.21


For Dante the new empire was supposed to be the incarnation of the republicanism of such heroes as Scipio Africanus and Cato the younger. From the scanty and biased biography of Dante provided by Boyd, Blake understood Dante’s Ghibellinism in its literal sense and objected to his apparent abdication of freedom. His reading is thus at variance to the Whig interpretation of the poet and in accordance with Eyre Evans Crowe’s article published in the Tory Blackwood Magazine: the author criticises Foscolo for representing Dante as ‘the apostle of Liberty’ while in fact he was ‘full of mean, municipal prejudice’.22 William Hayley’s The Triumphs of Temper (1781) might have similarly encouraged a conservative reading of the Divine Comedy through the association between Dante’s and Pope’s satire. The few statements on Dante later recorded by Blake are his notes on two of his illustrations for the Inferno and two conversations recorded by Henry Crabb Robinson.23 Both show that he retained an ambiguous approach to the Italian poet. In both cases fierce condemnation is followed by an attempt to amend Dante’s system through the explicit or implicit comparison with Milton. In Plate 7, Homer and his Companions, Blake reacts to Dante’s celebration of Homer’s poetry in terms that recall his earlier statements. The illustration places Homer at the centre of Dante’s world with the following comment: Every thing in Dante’s Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All, & the Goddess Nature Memory is his Inspirer & Not Imagination the Holy Ghost … Round Purgatory is Paradise & round Paradise is Vacuum or Limbo, so that Homer is the center of all, I mean the Poetry of the Heathen Stolen & Perverted from the Bible not by Chance but by design by the Kings of Persia and their Generals the Greek Heroes & lastly by the Romans.24 Blake’s identification of the ‘Primum Mobile’ with ‘Vacuum’ and with the ‘Limbo’ is central to his approach: in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake used the word to describe the Holy Ghost – the imagination of his mythology – as absent from Milton’s poetry.25 Dante’s lack of imagination is the result of his subservience to the ancient poets; Inferno, IV, with its celebration of Latin and Greek poetry, is the epitome of this deficiency.26 While Dante the politician encounters Blake’s uncompromising attack, Dante the philosopher receives a different treatment: not unlike


Milton his poetry is subjected to a process of enquiry and selection aimed at saving it from ‘false vision’. I believe these are the implications of Blake’s notes on Plate 22: It seems as if Dantes supreme Good was something Superior to the Father or Jesus [as] if he gives his rain to the Evil & the Good & his Sun to the Just & the Unjust He could never have Built Dantes Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible neither in the way our Parsons explain it It must have been originally Formed by the devil Him self & So I understand it to have been. Dante’s Hell must be denounced because it is built by Satan himself, or by the devil within Dante. Robinson’s recorded conversations further confirm that the Divine Comedy offered to Blake the same ideological complexity of Paradise Lost. In the first conversation, which occurred sometime towards the end of 1825, Robinson questioned Blake on Dante’s morality:27 I asked about the moral character of Dante in writing his Vision – was he pure? ‘Pure?’ said Blake. ‘Do you think there is any purity in God’s eyes; the angels in heaven are no more so than we. He chargeth his angels with folly.’28 Blake’s reply is very evasive and, one suspects, purposely so; Robinson’s question was bound to provoke his riposte by its mention of the moral code, usually regarded by the poet as the code of the Old Testament. Blake is here rejecting a particular approach to God rather than Dante’s theology as such. The God who ‘chargeth his angels with folly’ is not merely Dante’s God. Blake’s mature theology must reject any idea of retribution that excludes the possibility of universal salvation.29 Later Blake typically reverses the earlier indictment: As Blake mentioned Swedenborg and Dante together I wished to know whether he considered their vision of the same kind. As far as I could recollect he does. Dante, he said, was the greater poet – he had political objects; yet this, though wrong, does not appear in Blake’s mind to affect the truth of the vision.30 Blake’s attitude is consistent with the one expressed in his annotations to Boyd: Dante is criticised for his political involvement, yet admired as a great poet.


The second conversation recorded, dated 17 December, repeats and confirms the pattern of Blake’s ambiguity towards Dante: Our conversation began about Dante. ‘He was an atheist – a mere politician busied about this world as Milton was till in his old age he returned to God whom he had had in his childhood.’ I tried to get out from Blake that he meant this charge only in a higher sense and not using the word atheism in its popular meaning. But he would not allow this …31 Blake’s comparison between the two poets concerning their eventual return to God is an interesting one. In a conversation with Robinson, Blake recorded in typical visionary fashion the purport of a visit Milton paid to him: ‘He came lately as an old man[.] – He said he came to ask a favor of me [.] – He said he had committed an error in his Paradise Lost, which he wanted me to correct, in a poem or picture; but I declined[.]’32 The conversion seems to refer to Milton’s redemptive role in Blake’s poem. A similar indication of Blake’s conception of Milton’s later conversion is developed figuratively in ‘Milton: Old Age’, one of the illustrations of Il Penseroso. He is shown in a cave completely devoted to his works of inspiration. According to Pamela Dunbar, ‘here we see the “original” form of the poet nearing the end of his life and overcome by a vision of his own redemptive return’.33 In his second conversation Blake does not state that Dante, too, achieved his conversion in his old age. However, in a later conversation he seems to claim so as Robinson records him speaking of Dante ‘as being now with God’.34 Like Milton, Dante was of the Devil’s party without knowing it and, though he had political objects, Robinson recorded that ‘this, though wrong, does not appear in Blake’s mind to affect the truth of the vision’.35

The commission for the illustrations In an entry dated 17 December 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson records his first perusal of Blake’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy : I found him at work on Dante, the book (Cary) and his sketches both before him. He showed me his designs, of which I have nothing to say but that they evince a power of grouping and of throwing grace and interest over conceptions most monstrous and disgusting, which I should not have anticipated.36


Robinson’s comment shows that descriptions of Dante’s poetry as ‘grotesque’ and ‘terrible’ persisted even when more elaborate approaches to the poet were available. The young artist Samuel Palmer, to whom we owe the first record of Blake’s last work, found on the contrary the designs to be ‘sublime’ and worthy of Michelangelo.37 The comparison is not casual when one considers the long-standing tradition associating the painter and sculptor to Dante. Blake began working on his illustrations in autumn 1824, a few months before his sixty-seventh birthday. He died three years later, on 12 August 1827, leaving the series of designs incomplete. The illustrations were commissioned by John Linnell, a young artist Blake had met in 1818 who had similarly commissioned the illustrations to the Book of Job as a means of giving him continuous employment. Linnell’s choice is quite significant as it comes at the peak of British interest in Dante. While the progress of the Job engravings can be followed from existing documents, very little is known of the Dante series. The BlakeLinnell Papers contain only one reference to them: the record of a five-pound payment to Blake in 1825 ‘for sketches of subjects from Dante’.38 Linnell’s biographer gives an account of the agreement between the young artist and Blake: The agreement between the two was to the effect that Blake was to proceed with the designs, doing as much or as little as he liked, and that Linnell was to go on paying him, as heretofore, two or three pounds a week, according to his needs, until they were finished.39 The last payment for the drawings was made on 2 August 1827, just ten days before Blake’s death, but the subsequent correspondence between Linnell and Mrs Blake shows that she received a further £46 after her husband’s death.40 At his death Blake left 102 drawings at different stages of completion, and seven engravings. Sixty-nine drawings are based on the Inferno, twenty on the Purgatorio and ten on the Paradiso. Three additional drawings do not relate to specific incidents in the poem, but are clearly inspired by episodes in the Inferno. All the engravings are on subjects taken from the Inferno. As Geoffrey Keynes’s documents show, the engravings were meant to be issued as loose leaves or bound in a portfolio with a frontispiece bearing the title ‘Blake’s Illustrations of Dante’ and containing for each a brief quotation from Cary’s The Vision.41


Blake’s few references to the drawings in his letters do not record his progress in the series; they prove, instead, his commitment to his latest work. On 7 June 1825 Blake rejoices at his progress in the designs, despite his inability to proceed with the engravings.42 The letters to Linnell of July 1826, and February, March and April 1827 record the work carried out with the engravings and designs alike.43 On 25 April 1827 Blake wrote his final declaration of his commitment to his last artistic project: I go on without daring to count on Futurity, which I cannot do without doubt & Fear that ruins Activity, & are the greatest hurt to an Artist such as I am … I am too much attach’d to Dante to think much of anything else.44 The obituary published in the Literary Gazette on 18 August 1827 contains some detailed and exclusive information on Blake’s work on the Dante plates. After acknowledging the widely known merits of Blake’s art as an illustrator, the anonymous author describes the poet’s simple lifestyle in his last days: Pent, with his affectionate wife, in a close back-room in one of the Strand courts, his bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a rickety table holding his copper-plates in progress, his colours, books (among which his Bible, a Sessi Velutello’s Dante, and Mr. Carey’s translation were at the top), his large drawings, sketches and MSS.; … He has left nothing except some pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work, a Series of a hundred large Designs from Dante … At the age of sixty-six he commenced the study of Italian, for the sake of reading Dante in the original, which he accomplished!45 The article is the only source for our knowledge of the Italian edition of the Divine Comedy used by Blake. There were six editions of the poem with the commentary by Alessandro Vellutello.46 Baine cogently identified ‘Sessi’ with the publishing firm of the Fratelli Sessa, which issued editions of the Divine Comedy with the commentaries by Landino and Vellutello and woodcuts in 1564, 1578 and 1596.47 Of particular interest is the reviewer’s statement concerning Blake’s study of the language. This information is confirmed by Frederick Tatham, who further states that ‘before, he never knew a word of Italian’.48 Blake’s use of Cary’s translation is endorsed by Palmer’s account of his visit to the poet quoted above. Both Blake’s copies of Vellutello and


The Vision are untraced.49 He could have been using either the 1814 or the 1819 edition of The Vision, although considering the wider availability of the second, this is the one he was more likely to possess.50 Concerning the authorship of the article in the Literary Gazette, there is a strong possibility that the obituary was written by William Carey, the main contributor to the first numbers of the magazine.51 G.E. Bentley, the first critic to suggest the identification, calls attention to Carey’s earlier praise of Blake’s designs for Blair’s Grave in his articles for the Literary Gazette of 7 November 1808 and 31 December 1817.52 The obituary significantly mentions the illustrations as Blake’s acknowledged achievement: ‘Few persons of taste are unacquainted with the designs by Blake, appended as illustrations to a 4to edition of Blair’s Grave’.53 In his Critical Description and analytical review of ‘Death on the Pale Horse’, painted by Benjamin West, P.R.A… ., Carey first offered some remarks on Blake’s humble lifestyle. He writes emphatically: ‘I meet with some in doubt whether he is still in existence’ and admits of not having ever met him.54 Carey must have met the poet during his illness: the detailed description of Blake’s way of working on the Dante designs and the unique mention of the editions of the Divine Comedy that he owned presuppose a visit to the poet’s house. Two mistakes about the day of Blake’s death and his age suggest a casual acquaintance such as Carey might have had.55 On the question of whether Blake had been acquainted with Henry Francis Cary, Alexander Gilchrist casually notes in his Life of Blake, when quoting the translator’s refutation of Blake’s insanity: ‘Even so well-balanced a mind as Cary’s (the translator of Dante) abandoned, after he came to know him, the notion he had taken up of his “madness”, and simply pronounced him an “enthusiast”.’56 No reference to a meeting between Blake and the translator is found in Henry Cary’s Memoir. Robinson similarly does not mention Cary for the period concerned. The acquaintance between the two implied by Gilchrist’s reference must have been very superficial. According to King, the poet, painter and later convicted murderer Thomas Wainewright, whose admiration for Blake is well known, most probably arranged the meeting.57

The Romantic illustrator of Dante Linnell’s commission engaged Blake in a literal illustration of Dante’s text that stands out for its comprehensive and personal rendering of the Divine Comedy. While Fuseli’s few illustrations occupy a central


position in the period for their perceptiveness in visualising a sublime and epic Dante, Blake’s illustrations are significant for their comprehensiveness – in which they can be compared only to John Flaxman’s complete series of designs – and also for their originality. Blake’s call for literal illustrations of Dante was already implicit in his defence of Fuseli’s Ugolino. In the letter to the editor Blake specifically criticises the reviewer of Bell’s Weekly Messenger for not relying on Dante’s episode in the assessment of the illustration: The child in his arms, whether boy or girl signifies not (but the critic must be a fool who has not read Dante, and who does not know a boy from a girl), I say, the child is as beautifully drawn as it is coloured – in both, inimitable! and the effect of the whole is truly sublime, on account of that very colouring which our critic calls black and heavy.58 Blake’s riposte highlights the ambiguity of word and image relations. How far can an illustration be a literal rendering of a narrative episode? How significant is this equivalence from an aesthetic perspective? A comparison with translation studies, a discipline similarly characterised by duality, is useful in order to understand the study of illustration. While the source text has only recently been dethroned from its acknowledged centrality in translation studies, in word and image relations the artist has rarely been subjected to the test of the source text. This lack of accountability, however, has not always been to the artist’s advantage. The higher status of the printed word in the western tradition accounts for the tradition of the paragoni in the Renaissance and for the later debate of inter-arts comparison, or ‘ut pictura poesis’. The twentieth-century critical approach to Blake’s illustrations of Dante has to some extent restated the primacy of the written word. Since the publication of Albert S. Roe’s Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy the studies devoted to Blake’s illustrations of Dante have tended to interpret and explicate their links with Blake’s poetry and in particular with his visionary poems.59 More recently, however, David Fuller and Rodney M. Baine urged the need for a closer study of the connection between the Divine Comedy and Blake’s plates.60 According to Fuller, modern critical practice has disregarded the literalism of Blake’s plates: ‘Modern Blake scholarship has taken these illustrations to be highly and continuously interpretative. They are, in my view, much more literal than the modern reading allows.’61 This groundbreaking correction has opened a new under-


standing of Blake’s interpretation of Dante. My intention is to approach the plates in a composite way, as literal illustrations of the Divine Comedy and as a comprehensive iconographic interpretation of the text and its ideology that complements but is not entirely contained by Blake’s statements on the poet. In order to understand Blake’s illustrations one must take into account his complex ‘literalism’, as defined by Michael J. Tolley: ‘for Blake to be literal in some contexts is in fact … to be metaphorical in the sense that by following the letter in its double sense he establishes its metaphorical content’.62 In approaching a composite work such as the plates for Dante one has to assess the relationship between the illustrations and the Divine Comedy, but also their links with Blake’s visual production as a whole. His book illustrations are in fact literal pictorial translations of a text only in so far as their target language is correctly identified as his own iconographic language: as Janet A. Warner states, ‘once he had chosen his own visual vocabulary from this lexicography, Blake used it consistently’. On the other hand it is clear that meaning in Blake is contextual and one must take into account that the same image can acquire different values in different contexts. My approach to the illustrations for Dante wants to demonstrate the versatility of Blake’s figurative language in lending itself to the ‘translation’ of a poem into images. Blake’s literalism consists, for instance, in his illustration of both tenor and vehicle of Dante’s metaphors. This process, first identified by Fuller, accounts for many of the apparent intrusions of his own mythology in the illustrations.63 In plate 34 he illustrates the simile that compares Malebolge to the structure of a castle drawbridge by drawing one in the left-hand corner of the illustration. In plate 60 Bertran De Born’s head is surrounded by a halo illustrating Dante’s comparison of it with a lantern. In plate 62 Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha are given animal heads because Dante compares them to pigs.64 Blake’s literalism often requires Cary’s translation as its point of reference. While at work on the illustrations, Blake used The Vision together with the Italian text: his scant Italian, however, implies a prevailing use of the translation. Klonsky, Roe, Tinkler-Villani and Pite have identified similarities between Blake and Cary’s approach to Dante. Although The Vision is the essential reference for an understanding of Blake’s approach to Dante, the relationship between translated text and illustration is never straightforward.


The opening illustrations of Inferno offer an example of the cultural mediation of The Vision. In Plate 4 of the Inferno Dante and Virgil stand before a lofty door above which is inscribed Dante’s famous warning:65 Lasciate ogni Speranza, voi che in Entrate. [Leave every Hope you who in Enter.]66 Blake’s inscription is in two languages: this prefigures his desire to interpret and illustrate Dante’s poem with a process that could be compared to Cary’s use of the parallel Italian text in his translation of the Inferno. It has been noted that Blake derives from Cary the almost Gothic loftiness of the door, in Dante undefined: Such characters, in colour dim, I mark’d Over a portal’s lofty arch inscribed. (The Vision, Hell, III, 10–11) Cary here further modifies the chromatic qualities of the entrance into Hell. As pointed out by Crisafulli, Dante’s puns are often simplified or eliminated in the translation.67 Here Cary avoids Dante’s pun on the darkness/hardness (‘di colore oscuro’, Inferno, III, 10) of the words inscribed above the door, and introduces an element of indeterminacy by using the adjective ‘dim’. In Blake’s plate, too, the words on the door are not of a ‘dark colour’, but barely legible, as described by the translator. From Cary, Blake further derives his repeated use of a whirlwind to illustrate the tenor of Dante’s similes that contain the image of a strong wind. This occurs, for instance, in the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca. Cary emphasises the whirling motion of Dante’s ‘bufera infernal’ [infernal gale] (Inferno, V, 31) (my italics): The stormy blast of hell With restless fury drives the spirits on, Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy. When they arrive before the ruinous sweep, There shrieks are heard, there lamentations, moans, And blasphemies ’gainst the good Power in heaven. (The Vision, Hell, V, 32–7) Cary’s rendering of the difficult form ‘ruina’ (Inferno, V, 34) with ‘sweep’ further emphasises the idea of a circling movement. The Oxford English


Dictionary documents the versatility of the noun. The meaning as ‘the rapid or forcible and continuous movement of a body of … wind, etc.’, is well documented in possible sources for Cary’s usage, such as Gray’s Pleasure, Southey’s Thalaba and John Clare’s Village Minstrel.68 Blake likewise centres his interpretation on the image of the vortex that he had fully developed and defined both in theoretical and iconographic ways in the poem Milton.69 In the watercolour, Blake clearly separates the whirlwind from both river and bank by leaving it white with blue contours. Even the souls just emerging into sight are encompassed by the blast. The souls are portrayed in twisted positions that betray their debt to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and to Fuseli’s similar debt in his illustrations. In Plate 19 Blake again uses a whirlwind; here to portray the arrival of the celestial messenger in Inferno, IX. Roe associates the vortex with that of Canto V and sees both as the access to the world of Generation.70 Klonsky suggests a more literal interpretation: His [the angel’s] arrival has stirred up among the fallen angels guarding the battlements of Dis a great whirlwind, unmentioned by the text … The angels who sided with Satan during his rebellion were also guilty of ‘adultery’, in the theological sense, and cast out of heaven by ‘Old Nobodaddy’, whose first commandment is absolute fidelity to himself.71 Dante’s text itself includes a reference to a strong wind in a simile that is meant to evoke the commotion caused by the Divine Messenger’s arrival.72 Cary omits the comparative term73 thus personifying the wind, and introduces the idea of a whirlwind alongside that of the gale; while in Dante the wind ‘goes proudly onward’ [dinanzi poleveroso va superbo] (Inferno IX, 71), in Cary it is personified and ‘proudly sweeps / His whirlwind rage’ (italics added): And now there came o’er the perturbed waves Loud-crashing, terrible, a sound that made Either shore tremble, as if of a wind Impetuous, from conflicting vapours sprung, That ’gainst some forest driving all his might, Plucks off the branches, beats them down, and hurls Afar; then, onward passing, proudly sweeps His whirlwind rage, while beasts and shepherds fly. (The Vision, Hell, IX, 65–72)


Blake here proves himself a literal illustrator of The Vision: the vortex dominates the design while the souls escaping the whirlwind fly from the messenger as described in the text.74 One further use of the vortex is in plate 91 ‘Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car’. The plate, together with those illustrating the last Purgatorial cantos, in fact, represents the point at which Dante’s and Blake’s art come closest in their common source in the Book of Revelation. As Dante directs the reader to Ezekiel and St John in canto XXIX, so Blake goes back to his illustrations of the Bible for Thomas Butts to address Dante’s biblical sources. Dante describes a procession of liturgical and biblical origin witnessed by the pilgrim. The procession is followed by the appearance of a two-wheeled chariot, the allegorical representation of the Church. While Dante does not mention any special quality of the wheels, Blake represents them as a vortex with turning eyes. Fuller suggests that their colourful nature is a device for adding light to the scene. The unfinished plate 90, however, shows that he had already conceived of the wheel as such before colouring the plate. Blake had early employed the symbol of the eyes in Ezekiel’s Wheels and The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne, both of them painted in tempera around 1803–1805.75 He introduced the same biblical imagery in A Vision of the Last Judgment.76 The eyes appear again on the wings of sleep bringing dreams to Milton in Milton’s Mysterious Dream of about 1816.77 Like the four animals, the wheels are a notable feature of Ezekiel’s account that represents Dante’s intertextual reference. Ezekiel emphasises their brightness and their concentric movement in a description extending in full to two paragraphs: ‘The appearance of the wheels, and their worke was like unto the colour of a Berill: and they foure had one likenesse, and their appearance and their worke was as it were a wheele in the middle of a wheele.’78 According to Ezekiel ‘the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheeles’.79 Blake’s eyes thus represent the living quality of the wheel. Roe interprets the wheel as the vortex of entry into existence described in Milton, 17, 21–55. The fact that Blake’s illuminated books do not contain any similar wheels confirms that they should be associated with the biblical source similarly illustrated by Blake. The use of the vortex in Blake’s illustrations is not merely a personal superimposition of his own mythology on Dante’s, but rather highlights the episodes in which their art comes close. Blake expresses more clearly his divergence from Dante by including, in Mitchell’s words, ‘illustrations which do not illustrate’.80 In fact these represent only a


small portion of the illustrations. They are never entirely divorced from the text, but they juxtapose literal illustration and Blake’s own interpretation or indeed his own mythology. The most interpretative illustrations relate to the Inferno, but some interpolations can be found in those for the Purgatorio and Paradiso as well. Among the Infernal plates the most significant insertion of additional iconographic material occurs in plate 3, ‘The mission of Virgil’. This plate best typifies Blake’s desire to illustrate and interpret at the same time. The illustration deals with Virgil’s narration of his meeting with Beatrice. Like Flaxman before him, Blake emphasises the presence of dialogue by using dramatic postures: both Virgil and Beatrice are shown with open mouth and uplifted arms, a posture that reveals Blake’s debt to pantomime and to LeBrun’s influential Expressions des passions.81 The four female figures within a cloud separating the upper from the lower part of the illustrations correspond to the four women who are mentioned in the text, respectively the Virgin Mary at the top, St Lucy, Rachel sitting and Beatrice with open arms.82 Blake’s most significant additions consist in the two figures facing each other in the upper half of the picture, and in the giant forms respectively at the right and left-hand corners. The top figure represents the only portrayal of God among the designs for the Inferno: it follows the iconology of the Satan of ‘Christ’s Troubled Dream’, and of the God-Satan in the eleventh illustration of the Book of Job83 with which it shares the cloven foot. The melting quality of the features and the position of the arms are the same as those of Urizen in Plate 15 of Milton. The old man portrayed is thus both the God of the Old Testament and Satan. In front of him stands a young man with a fierce expression. Roe identifies him as a representative of Church and State since he holds the symbols of religious and secular authority: censer and crown. This figure, however, is not a purely gratuitous insertion. Blake significantly entitled the plate ‘The Mission of Virgil’. Virgil’s mission is twofold: as the soul confined in Limbo his role is to lead Dante safely to Beatrice; as the author of the Aeneid his mission is the celebration of Augustus’ Empire. Blake, however, decided on a neutral representation of Virgil, as he did for Dante; he is always shown with a long blue tunic. I believe that Blake’s reservations on Virgil’s poetic mission are here expressed by the insertion of this additional figure that represents Blake’s response to Dante’s discussion of Aeneas’ mission as narrated by Virgil and St Paul (Hell, III, 14–26, 33–4). This is a political and religious mission: the foundation of Rome as a religious and political centre of the western world. The young man adoring the false God


introduces in Blake’s illustration both Aeneas and St Paul: the founders of Roman political and religious power. His finger purposefully points to the lower part of the picture which shows the consequences of Roman rule; however, as Aeneas-Paul he also reveals to his false God the danger of Dante’s journey: like Milton in Blake’s poem, Dante will reverse his predecessors’ fall and bring salvation to mankind. As for the crosses on his body, Blake could have found inspiration in one of the plates for Richard Gough’s Antiquities of England, one of the first collaborative projects he had undertaken for engraver James Basire. Although Blake learned from his early projects that ‘the antiquities of every Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews’ (Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 39), in the illustrations for the Divine Comedy, Blake is consistent in portraying many of Dante’s historical characters with an iconology derived from British medieval statuary. This is equally evident in The Vestibule of Hell. Dante’s cowards are kings and queens and Blake takes pains to emphasise the riches of his female sinners, as well as the warlike nature of medieval heroes. His female figures, too, are endowed with daggers and swords, Blake’s iconology of conflict in the Inferno.84 Plate forty-nine of the Antiquities of England is a reproduction of the funeral monument of Thomas Lord Berkeley. The engraving is not among those attributed to Blake. The caption in the text identifies the monument with ‘Thomas Lord Berkeley who had the custody of Edward II, in his castle, and cautiously took care to be out of the way at the time of his murder; on which account he was afterwards acquitted; though he openly protected the executioner, and entertained the Queen and Mortimer here next year.’ The funeral monument reproduces on the dress the Berkeley coat of arms: the cross. Here we have a medieval lord of the generation just after Dante involved in treachery. Blake might have found the coat of arms and the association between it and betrayal suitable to his Aeneas-St Paul figure. Roe identifies the two squatting giants enveloped in flames with souls in Ulro, the state that Dante is about to enter under Virgil’s guidance.85 Dante’s text does not justify their presence in the picture and clearly they must reinforce the condemnation of Dante’s system of retribution expressed by the inscription at the top of plate 3, ‘The Angry God of this World & his Throne in Purgatory’.86 Similar insertions of giant figures occur in other illustrations, with an iconology clearly inspired by the frozen limbs of the giant, Albion. Man’s fallen image can be found in plate 39, ‘The Devils Under the Bridge’, in the engraving 108, ‘The Pit of Disease: The Fasifiers’, and in engraving 109, ‘The Circle of Traitors: Dante Striking Against Bocca degli Abati’. In the


latter, as well as in the unfinished watercolour ‘Lucifer’, Blake draws four giant forms that can be identified with his fourfold humanity. Here he is clearly illustrating his mythology of the fall of man within Dante’s view of his own fall into sin and ascent to salvation. The image of Albion’s scattered portions occurs in The Book of Los, as pointed out by Roe,87 but also in Vala, Jerusalem and Milton as well. Blake thus associates Dante’s own journey of spiritual salvation with Albion’s, and develops the comparison in a more extensive way by the identification of Dante with Los, the saviour who becomes incarnate to achieve a return to primal unity. The unfinished ‘Lucifer’ (plate 72) offers further proof of Blake’s closeness to Dante. Satan for Blake is a state, the ‘Limit of Opacity’ created by the saviour.88 He is also the ‘Father of Hell’, who ‘must have been originally formed by the Devil Him self’.89 For Dante, too, he is a negation of the love that informs all creation and unlike the Satan of Milton he does not earn heroic status, albeit negative. He is powerless, and paradoxically an instrument of Divine Justice. Blake’s Lucifer in his illustrations of Dante is likewise old Nobodaddy, and not the youthful Satan of the Job illustrations. The sloping eyebrows of two of his heads portray the sadness of his crying eyes, while the sketched eyes of the third show an indication of rage. Consistent with his definition as ‘emperor of the kingdom of suffering’, he wears the crown of worldly power. His body, like that of Dante’s classical monsters, is dark and muscular, and Blake omits the hair by which Virgil and Dante descend towards the centre of the earth.90 Blake’s Illustrations of the Inferno are thus literal and interpretative at the same time. They reveal Blake’s need to express his objections to Dante’s endorsement of the classical poets and to his doctrine of punishment. They also reveal however, his identification with Dante’s view of atonement and with his personal involvement in the journey towards salvation. The illustrations to Purgatorio and Paradiso confirm this ambiguity, but show Blake’s literalism increase and diversify itself. The illustrations are tackled in a different way from those of the Inferno. Their smaller number cannot be ascribed to diminished interest in his work, though illness certainly forced him to select fewer cantos. An approach to Blake’s last illustrations of the Divine Comedy must take into account both the interpretation of the text and their artistic quality and Blake’s use of colour. The chromatic complexity found in plates such as ‘Beatrice on the Car, Dante and Matilda’ (plate 90), or ‘Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car’ (plate 91) suggest that by this stage he had abandoned the idea of


engraving the whole series: meaning is now conveyed through colour rather than line. The illustrations of the Purgatorio typically show one side of the mountain, the sea and the sky. Blake thus reproduces the idea of the ascent that characterises Dante’s second world. The sun, Dante’s symbol of the saviour, is shown shining in plates 73 and 87, and covered by clouds in plates 76, 77, 81 and 82. In plates 76 and 77 the clouds surround the mountain itself rather than the sun. A similar cloud occurs in plates 78 and 86 and is rather a means to point out the supernatural aspect of the scene. In plates 81 and 82 the cloud is large and of a dark red colour. In canto IX, to which the two illustrations refer, Dante uses a complex mythological reference to contrast the arrival of the third evening hour in Purgatory with dawn in the opposite hemisphere. He then falls asleep and wakes up two hours after sunrise. Cary follows earlier commentators in believing that Dante is consistently talking of the first and later hours of the morning.91 Blake’s illustration shows the sun high up, but the red and yellow tones encompass also Dante’s metaphorical description of white ‘Dawn’. As he had done for the Inferno, Blake follows the order of the cantos: plates 73 to 86 illustrate the first thirteen cantos of the Purgatorio. There is then a gap in the series as he proceeds to illustrate cantos XXVII to XXXII. It is tempting to speculate on the reasons for such an exclusion. The cantos concerned contain Dante’s most politicallyminded meetings in the Purgatorio. In canto XVI the poet’s encounter with Marco Lombardo is the origin of an invective against the political leaders of Lombardy; in canto XX the French king Hughes Capet lists the crimes of his descendants and in canto XXIII Forese Donati rails at the corrupted manners of contemporary Florentines. The fourteen cantos concerned also contain passages of great figurative potential, such as the examples of punished anger from biblical and classical history in cantos XV and XVII, Dante’s allegorical dream in canto XIX or the starving appearance of the gluttonous successfully illustrated by Flaxman. In moving to the last cantos Blake was most probably spurred by the desire to focus on the Miltonic subject of the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ and on Beatrice. However, the omission of the most political of Dante’s Purgatorial cantos demonstrates Blake’s progressive interest in Beatrice rather than in Dante’s ideology. As in the case of the Inferno, few illustrations include Blake’s own interpolation. These, too, have been subjected by Klonsky and Roe to an allegorical interpretation in light of Blake’s mythology. For Roe,


Blake’s Purgatory corresponds to Beulah. Referring to the angel he writes: The presence here of the moon-like boat, and of the angel, and the prominence given to the embrace of Casella and Dante all indicate that Blake associates this scene of the spirits arriving in Purgatory with Beulah, for Beulah too is a place where spirits come and go.92 Roe’s comparison, accepted by Klonsky, is suggestive, and supported by the way in which Beulah is described from the eternal perspective in Milton, Book II. However, Dante’s Purgatorio is an earthly mountain, though unreachable for men, and this is how Blake portrays it. Blake’s second interpolation occurs in plate 75, ‘The Angelic Boat Wafting Over the Souls for Purgation’. Two details are Blake’s additions: the cave behind Cato, and the angel’s boat in the shape of a half moon. The cave contains an altar with a burning lamp in front of it. Blake used the same addition in plate 8, in which a laurelled sage venerates the fire, and in plate 64 representing the Babelic king Nimrod. The altar, like the oak, is here a symbol of false rites: the cantos illustrated contain Dante’s praise of Cato’s republicanism. As in his illustration to canto IV, Blake typically reads Dante’s intertextual references to Latin and Greek culture as an expression of his imperialism and love of war. The half-moon shaped boat is a symbol fairly common in Blake’s mythology. Noah’s Ark, the means of man’s salvation from the ‘Sea of Time and Space’, takes the same form. The crescent moon for Blake is the symbol of love, and as such occurs in Jerusalem, plates 24 and 44. A similar planet image may be found in Dante’s comparison between the angel’s bright light and Mars rising at dawn; Cary renders the traditional redness of Mars (Dante uses the verb ‘rosseggia’ in Purgatorio, II, 14) with a more poetic and vaguer ‘fiery beam’: When lo! as, near upon the hour of dawn, Through the thick vapours Mars with fiery beam Glares down in west, over the ocean floor; (The Vision, Purgatory, II, 13–25) For Dante’s reference to the planet Mars, Blake uses his more common image of the moon. In the more literal plate 79, ‘The Lawn with the Kings and Angels’, Blake places the princes in the shade of green trees rather than in a


valley as the poem says. As Roe points out, the oak with its characteristic acorn stands, in Blake, for the fallen world.93 Oaks are prominent in the left-hand corner of the picture, and the attack on worldly power is an essential feature of the illustrations. Blake’s trees, however, are used also to create the idea of seclusion within the valley; grass would not have been so effective. In Cary’s translation the vale is ‘hollowed out’ and the three poets enter a place ‘Where in a bosom the high bank recedes’ (The Vision, Purgatory, VIII, 65, 68). Blake illustrates Dante’s colourful bowers through the delicacy of pastel colours: to the light blue of the sky are added pink, light yellow and delicate tones of green, with a prevalence of olive. This chromatic interpretation of the Purgatorio, consistent throughout the illustrations, finds its best and most developed expression in plates 90, ‘Beatrice on the Car, Dante and Matilda’, and 91, ‘Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car’. The last three plates of the Purgatorio involved Blake in a surprisingly literal rendering of the elaborate liturgical procession that precedes the appearance of Beatrice. The abundance of detail is that of a miniature. In the unfinished plate 90, the flames of the candelabrum colour the air, as Dante describes in Canto XXIX, 73–8, Dante and Matilda have proceeded from the left and face each other as described in canto XXIX, 4–9, and the river reflects the flames and the eyes of the four animals’ wings as a result of the purity and transparency described in canto XXVIII, 28–33. Blake uses the same rainbow-like richness of colouring for the vegetation by the river to illustrate Dante’s description of ‘the tender may-bloom, flush’d through many a hue, / In prodigal variety’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXVIII, 36–7) and Matilda’s movement ‘Over the yellow and vermilion flowers’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXVIII, 55). Blake had included the first two of the three ladies accompanying the chariot in Charity and An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man.94 As Baine first pointed out, Blake’s allegorical charity is usually surrounded by children according to traditional iconography going back to Raphael’s Borghese Deposition.95 Faith shows the Bible as in Blake’s An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man. The colour of the three allegorical characters, too, follows Dante’s description because their bodies, as well as their garments, are green, red and white.96 The most important feature of this illustration is the figure of Beatrice. Dante’s relationship with his muse was bound to arouse Blake’s interest in the light of his doctrine of the female ‘emanation’ developed in Vala. Does he associate her to Jerusalem, the poet’s emanation, or Vala, the goddess of nature? Critical opinion has fluctuated between


the two. Roe, Klonsky and Tinkler-Villani see Beatrice as Vala.97 Roe emphasises her sensual garment and crown as attributes of Luvah’s emanation, while Klonsky and Tinkler-Villani explicitly identify her with the fallen form of Vala, that is to say, Rahab, the whore of Babylon. The latter identification seems extreme in light of Blake’s portrayal of the whore in plate 92. Baine and Fuller see Blake attempting to save Beatrice from Dante’s classicism: she is not given Minerva’s leaves, but a crown, as in the tradition of Raphael’s portrayal in the ‘Stanza della Segnatura’.98 The text shows how closely Blake illustrates the canto: Thus, in a cloud Of flowers, that from those hands angelic rose, And down within and outside of the car Fell showering, in white veil with olive wreathed, A virgin in my view appear’d, beneath Green mantle, robed in hue of living flame: And o’er my spirit, … there moved A hidden virtue from her, at whose touch The power of ancient love was strong within me. (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 28–34, 36–8) Blake draws Beatrice wearing an open green veil showing a transparent red garment. The sensuality with which she is depicted expresses the resurgence of Dante’s juvenile platonic love. Blake’s emphasis on Beatrice’s sensuality is especially apparent in light of Cary’s unsatisfactory rendering of the last Purgatorial cantos where he twice translates ‘donna’ [woman] as ‘virgin’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 32, 62), thus introducing a connotation that Blake attacked in the poem Thel: the denial of sexuality. He further adds a touch of ambiguity by translating ‘vista’ [sight] as ‘vision’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 39) and ‘non era di stupor tremando affranto’ [had not been overcome with awe] as ‘felt no shuddering dread’ (The Vision, Purgatory, XXX, 35), replacing awe with fear. In Cary’s translation Beatrice could be read as Blake’s terrible ‘Female Will’ who exerts her control on man by the denial of sex. No such interpretation is displayed by the illustrations. Blake’s Beatrice does not resemble the virgin Thel, nor does she recall the Jerusalem of plate 81 of the poem, portrayed in the posture of the Medici Venus. Although she wears a veil, like Vala in Jerusalem (plate 32), she closely resembles the Jerusalem of plates 93 and 96 for her freed sexuality. She


is casting off her veil, as described by Dante in Canto XXXI, a gesture interpreted positively by Blake in Milton, plate 13.99 Dante is looking at her bashfully as a result of the long rebuke she voices in cantos XXX and XXXI. The ten illustrations of the Paradiso further develop Blake’s interpretation of the relationship between Dante and Beatrice and confirm the coincidence between his own and Dante’s own ideology of the female. The illustrations consistently show Blake more interested in using his own iconology but this time in order to underline his agreement with the system of Dante’s Paradiso. In plates 96, 97, 98 and 99 Beatrice and Dante face each other in the symmetric position that Blake had used in Milton, Plate III.100 In the latter the lovers, joined by one foot, look at each other and partake of the joy of harvest. Dante’s heavenly vision springs from Beatrice’s eyes.101 Blake thus reinterprets Dante’s praise of his earthly love in light of his own view of the essential primeval union of the sexes. This is shown by the literalism of plate 96, ‘Beatrice and Dante in Gemini amid the Spheres of Flame’. Dante and Beatrice face each other; the elaborate drapery of her dress and her central position within the intercepting spheres show that she stands out as the object of Dante’s admiration in Botticellian fashion.102 In Canto XXV Dante does in fact describe her as a bride, giving foundation to Blake’s interpretation. In plates 97, 98 and 99, Dante and Beatrice face together the giant figures of St Peter, St James and St John thus underlying their symmetry as part of the same being. Blake’s illustration of Dante’s final vision centres on the image of the circle. These, together with the broad use of white and yellow, correspond to the flashing lights of Dante’s Paradiso. In the canto illustrated by plate 99, for instance, Dante describes the arrival of St John in a triumph of light: Amidst them next, A light of so clear amplitude emerged, That winter’s month were but a single day, Were such a crystal in the Cancer’s sign. (The Vision, Paradise, XXV, 100–8) The comparison between St John’s light and that of a diamond is reflected in the illustration by the use of white for St John’s robe. Dante further describes St John as ‘splendore’ [splendour] (Paradiso, XXV, 106) and compares his whirling movement to a dance.103 Blake’s circles thus show his response to the whirling spheres of light enclos-


ing Dante’s blessed. One should not, however, disregard an overlapping between the illustrations and Blake’s own system. The intertwining circles occur in Milton, plate 32, to describe Milton’s track. The globe is also the device Blake used in Milton to symbolise a dream or vision. In ‘The Choir of Angels’ from the Nativity Ode it corresponds to Milton’s ‘globe of circular light’ peopled by the heavenly hosts.104 In ‘The Youthful Poet’s Dream’ from Il Penseroso the globe encompasses the sun of the imagination, while in ‘The Spirit of Plato’ two spheres representing the circles of Plato’s heavens expose the philosopher’s corrupt system.105 The general implication of all three examples is one of dream and vision. The application of this symbolism suggests that Blake could have wished to respond to the different levels of Dante’s narrative by differentiating the visionary and the vision: in plate 96 Beatrice and Dante are not encircled by spheres. Like Milton in the illustrations discussed, they are thus the creators and partakers of the vision.106 In the unfinished plate 102, ‘The Queen of Heaven in Glory’, Blake’s brief excursus in Dante’s Paradiso finds its final synthesis. It complements plate 95, ‘The Recording Angel’ and plate 100, ‘The Deity, from Whom Proceed the Nine Spheres’. All three plates indicate that Blake still wished to express his objection to the portrayal of the militant hierarchies in military terms in the sky of Mars (plate 100) and to the concept of Divine justice (plate 95). However, the unfinished plate 102 demonstrates that to the end of his project Blake’s approach to Dante was ambiguous, and that there was an increasing propensity for the illustrator to overwrite Dante’s vision with his own. In plate 102 Blake recreates Dante’s ‘candida rosa’ (Paradiso, XXXI, 1), the image of the Church itself pivoting on its two centres: Beatrice and the Virgin Mary. Blake does not follow Dante in attributing the seats of the petals to the characters from the Old and New Testament. Beatrice and the Virgin stand out in the centre. In the design Blake expresses his reservations concerning Dante’s theology, grounded as it is in Aristotle’s philosophy, by introducing two chained books, open, with the inscription ‘Homer’ and ‘Aristotle’. The unfinished plate raises speculation as to the roles assigned to the Virgin and Beatrice: while the Virgin holds a lily and kneels, Beatrice in a lower position, points up at her. Her upward glance and the looking glass suggest her pleading role before the Trinity.107 While the Virgin Mary follows the iconology of Oothon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, similarly shown kneeling hiding her sexuality with prudery, Beatrice is portrayed sitting in a sensual pose. This corresponds to Dante’s


celebration of her beauty in cantos XXX and XXXI,108 that Blake interprets correctly by placing her at the centre of the vision. Although a criticism of the Virgin is most likely implied in the plate, the position of the women does not resemble the typical JerusalemVala confrontation of plates 31 and 81 of the poem, but reveals the hierarchical posture given to them in the poem. For her freed sexuality, Beatrice is also Blake’s Jerusalem. Although the illustrations end with canto XXXI, Blake to some extent anticipated Dante’s final vision of God in canto XXXIII in plate 94, ‘Dante Adoring Christ’ (Figure 5) that significantly mirrors the design of plate 1 of the series. The design testifies to a coincidence between Dante’s vision and Blake’s. The crucified posture of the resurrected Christ faced by Dante in symmetric position is drawn from Albion’s contemplation of the cross in Jerusalem, plate 76. Dante’s posture, furthermore, closely resembles that of ‘Christ offering to redeem mankind’ of the illustrations to Paradise Lost, and the similar symmetric group in Jerusalem, plate 99.109 Christ’s features follow Blake’s most typical characterisation of the saviour in the Milton illustrations and in the Butts tempera series.110 In Blake’s own iconographic interpretation, the vision that Dante arrives at is the same that Albion achieves at the conclusion of the poem Jerusalem. Albion is the eternal man while Dante is everyman: Blake’s iconography makes them coincide. Dante’s life is ‘our life’ (Inferno, II, 3–6), yet he alone will undertake the infernal journey of redemption. His message thus corresponds to Jesus’ final revelation to Los that the sacrifice of one’s life is necessary: Jesus said. Wouldest thou love one who never died For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist. for Man is Love: As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.111

Concluding remarks While Shelley and Keats’s reading of the Divine Comedy is subservient to the thematic and structural needs of their own poetry, Blake’s concern as an illustrator is to give form to his perception of the complex blend of theology, politics and aesthetics that constitute the real structure of the poem.


Figure 5 William Blake, Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy 1824–27, Paradiso, XXIII, ‘Dante Adoring Christ’. Pen, ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk, 52.7 × 37.2 cm


One can find a significant analogy between Blake’s and Cary’s approach to Dante. Cary found in Dante’s final vision the mysteries of the Christian faith revealed. His argument for the last canto underlines the theological dimension of the Divine Comedy: Saint Bernard supplicates the Virgin Mary that Dante may have grace given him to contemplate the brightness of the Divine Majesty, which is accordingly granted … Lastly, he is admitted to a glimpse of the great mystery; the Trinity, and the Union of Man with God. (The Vision, Paradise, XXXIII, Argument) Significantly Cary writes ‘Man’ with a capital letter. Blake’s illustrations in this respect show their similarity to Cary. While aiming to be literal illustrator of the text both the artist and translator emphasise the similarities between their own theology and that of Dante.

Notes Introduction 1. William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt, second revised edition, ed. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–88), VII, p. 838. 2. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. Bishop Morchard (London: Richards, 1952), p. 282. 3. During Cary’s lifetime there were four editions of The Vision: 1814, 1819, 1831 and 1844. Cary’s biographer, W.J. King, counted as many as twenty editions of The Vision between the poet’s death and the 1920s. The Translator of Dante (London: Secker, 1925), p. 285. 4. Gilbert F. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English: a Critical Bibliography 1782–1900, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1965–66), pp. 6–8. 5. Henry Cary, Memoir, II, pp. 18–19. The meeting took place in the autumn of 1817. 6. See especially Jerome McGann, ‘Rethinking Romanticism: the Challenge of Periodisation’, English Literary History, 59 (1992), pp. 735–54. 7. See for instance, Marshall Brown’s introduction to the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8. For Lamb’s iconoclasm, see Luisa Calè, ‘“The Vantage-Ground of Abstraction”: Charles Lamb on Reading and Viewing’, in Image and Word; Reflections of Art and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. A. Braida and Giuliana Pieri (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), pp. 135–50. For Blake’s attitude towards ‘Republican Arts’, see John Barrell and Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992); John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). 9. Julia Kristeva, Séméiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1969); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 10. Graham Allen, Intertextuality, the New Critical Idiom (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 140–1. 11. According to Graham Allen, David Duff argues that ‘attention to literary genre evaporates as we move from the work of Bakhtin to Kristeva’s and other poststructuralists’ work’. Cited in Allen, Intertextuality, p. 57. 12. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 141. 13. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 300. 179

180 Notes 14. ‘Theories of Genre’, in Brown, Romanticism, p. 230. 15. Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. viii–ix. 16. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes; La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 13, translated by Allen, Intertextuality, p. 108. 17. Allen, Intertextuality, p. 108. 18. In a letter to John Murray of 20 March 1820, Byron compares his translation of Francesca da Rimini with previous ones. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols (London: Murray, 1973–82), VII, 58. Byron’s journals contain numerous references to Dante. See, Byron’s Letters and Journals, III, p. 221, IV, p. 11, VI, p. 121.

1. The eighteenth-century reception: Dante and visual culture 1. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis (1895–1983), 48 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), XXXI, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Hannah More (1961), p. 296. Hannah More refers to Thomas Burgess’s Considerations on the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade, upon Grounds of Natural, Religious, and Political Duty, Oxford, 1789. The quotation is at page 74. 2. Crisafulli (2003) devotes some attention to the eighteenth-century reception, but focuses mostly on the reception of The Vision since its publication. Pite (1994) devotes his study to the nineteenth-century assimilation of Dante into English literature. Nick Havely’s collection deals with Thomas Gray’s study of Dante, acknowledging that ‘the process of rehabilitation … was well under way by 1800’, but the collection focuses on the postRomantic reception: Havely, Dante’s Modern Afterlife (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan 1998), p. 2. Earlier studies have taken a broader chronological approach: Tinkler-Villani (1989) analyses eighteenth-century translations of Dante as well as Cary’s, and Peter Brand’s more ambitious study searched for the origins of the reception of Dante in Britain. Charles Peter Brand, Italy and the English Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 3. For the emergence of a varied and successful commercial visual media before the invention of photography, see especially Gillien D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) and William H. Gilperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 4. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, pp. 49–72. 5. Milbank finds evidence of this political interest in the Florence Miscellany (1785), an anthology meant to encourage the association between the two countries in the common cause for liberty earlier embraced by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Compare Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 9. 6. According to James Sambrook, Colen Campbell’s Mereworth in Kent is the best example of the imitative Palladian villa. The model is Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, near Vicenza. Sambrook, The Eighteenth-Century: the Intellectual

Notes 181

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700–1789 (London and New York: Longman, 1986, 2nd edition, 1993), p. 160. David Rogers, ‘Richardson, Jonathan’, Grove Dictionary of Art (1996), 26, pp. 345–6. Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalisation of Connoisseurship’, Art History, 7 (1984), pp. 38–56, at 54. Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London: printed for W. Churchill at the Black Swan in Paternoster Row, 1719). The two discourses are respectively entitled: I. ‘An Essay on the Whole Art of Critism as it Relates to Painting…’; II. ‘An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur …’ This was known through Thomas Hoby’s translation, The Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio (London: imprinted by Henry Denham, 1561) or through Henry Peacham’s later adaptation entitled Compleat Gentleman (London: F. Constable, 1622). Aglionby’s treatise has a similar inspiration to Richardson’s. As he states in the preface, his aim is to encourage history painting in England: ‘we never had, as yet, any [painter] of Note, that was an english Man, that pretended to History-Painting. I cannot attribute this to any thing but the little Incouragement it meets with this Nation’. See Choice Observations Upon the Art of Painting, Together with Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters from Cimabue to the Time of Raphael and Michelangelo (London: King, 1719), ‘The Preface’ (unpaginated). Richardson, Two Discourses, I, pp. 204, 208. Richardson, Two Discourses, II, p. 33. Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalisation of Connoisseurship’, p. 50. See Gibson-Wood, ‘Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalisation of Connoisseurship’, p. 51; Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978). The first artist to undertake the task was Botticelli. His parchment illustrations were soon dispersed, although some of his designs were engraved in the first Florentine edition of the poem (1481). See Paget Toynbee, ‘The Earliest English Illustrators of Dante’, in Dante Studies, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), pp. 133–55. See also Jonathan Nelson, ‘Luca Martini, dantista e Pierino da Vinci’s relief of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons’, in Pierino da Vinci, ed. Marco Cianchi (Conference Proceedings, 1990) (Florence: Becocci, 1995), pp. 24–32. Now in the Casa Gherardesca at Florence. The bas-relief is by Pierino da Vinci, as acknowledged already by Vasari. The wax design is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which also possesses a terracotta version. It was eventually donated to the university by Philip Bury Duncan (1826–55), keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, from the collection of the portrait painter William Hoare (1706–92). See Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum 1540 to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992),Vol I, Italian, pp. 95–100. Two Discourses, p. 32; Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) (London,1806 edn) p. 253. Two Discourses, II, pp. 32–5. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 64.

182 Notes 21. One of the most influential treatises was Roger De Piles’s L’Idée du peintre parfait pour servir de règle aux jugements que l’on doit porter sur les ouvrages des peintres, first published in 1699. The English editions appeared in 1706 and 1744. 22. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England … collected by the late George Virtue, 5 vols (London: Henry Bohn, 1786), IV, p. 34. 23. In 1735 Desmaizeaux published an edition of Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique in which he stated his intention of providing translations of ‘quotations from Eminent Writers in various languages’. See Toynbee, Dante Studies, I, p. 283. The section devoted to Dante includes about twelve passages from the Divina Commedia translated freely into heroic couplets. His example can confidently be described as Dryden’s ‘Paraphrase’. 24. A similar loss is recorded for Dr Charles Burney’s complete prose translation of the Inferno as acknowledged by his daughter. He also published a brief translation from Purgatorio II in his History of Music. See Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr Burney; Arranged from his own Manuscripts … by his Daughter, Madame d’Arblay, 3 vols (London: Moxon, 1832), I, pp. 150–1. 25. A dissertation upon the Italian poetry, in which are interspersed some remarks on Mr. Voltaire’s Essay on the epic poets (London: Printed for Dodsley, at Tully’s Head in Pall-Mall, 1753). For Baretti’s involvement in the debate, see Chapter 2. 26. Lacy Collison-Morley, Giuseppe Baretti: With an account of his Literary Friendhips and Feuds in Italy and in England in the Days of Dr Johnson (London: Murray, 1909), p. 92. 27. William Hogarth to William Huggins (23 November 1758) cited in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965, 1971), II, p. 264. 28. Paulson, Hogarth, II, p. 285. See also Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols (Cambridge: the Lutterworth Press, 1991–93), III, pp. 291–3. 29. The British Magazine, 1 (April 1760), p. 266. 30. See A. Braida, ‘William Huggins’, New Dictionary of National Biography, forthcoming. 31. Both Toynbee and Dorothy Sayers praise Huggins’s short translation. Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 288; Dorothy Sayers, ‘The Art of Translating Dante’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 9 (1965), pp. 15–31 (p. 18). 32. William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry (London: Dodsley, 1782) pp. 166–98. 33. See here below, pp. 21–3. 34. See Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 77. 35. The Triumphs of Temper: a Poem in Six Cantos (1781) (London: Chichester, 1809), ‘Preface’, p. x. 36. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 105. 37. Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets (1815), facsimile (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), p. 51. Hunt discusses the translations in his notes to the poem. 38. Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 294. 39. Charles Rogers, The Inferno of Dante Translated (London, 1778), pp. 19–20. See Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, pp. 108–110. 40. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 119.

Notes 183 41. Annual Register, 7 (1764), p. 272. 42. See Toynbee, ‘The Earliest Illustrators of Dante’, p. 137; Corrado Gizzi, ‘Michelangelo e Dante’, in Michelangelo e Dante (Milan: Electa, 1995), pp. 221–32. 43. Toynbee, ‘The Earliest Illustrators of Dante’, p. 136. 44. See Corrado Gizzi, Federico Zuccari e Dante (Milan: Electa, 1993); and Giovanni Stradano e Dante (Milan: Electa, 1994). 45. Gert Schiff, ‘Füssli in Italia’, in Füssli e Dante (Milan: Mazzotta, 1985), pp. 51–5. 46. This is shown by one of his illustrations of Inferno XXXIII, in which Fuseli introduces the giants described in Canto XXXI with a design similar to Botticelli’s. 47. 31 July 1773, The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, ed. David H. Weinglass (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1982), p. 14. 48. Frederick Antal, Fuseli Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956). 49. Schiff, ‘Füssli in Italia’, p. 53. 50. John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Esq. M.A.R.A., 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), III, p. 90. 51. Fortunato Bellonzi, ‘Füssli, la formazione, l’estetica del sublime, la lettura di Dante’, in Gizzi, Füssli e Dante, pp. 27–36 (p. 32). 52. Theodore E.B. Wood, The Word Sublime and its Context, 1650–1760 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 16. 53. Longinus on the Sublime, The Greek Text edited after the Paris Manuscript, with Introduction, Translation, Facsimiles and Appendices, translated and edited by Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), pp. 57–8. 54. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beatiful (1757), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, general ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981–2000), vol I (1997), ed. T.O. McLoughlin and James T. Boulton, p. 216. 55. See Fortunato Bellonzi, ‘Füssli, la formazione, l’estetica del sublime, la lettura di Dante’, p. 32. 56. Schiff, ‘Füssli in Italia’, p. 54. 57. The three paintings that Fuseli exhibited are: Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Polenta with Gianciotto, Ugolino and his sons in the Tower of Famine and As he descends into Hell, Dante discovers the shades of Paolo and Francesca in a whirlwind. The last two paintings are lost. Of the second one a preliminary drawing and an engraving survive. Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825 (Zürich: Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, 1973), Plates 720, 1200, 1799a, and I, 653. See also Corrado Gizzi, Füssli e Dante (Milano: Nuove edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1985); Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), and Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825 (London: Tate Gallery 1975). 58. Cited in Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 298. Toynbee dismisses it as the worst eighteenth-century example. 59. Ugolino and His Children in the Dungeon. See David Mannings Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2000), cat. No. 2172. The painting is at Knole. See also Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Subject Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University

184 Notes

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

Press, 1995). Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (London: Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986), plate 82, pp. 251–3. James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols (London: 1818), vol. I, 278–83. See also Richard Cumberland’s similar account. He attributes Reynolds’ inspiration to Goldsmith. The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, ed. Richard J. Dircks (New York: AMS Press, 2002), p. 198 and note. According to Postle, George White soon became one of the most popular artists’ models in London, see Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Subject Pictures, p. 127. The entries ‘Beggar Hugolino’ and ‘Hugolino’ appear for 12 and 15 June and reoccur till August. See Mannings, vol. II, p. 569. 30 April 1773. To Lady Ossory (6 September 1793) he wrote about a portrait of Dante she had mentioned ‘at the other painting it is impossible I should guess; and if it exhibits any of Dante’s extravagances, I wish not to see it’. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, XXXIV (1965), p. 189. ‘Advertisement’ (1780) to the Anecdotes of Painting in England, I, xvii. See Manning, vol. II, p. 568–9. Paul Johannides finds evidence of the influence of the print in a sketch by Gros of about 1793–95; Postle suggests the debt of Pierre Narcisse Guerin’s The Return of Marcus Sextus (1797–99, Louvre), and Philippe Bordes finds a connection between Reynolds’s paintings and David’s Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, shown in 1789 at the Paris Salon. See Paul Johannides, ‘Some English Themes in the Early Work of Gros’, Burlington Magazine, 117 (December 1975), pp. 774–85; Postle, p. 147; Philippe Bordes ‘Jacques-Louis David’s Anglophilia on the Eve of the French Revolution’, Burlington Magazine, 134 (August 1992), pp. 482–90. According to Postle, the facial expression is modelled closely on the representation of ‘horreur’ in Le Brun’s Expression des Passions. Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Subject Pictures, p. 143. A negative review was published in Bell’s Weekly Messenger of 25 May 1806. Blake defended Fuseli’s treatment in a letter to the editor of the Monthly Magazine: ‘Fuseli’s Count Ugolino is a man of wonder and admiration, of resentment against man and devil, and of humiliation before God; prayer and parental affection fill the picture from head to foot.’ The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1968), p. 123. See Hazlitt’s article in the Edinburgh Review, 25 (June 1815), pp. 31–63. Lamb criticised Reynolds’s Ugolino in his essay ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, first published in The Reflector, II (January–March, 1811), now in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edward V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–5), I. Toynbee, ‘The Earliest English Illustrators of Dante’, p. 150. The reader adds a moralising approach to Dante: ‘Perhaps, too, the horrors of hell, depicted by him after Dante, would render a more important service to morality than all the thunders of the pulpit.’ Letter to the Editor, signed ‘W.’, The Monthly Magazine (August 1803), 16, p. 8. For the reprints of Flaxman’s designs, see G.E. Bentley, The Early Engravings of Flaxman’s Classical Designs (New York: The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 1964).

Notes 185 74. Pite, The Circle of our Vision, p. 55. 75. See for example from the Inferno, plate 2 ‘Beatrice in Limbo’, plate 8 ‘Pluto’, plate 10 ‘Farinata’; from the Purgatorio, plate 5 ‘Casella’. But the use of hand gestures to signify speech occurs almost systematically throughout the illustrations. 76. Toynbee, ‘The Earliest English Illustrators of Dante’, p. 152; Renato Barilli, ‘Flaxman: una via all’astrazione’, in Corrado Gizzi, ed., Flaxman e Dante (Milano: Mazzotta, 1986), pp. 21–25 (p. 23). Taaffe compares the illustrator to the translator: ‘Mr Flaxman has translated Dante best, for he has translated him into the language of nature’. John Taaffe, A Comment on the Divine Comedy (London: Murray, 1822), p. xxxi. 77. Barilli, ‘Flaxman: una via all’astrazione’, pp. 21–5. 78. See the analogies of these plates with Purgatorio, plate 11, 34 and Paradiso, plates 1, 6, 22.

2. The Romantic translation of the Divine Comedy: Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision 1. ‘Neoclassicism and Enlightement’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 55–64 (p. 64). 2. Brown, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Romanticism, p. 2. 3. I am aware that by now descriptive translation studies is a broad umbrellaterm that encompasses a variety of approaches and practices to the study of translations. For a clear review of the most significant contemporary positions, see Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, pp. 13–96. See the essential essays: Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, in Translation across Cultures, ed. Gideon Toury (New Dehli: Bahri Publications, 1987), and Gideon Toury, ‘A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies’, in The Manipulation of Literature, ed. Theo Hermans (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985). 4. John Dryden, ‘Preface’, The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–89), I: Ovid’s Epistles, ed. E. Nives Hooher and H.T. Swedenberg Jr, pp. 109–19 (p. 118). 5. The standard reference is Horace’s Ars Poetica, pp. 128–35: ‘nor should you try to render your original word for word [verbum verbo reddere] like a slavish translator [fidus interpres]’. Q. Horati Flacci opera, ed. Edward C. Wickham and H.W. Garrod (Oxford, Clarendon, 1901), Ars Poetica, vv. 131–4, in Ancient Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russel and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972). 6. Dryden, ‘Preface’, p. 118. 7. ‘Preface’, The Poems of Alexander Pope, 11 vols (London: Methuen, 1967–69), VII: The Iliad of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, pp. 1–25 (p. 17). 8. Lawrence Venuti, ‘Neoclassicism and Enlightenment’, p. 57. 9. A.F. Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation (London: Cadell, 1791). 10. Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation, p. 57. 11. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 136.

186 Notes 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation, pp. 16, 130. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 136. Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation, p. 147. On the subject see especially H.A. Mason, To Homer through Pope (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972). Joseph Weston’s translation of John Morfitt’s poem Philotoxi Ardenae opened the debate: he translated the poem in blank verse and heroic couplets and added a preface claiming the superiority of Dryden’s versification over Pope. Anna Seward was Weston’s most vehement adversary, claiming the superiority of Pope and the ‘moderns’. See Gretchen M. Foster, Pope Versus Dryden: a Controversy in Letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine: 1789–1792, English Literary Studies 44 (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1989). Marcellus, Gentleman’s Magazine, 59 (1789), pt. II, pp. 682–3. Dante Alighieri: the Divina Commedia, translated into English verse, with preliminary essays, notes, and illustrations, trans. Henry Boyd, 3 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802). He had completed the Inferno in 1785. A Translation of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri in English Verse with Historical Notes, and the Life of Dante, to Which is Added, A Specimen of a New Translation of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto (Dublin: Byrne, 1785). Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 295. Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 295. Critical Review 37, (1803), pp. 241–9 (p. 245). Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 126. See especially Constantine Jennings’s translation. For an analysis of Gothic translations of Dante, see Cosetta Gaudenzi, ‘Gothic Translations of Dante’s Ugolino Episode in Eighteenth-Century and Early NineteenthCentury Great Britain’, Romance Languages Annual (1999), pp. 196–201. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 130. Boyd, Divine Comedy, III, 3. Boyd, Divine Comedy, I, 7. Boyd, Divine Comedy, I, 25. Boyd, Divine Comedy, II, 4. A short biography of Cary was first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1847. The same year Henry Cary published the Memoir. R.W. King began his publication of Cary’s unpublished documents in two articles of 1923. He then published Cary’s biography in 1925. Crisafulli’s bibliography has also been consulted. All these accounts have been taken into consideration in this summary of his life. See, Gentleman’s Magazine, 27 (1847), 339–60; Richard Garnett, ‘Henry Francis Cary’, Dictionary of National Biography (1887), pp. 242–4; R.W. King, ‘Charles Lamb, Cary and ‘The London Magazine’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 559 (1923), pp. 363–9; 560 (1923), pp. 520–30; Charles Branchini, ‘Poet Father and Painter Son: the Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844) and his son Francis Stephen Cary, Charles Lamb Bulletin, new series 60 (1987), pp. 122–130; R.W. King, The Translator of Dante (London: Secker, 1925). Gentleman’s Magazine, 57 (1787), pt. I, p. 529; pt. II, pp. 625, 916. Cary, An Irregular Ode to General Eliott (Birmingham: Piercy, 1788). For the review, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (1788), pt. II, p. 633.

Notes 187 32. ‘Miss Seward. – The writings of this lady are so universally known and admired, that to make particular mention of them here, would be impertinent.’ Cary, An Irregular Ode to General Eliott, p. 6. 33. King, The Translator of Dante, p. 22; Cary, Sonnets and Odes by Henry Francis Cary (London: Robson and Clarke, 1788), p. 1. Cary’s poems were first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine between the years 1787 and 1789 under the nom de plume Marcellus. 34. Cary, Memoir, I, 28. 35. Alethes, Gentleman’s Magazine, 55 (1785), pt. II, pp. 610–13 (611, 613). 36. New Review, 9 (1786), pp. 164–8. 37. I consulted a later edition of Vergani’s introductory essay: Angelo Vergani, Le bellezze della poesia italiana … accompagnate d’un trattato della poesia italiana (Paris: Barrois, 1819), pp. 181–8; 210–66, 297–301. 38. Marcellus, ‘Translation of an Italian Sonnet written by the Abbé Cassiani’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 59 (1789), pt. I, p. 257. 39. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 38. 40. Marcellus, ‘Remarks on the Provençal Poetry’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793), pt. I, pp. 520–2; Marcellus, ‘Remarks on the Writing of some Provençal Poets’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793) pt. II, pp. 912–13. 41. Marcellus, Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (1791), pt. I, pp. 125–6 (p. 126). 42. Cited in King, The Translator of Dante, p. 56. 43. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 43. 44. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 43. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 103. 48. ‘The Mountain Seat’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 64 (1794), pt. I, pp. 161–2. 49. Cary, Memoir, II, p. 125. 50. The episode of Cary’s application for the post and his and Panizzi’s position in the British Museum is illustrated by Edward Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1870), II, pp. 532, 543–55. 51. Cary, Early French Poets (London: H.G. Bohn, 1846); Lives of English Poets. 52. Cary, The Birds of Aristophanes (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), p. vi. 53. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 92. 54. Cary’s literary journal contains entries on the Purgatorio from 16 January to 18 March: Memoir, I, pp. 103–8, 114–15, 128. In a note first included in The Vision 1819 Cary acknowledges that he used the 8.vo Venice edition of the Divine Comedy of 1793 (The Vision 1819, p. 12n.). 55. Cited in King, The Translator of Dante, p. 78 n. 56. King, The Translator of Dante, p. 78. 57. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 165. 58. See Cary, Memoir, I, p. 165. 59. Henry Cary writes: ‘As his journal has informed us, he began translating that portion of the Divina Commedia on the 23rd of May, 1800, and in the autumn of 1804 his work was sufficiently advanced to warrant his offering it for publication.’ Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 217–18. 60. The entry is as follows: ‘May 8. Finished my translation of Dante’s Commedia – began the 16th of June, 1797.’ Cary, Memoir, I, p. 269. 61. See Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 278–9.

188 Notes 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83.

Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 281–2. Cary, Memoir, I, p. 283. Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 300. William J. De Sua, Dante into English (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1964), p. 30. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English, p. 20. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 183. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 237. Cary expressed his reservations on Rogers’s translation in a letter to Thomas Price of 20 February 1814. Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 296–7. Cowper’s Odyssey was published on 1 July 1791. As a letter to Miss Seward documents, Cary knew of Cowper’s ongoing translation as early as 1789. Marcellus, ‘A Remark on Winkelmann on Imagination Controverted’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (1792), pt. II, p. 605. Cary was reading Longinus again in 1800. See Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 156, 267. These are especially Inferno, XVIII–XXII. As Zygmunt Baranski points out, Dante’s experimentation stems from his dissatisfaction with the contemporary approach to literary genres, or ‘genera dicendi’. Often associated with particular groups of texts, especially tragedy and comedy, these required a strict correspondence between subject matter and style. According to Baranski, ‘it was against [their] perceived constraints that Dante directed so much of his energy when he composed the Commedia’. ‘“Tres enim sunt manerie dicendi …”. Some observations on medieval literature, “genre”, and Dante’, The Italianist,15 (1995), supplement, ed. Zygmunt G Baranski, pp. 9–60 (p. 23). Pite, The Circle of our Vision, pp. 14–16. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 230. ‘For a playful sonnet which Dante addressed to him, and a spirited translation of it, see Hayley’s Essay on Epic Poetry, Notes to Epistle III’ (The Inferno, I, 166n). Cary discussed their use of terza rima in his later essay ‘On the Early French Poets: Hugues Salel and Oliver de Magni’, London Magazine, 5 (1822), pp. 157–60 (p. 158). Cary, Memoir, II, pp. 341–2. Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation, p. 112. William Cowper, ‘Preface to the first edition (1791) of the Translation of Homer’, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ry Skamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), V, pp. 61–9 (p. 65). The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer translated into English verse by William Cowper (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1791), XI, pp. 39–49. The Gentleman’s Magazine complained that his ‘commendable desire of retaining the strength of his original has made him less attentive to that sweetness and melody which the Greek language possesses beyond all others, but of which our own is sufficiently capable’, the Critical Review was even more scathing. Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (1791), pt. II, pp. 845–6 (p. 845); Critical Review, 2nd series, 4 (1792), pp. 560–9 (p. 569). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959–71), IV, p. 781.

Notes 189

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

103.

Cary was well acquainted with contemporary examples of the use of blank verse; as his literary journals show, Cary had read Southey’s Joan of Arc by February 1797 and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads by August 1800. See Cary, Memoir, I, pp. 107, 203. Coleridge, Letters, IV, pp. 780–1. Cooksey, Dante’s England, p. 362. King, The Translator of Dante, pp. 302–5. Crisafulli’s articles first alerted my awareness of translators’ lexical compensatory strategies. For a definition of compensation, see especially ‘Dante’s Puns in English and the Question of Compensation’, The Translator, 2 (1996), pp. 259–76. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 203. Giuseppe Lisio, L’arte del periodo nelle opere volgari di Dante Alighieri e del secolo XII (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1902), pp. 114–16. Lisio, L’arte del periodo, p. 114n. According to Ferrante the number of cantos of the Paradiso in which speech prevails is more than double that of the Inferno. ‘A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony’, The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 156–7. ‘Le sentenze della Commedia’, in Antologia della critica dantesca, ed. Mario Fubini and E. Bonazza (Torino: Petrini, 1967), p. 319. Ferrante, ‘A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony’, p. 154. Ferrante, ‘A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony’, p. 157. Ferrante, ‘A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony’, p. 59. Lisio, L’arte del periodo, pp. 114–15. According to Ferrante the average number for the Inferno is 15. See Ferrante, ‘A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony’, p. 159. King, The Translator of Dante, pp. 338–45; Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 189. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), IV, p. 1007, X, p. 915. ‘I know nothing in the whole circle of diablerie more terrible than the transformations in canto xxiv and xxv. The two nauseous passages you have remarked, with something more of the same sort, I should have been heartily glad not to have met with: but I did not think myself justified in doing more than endeavouring to make them somewhat less offensive than they are in the original.’ Cary, Memoir, I, p. 228. Dante’s line is ‘ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse’ (Inferno, V, 132). For an analysis of Cary’s translation of Canto V, see Valeria Cenami, La Divina Commedia nelle traduzioni di H.W. Longfellow e di H.F. Cary (Lucca: Tipografia editrice Giusti, 1933), p. 23. The process begins as early as Purgatorio, II, where the musician Casella sings Dante’s poem, ‘Amor che nella mente mi ragiona’. As Teodolinda Barolini points out, at this early stage in the poem love poetry is the occasion for Cato’s reproach; by the time one reaches Purgatorio, XXIV Dante’s perspective has changed: poetry is one of the instruments of salvations provided it admits its dependence on theology. Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Autocitation and Autobiography’, in Dante, ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), pp. 167–78.

190 Notes 104. Thus ‘soavemente’ [gently] (II: 85) is translated as ‘with voice of sweetness’ (Purgatorio, II, 80–1) and Casella sings ‘in such soft accents’ (II: 108), ‘sì dolcemente’ [so sweetly] (II, 113); ‘gentle’ or ‘courteous’ most commonly corresponds to Dante’s ‘gentile’ or ‘benigno’, Dante’s most common reference to nobility of heart. See The Vision, VII, 105; VIII, 53; IX, 84; XXVI, 91; XXXIII, 128. In XXVI, 105 and XXVIII, 59, Cary uses ‘dulcet’ for ‘dolce’ [sweet]. 105. The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968). 106. Shelley was to make extensive use of both the adjective and noun ‘serene’. It is interesting that Byron used the form as early as 1812, before the publication of The Vision; I would ascribe, nevertheless, Shelley’s use to the influence of Cary’s Purgatory and Paradise, the two parts of the Divine Comedy the poet appreciated most. Here, in fact, he could find such an extensive use of the form as to justify a direct influence. 107. See, for instance, The Vision, VI: 74, VIII: 94, XXI: 14, XXVI: 108, XXIX: 13.

3. Dante and high culture: the Romantic search for the epic 1. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with William Mason, ed. W.S. Lewis, Grover Cronin Jr and Charles H. Bennett (1955), 2 vols, vol. II, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, XXIX, p. 255. 2. Walpole objects to William Hayley’s advice in book V of his Epistle to abandon satire for the epic. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with William Mason, II, 255. 3. Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, p. 401. 4. Voltaire’s essay was published in March 1728, at the time of his attempt to enlist subscriptions for his Henriade, his first attempt at a French epic. The ‘Advertisement’ to the reader that prefaces the essay presents it as ‘a kind of Preface or Introduction to the Henriade’. It was reprinted in January 1728, but in France it became a bibliographical rarity because it was not reissued in any of the collective editions of Voltaire’s works. An Essay on epic poetry / Essai sur la poésie épique, ed. David Williams, in The English Essays of 1727, The Complete Works of Voltaire 3B (Oxford: Printed by the Alden Press for the Voltaire Foundation, 1996), p. 156 and ff.. See also Florence Donnel White, Voltaire’s Essay on Epic Poetry (New York: Phaeton Press, 1970). 5. For Italian responses to Voltaire’s essay, see Antonio Zardo, ‘La censura e la difesa di Dante nel sec. xviiii’, Giornale Dantesco, 24 (1906), pp. 145–67. 6. See George E. Dorris, Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London 1715–1744 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967). 7. (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, at Tully’s Head in Pall-Mall, 1753). 8. Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London 1715–1744, p. 35. 9. See David Williams, ‘Voltaire: Literary Critic’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 48 (1966), pp. 314–41 and Paolo Rolli and the Italian Circle in London 1715–1744, p. 203.

Notes 191 10. He replied in 1776 with his Lettres chinoises, xii ‘Sur le Dante et sur un pauvre homme nommé Martinelli’, Lettres chinoises, Indiennes, et Tartares, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), 29, pp. 495–8. 11. Lettere Familiari e Critiche di Vincenzio Martinelli (London: Presso Luigi Nourse, Libraio dello Strand, 1758). The two letters attacking Voltaire are addressed to the Count of Oxford, in the edition consulted at pp. 216–37. Martinelli’s attack is the strongest among the three in accusing Voltaire of ignorance and misunderstanding. 12. The English Essays of 1727, p. 245. 13. Voltaire had earlier expressed his opinion on the Divine Comedy in the Essai sur les mœuers et l’esprit des nations: ‘Déjà le Dante, Florentin, avait illustré la langue toscane par son poème bizarre, mais brillant de beautés naturelles, intitulé Comédie; ouvrage dans lequel l’auteur s’éleva dans les détails au-dessus du mauvais goût de son siècle et de son sujet, et rempli de morceaux écrits aussi purement que s’ils étaient du temps de l’Arioste et du Tasse.’ Chap. 82, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: éditions Garnier Frères, 1963), 2 vols, I, p. 763. 14. Voltaire to Saverio Bettinelli, 18 December 1759, in Correspondance XXI, The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman, The Voltaire Foundation (Banbury: Cheney and Sons, 1973), 105, pp. 48–9. 15. ‘(Le) Dante’, in Suites de Mélanges, quatrième partie (1765), Dictionnaire Philosophique, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878),18, II, pp. 342–5. 16. A second translation of the Philosophical Dictionary with the entry on Dante was published in Britain in 1786. Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, I, 423. 17. Henry John Todd, The Poetical Works of John Milton (London, 1801). It was reviewed in Quarterly Review, 36 (June 1827), pp. 29–61. 18. Baretti, A Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry, pp. 67–68. 19. See John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers 1802–1824 (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 1. See also Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–47. 20. See also Frances A. Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 10 (1951), pp. 27–82. 21. See especially chapter 5, ‘Cary, Ideology and The Vision’, in The Vision of Dante, pp. 265–325. 22. Dante and the Victorians, p. 9. 23. De l’Esprit de lois, book xiv: ‘des lois, dans le rapport qu’elles ont avec la nature du climat’, ed. Victor Goldschmidt (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979). 24. The Edinburgh Review, 25 (1815), pp. 31–63. Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge had already been reviewed by the Quarterly Review in 1812 , vol. 7 (1812), pp. 357–71; it was then translated by Sismondi himself as a one volume History of the Italian Republics in 1832 for Lardner’s Encyclopaedia. 25. The Edinburgh Review 25, pp. 31–63 (pp. 46, 48). Also in the Collected Works of William Hazlitt, 16, pp. 41–2.

192 Notes 26. Quarterly Review, 9 (1813), pp. 444–66. 27. Joseph Berington’s A Literary History of the Middle Ages was a further source of acknowledgment of Dante’s importance in medieval Europe. Sharon Turner’s History of England (1815) acknowledged the influence of Dante on Chaucer. The most influential historical work on the topic was Henry Hallam’s View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818). Travel literature, in great demand now that the tour on the continent was again a possibility, soon followed the trend: the anonymous Remarks on Antiquities, and Letters, During an Excursion in Italy (1802–1803),devoted four pages to Dante, and the influential A Tour Through Italy (1813) by Eustace, three. 28. Dunlop, for instance, relates Sacchetti’s story about Dante’s meeting with a blacksmith reciting his poety. Dunlop, The History of Fiction, II, pp. 358–9. See also Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, I, p. 586; II, pp. 138, 188–190. 29. Tilottama Rajan, ‘Theories of Genre’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, V: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 229. 30. Thomas Campbell, Lectures on Poetry (London, 1821) 31. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807). 32. The Quarterly Review, 31 (December 1824 and March 1825), pp. 263–311 (p. 283). The attribution is in The Wellesley Index of Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, ed. Walter E. Houghton, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966–89), II, p. 703. 33. The Quarterly Review, 31, p. 284. 34. The Vision of Dante, p. 143. 35. See The Vision of Dante, pp. 145–52. 36. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 37. Boyd’s Inferno was first reviewed in 1785 by the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Critical Review and the Monthly Review. Gentleman’s Magazine, 55 (1785), pt. I, 378–81; Critical Review, 59 (1785), pp. 401–10; Monthly Review, 1st series, 73 (1785), pp. 425–7. 38. Gentleman’s Magazine 55, pt. I, p. 381. 39. The Annual Review and History of Literature blames the ‘diffuseness’ of Boyd’s translation, but once again finds greater fault in ‘the nature of the poem itself, which at this time of day, must rather be reckoned among the curiosities of literature’. Annual Review and History of Literature, 1 (1802), 672–80 (p. 680). In the Monthly Review, Lockhart Muirhead belatedly reviewed the translation in 1805, only to praise the way in which ‘he has executed an entire English version of the Commedia with a degree of success which has surpassed our expectations.’ Monthly Review, 2nd series, 46, pp. 272–82 (p. 273). 40. Edinburgh Review,1 (1803), pp. 307–13. 41. The Literary Journal, 5, p. 1090. 42. The article included the infortunate misprint ‘obscene’ for ‘obscure’. Gentleman’s Magazine, 75 (1805), pt. I, pp. 551–2 (p. 551). 43. The Literary Journal, or Universal Review of Literature Domestic and Foreign, 5 (October 1805), pp. 1088–90 (p. 1088).

Notes 193 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

The Critical Review, 3rd series, 6 (1805), pp. 113–126 (p. 123). The Critical Review, 3rd series, 6, p. 123. Monthly Review, 55 (1808), p. 438. Cary, Memoir, II, p. 40. The Critical Review, 4th series, 5 (1814), p. 647. The Monthly Review, 76 (1815), pp. 322–4 (p. 323). The British Critic, 12 (1819), xii, pp. 584–97. The Eclectic Review praises Cary’s translation in comparison with Boyd’s freer version: ‘On comparing the present with the version of the Inferno published by Mr. Boyd in 1785, the superior value of a close yet not literal translation, over a free version, will be sufficiently evident’. The Eclectic Review, new series, 11 (1819), pp. 556–72 (p. 556). Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 153. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, pp. 148–53. ‘The Lovers of sentiment and Italian literature generally turn, most unjustly, their exclusive attention to Petrarch; and seem to regard Dante as a sublime but repulsive genius, untouched by those tender passions, of which his rival unceasingly complained … How much deeper his passion was than that of Petrarch, may be judged not only from the poetry, but the character of both; from the bold, indignant spirit of Dante, that throws into shade the feeble plaintiveness of his successor.’ ‘On Dante and his Times’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13 (1823), pp. 141–57 (p. 141). The identification of the contributor is in Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine; Volumes I through XVIII 1817–1825 (Lubbock, Texas: Library, Texas Technological College, 1959), p. 104. The Quarterly Review, 34 (1826), pp. 1–19 (p. 5). See Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, Second Series 1790–1815; Index of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 47–8. Foscolo wrote four articles on Dante and the Divine Comedy. Two were published in the Edinburgh Review and two by the New Monthly Magazine. The latter devoted a series to the Italian poets, to which Foscolo contributed two articles that quote extensively from The Vision. Ugo Foscolo, ‘Frederick the Second and Pietro delle Vigne’; ‘Guido Cavalcanti’, Saggi e Discorsi Critici, Edizione Nazionale X, ed. Cesare Foligno (1953), pp. 399–411; pp. 423–35. ‘On Dante and his Times’, p. 154. Thomas L. Cooksey, ‘Dante’s England: the Contribution of Cary, Coleridge and Foscolo to the British Reception of Dante’, Papers on Language and Literature, 20 (1984), pp. 355–6. The Letters of Charles and Mary Ann Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr, 3 vols (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1975–78), vol. I, p. 16. Leigh Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), I, p. 42. Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets, I, p. 65. Friederich Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur (1815) was translated into English in 1818 under the title Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Baldwin, 1818).

194 Notes 63. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), V, p. 17. 64. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 17. 65. ‘Milton, more perhaps than any other poet, elevated his subject, by combining image with image in lofty gradation. Dante’s great power is in combining internal feelings with familiar objects.’ Hazlitt, Works, XVI, p. 42. 66. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 65. 67. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 66. 68. Hazlitt, Works, XVI, pp. 24–57. 69. Judy Little, Keats as a Narrative Poet: a Test of Invention (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 127. In The Round Table Hazlitt explicitly links Milton’s art to the nakedness and simplicity of Greek sculpture: ‘the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, etc. are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture … The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue.’ Hazlitt, ‘On Milton’s Versification’, Works, IV, pp. 38–9. 70. See Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 113. 71. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 17. 72. Francis Jeffrey to Ugo Foscolo of 8 May 1818, Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario, ed. Mario Scotti, Edizione Nazionale della Opere di Ugo Foscolo, 9 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1949–94), VII, pp. 317–18. 73. Caesar, The Critical Heritage, pp. 351–2. ‘Appunto come per le stesse precorrenti ragioni noi nella Scienza nuova dimostrammo Omero, come egli è il primo certo autor greco che ci è pervenuto, così è senza contrasto il principe e padre di tutti i poeti che fiorirono appresso ne’ tempi addottrinati di Grecia, che li lega dietro, ma per assai lungo spazio lontani.’ Giambattista Vico, L’Autobiografia, Opere, ed. Roberto Parenti (Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972), 2 vols, I, p. 446. 74. See, for example, Coleridge’s letter to Lord Holland of 14 February 1818. Coleridge, Letters, IV, p. 838. 75. Rogers first met Wordsworth and Coleridge in August 1789. See P.W. Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: Smith, 1889) I, pp. 9–10. For Coleridge’s relationship with Rogers see especially his letter of 25 May 1815 in which he asks Rogers to forward his proposal for translations to Cadell. Coleridge, Letters, IV, pp. 569–70. 76. Mary Russell Mitford mentioned Rogers’s presence at the lecture of 2 December. See Coleridge, Letters, III, p. 353n. 77. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, Bollingen Series, 2 vols (1987) II, p. 33. See also Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, pp. 284–5. 78. Allen writes of Rogers: ‘in your present distress of body and mind the certainty of having such a friend near you, even though you should see him but seldom, must be a great consolation’. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, p. 229. 79. British Library, Holland House Papers, adds MSS 52181, fols 106r – 107v. 80. The confused and different descriptions on the origin of the article have been investigated by G. da Pozzo in his introduction to Studi su Dante, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo. See Corrigan, ‘Foscolo’s Articles on Dante in the Edinburgh Review: a Study in Collaboration’, in

Notes 195

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

Collected Essays on Italian Language and Literature Presented to Kathleen Speight, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), pp. 212–26; C.P. Brand, ‘Ugo Foscolo and the Edinburgh Review: Unpublished Letters to Francis Jeffrey’, The Modern Language Review, 70 (1975), pp. 306–23. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, pp. 229–30. British Literary Magazines, ed. Alvin Sullivan, 2 vols (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983) II, p. 140; see also Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1930), p. 236. Cary, Memoir, II, pp. 18–19. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, p. 231n. See Coleridge, Letters, IV, pp. 778–83. King, The Translator of Dante, p. 116. See George Crabbe’s Journal in The Life and Poetical Works of George Crabbe by His Son (London: Murray, 1901), p. 68. Wordsworth, too, knew of Rogers’s interest in Dante by May 1817. See, Wordsworth, Letters, III, pt. II, p. 382. Cary, Memoir, II, p. 19. ‘I would, that my literary Influence were enough to secure the knowledge of the work for the true Lovers of Poetry in general – But how came it that you had it published in so too unostentatious a form.’ Coleridge, Letters, IV, p. 779. Coleridge writes: ‘By the bye, there is no Publisher’s name mentioned in the Title-page. Should I put any number of Copies for you at Gate and Curtis’s, or at Murray’s?’ Coleridge, Letters, IV, p. 781. See Cary’s acknowledgement in the preface to The Vision 1819: ‘Amongst the few into whose hands [this translation] fell, about two years ago, Mr. Coleridge became one; and I have both a pride and pleasure in acknowledging that it has been chiefly owing to the prompt and strenuous exertions of that gentleman in recommending the book to public notice, that the opportunity has been afforded me of sending it forth in its present form.’ (The Vision 1819, pp. iii–iv). Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rook (1969), I, p. 429. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 6 vols (New York: Princeton, 1957–89), III, p. 4498. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols (London: Pickering, 1836–39), I, 150–66; Coleridge, Notebooks, III, p. 4498. See Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 184. Coleridge’s reference to Hallam is the annotation: ‘pay a proper compliment to Mr Hallam’. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 184. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 184. Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938), I, p. 220. Coleridge, Notebooks, I, p. 170. Coleridge, The Watchman (25 March 1796), ed. Lewis Patton (1970), p. 133; Coleridge, Notebooks, I, p. 1373. Edoardo Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). Coleridge, Letters, II, p. 1059.

196 Notes 102. See Coleridge, Marginalia, II, p. 132. 103. Opere di Dante Alighieri col comento del M.R.P. Pompeo Venturi della Compagnia di Gesù, 5 vols (Venice: Gatti, 1793). See Coleridge, Notebooks, II, pp. 3011–14, 3017–19, 3201, 3219 and 3014n. We do not know, however, which edition of the Convivio he possessed. 104. Coleridge, Notebooks, II, p. 3203. 105. See Coleridge, Notebooks, II, p. 3203. 106. Coleridge, Notebooks, III, p. 3611. 107. Coleridge, Notebooks, III, p. 4388. 108. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Bollingen Series, 1983) II, p. 151. 109. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, II, p. 21. 110. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, p. 209. 111. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 398. 112. Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols. R.A. Foakes demonstrates that Coleridge was using the German text. See Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, pp. 32 and 32n. 113. ‘If we are willing to study the poetry of the middle ages without being biased in favour of any particular theory … we shall find that it naturally divides itself into three species, the chivalric, the amatory and the allegorical.’ Schlegel, Lectures, II, pp. 4–5. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, I, pp. lxii–lxiv; II, p. 397. 114. Coleridge, Notebooks, II, p. 3203. 115. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, II, p. 399. 116. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, II, p. 400. 117. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, II, p. 401. 118. Schlegel, Lectures, II, p. 15. 119. Schlegel, Lectures, II, p. 15. 120. Schlegel, Lectures, II, p. 12. 121. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, II, p. 398. 122. Despite his preference of symbol over allegory in the Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge always revealed a fascination with the genre. See John Gatta, ‘Coleridge and Allegory’, Modern Language Quarterly, 38 (1977), pp. 62–121. 123. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 400. 124. Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1818), II, p. 596. 125. Hallam, View of the State of Europe, II, pp. 596–7. 126. Hallam, View of the State of Europe, I, p. 246. 127. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 397. Foakes identifies Hallam as Coleridge’s source. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 397n. 128. Foscolo, Studi Su Dante, p. 74. 129. Coleridge, Letters, V, p. 15. 130. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 202. 131. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 400. 132. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 401. 133. Coleridge praises in Wordsworth ‘the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and

Notes 197

134.

135. 136.

137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144.

145. 146.

147.

genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature.’ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, II, p. 148. Both Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle focus their analysis of the epic poem on Dante’s conciseness. Macaulay, Criticism on the Principal Italian Writers, The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, The Complete Works, I, p. 71; Thomas Carlyle, Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (London: Chapman, 1896–99), V, pp. 78–114 (p. 92). Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, II, p. 402. ‘And I frankly confess that the vague sublimity of Milton affects me less than these reviled details of Dante. We read Milton, and we know that we are reading a great poet; when we read Dante, the poet vanishes.’ Macaulay, Works, I, p. 63. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, II, p. 402. The notes for the lecture show that Coleridge referred to Cary’s The Vision when making the quotations from Dante. For his criticism, he singles out the simile from Inferno, II, pp. 127–32, the description of Charon (Hell, III, 95–126), the two episodes of Francesca and Ugolino, and Dante’s description of his feelings at the sight Satan (Hell, XXIX, 1–3). Coleridge, Letters, IV, pp. 827–8. British Library, The Vision 1819 with Coleridge’s marginalia. Coleridge, Marginalia, Bollingen Series, 12, ed. G. Whalley (1980), II, 135. Coleridge, Marginalia, II, 136. Pite, The Circle of our Vision, p. 68 and following. Charles T. Davis, ‘Dante and Italian Nationalism’, in A Dante Symposium, ed. William De Sua and Gino Rizzo (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 199–213. On this subject see especially Crisafulli’s discussion ‘Cary, Ideology and The Vision’, in The Vision of Dante, pp. 265–332 and Michael Caesar’s Introduction to Dante: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–88. In May 1865 the actors Ernesto Rossi, Tommaso Salvini and Adelaide Ristori were invited to the Teatro Pagliano in order to conclude the threeday celebrations with readings from the Divine Comedy. Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, pp. 169–75. E.R. Vincent, Byron, Hobhouse and Foscolo (Cambridge: University Press, 1949); Ugo Foscolo: an Italian in Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); C.P. Brand, ‘Ugo Foscolo e i periodici inglesi. I rapporti con Francis Jeffrey’, in Atti dei Convegni Foscoliani (1978–1979), 3 vols (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1988) III, pp. 169–80; Vincent, ‘Fortuna di Dante in Inghilterra’, Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols (1970), III, pp. 445–8. ‘Ho dato due articoli chiestimi pel Quarterly Review, e per la Review d’Edinburgo su la Letteratura Italiana: ma vanno tradotti in Inglese; Dio voglia che non diventino cadaveri! Lo stile non si traduce.’ [I have given in two articles requested by the Quarterly Review, and for the Review in Edinburgh on Italian Literature: but they have to be translated in English: let them not become corpses! Style cannot be translated.] Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, p. 167.

198 Notes 148. The articles will be occasioned by the new edition of some Italian Historian, Speaker or Poet from Dante to Alfieri. I will take the classical author with which the articles deal as the occasion for my considerations; and I will combine it with political, moral and literary anecdotes concerning their century. Cited in Brand, ‘Foscolo and the Edinburgh Review’, p. 307. 149. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, p. 325. 150. Foscolo, Epistolario, V, ed. Plinio Carli (1956), p. 158. 151. Foscolo, Epistolario, VI, ed. Giovanni Gambarin and Francesco Tropeano (1966), p. 144. 152. Foscolo, Epistolario, VI, p. 184. 153. Foscolo, ‘Primo articolo della Edinburgh Review’, Edizione nationale, IX, pp. 58–145, p. 78. 154. In August 1817, he sent Miss Pigout a short extract of the article in the course of composition, promising her some more to come. On 3 April 1818, Foscolo wrote to John Allen that he had sent to Mackintosh ‘le manuscrit refait, et il a eu la bonté de s’en charger et de promettre qu’il songera à la traduction’. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, pp. 221–2, 310–311. 155. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, pp. 314, 314n, 317. 156. See Jeffrey’s letter to Foscolo of 23 May 1818 and Foscolo’s letter to the editor of July 1818; Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, pp. 324–5; Brand, ‘Foscolo and the Edinburgh Review’, p. 312. 157. Holland House Papers, adds MSS 52181, fol. 106r. 158. Corrigan, ‘Foscolo’s Articles on Dante’, p. 217. 159. Foscolo’s first article, number IX in the issue for February 1818 of the Edinburgh Review, n. 30, pp. 453–73. 160. Foscolo, Epistolario, VI, pp. 73–5. 161. Foscolo, ‘Primo articolo’, 1. Foscolo wrote more explicitly about the commentary in a letter of 1827. Cited in A. Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo, Storia letteraria d’Italia, 2 vols (Padova: La Nuova Libreria, 1981), II, pp. 770, 807n. 162. ‘Crediamo che nel Biagioli ci sia una tacita polemica all’eruditismo piatto e massiccio del Settecento. I riferimenti storici e letterari non esorbitano la piana chiosa e comunque si inseriscono in una necessità interpretativa. Questi aspetti ed altri … lo portano invece al romanticismo’. Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca, II, p. 771. 163. Foscolo, Discorso sul testo e su le opinioni diverse prevalenti intorno alla storia e alla emendazione critica della Commedia di Dante, Edizione nazionale, IX, 149–573. 164. Foscolo, Primo articolo, pp. 16, 18. ‘Then remember me. / I once was Pia. Siena gave me life; / Maremma took it from me. That he knows / Who me with jewelled ring had first espoused’. (The Vision, Purgatory, V, 128–33). 165. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 40. 166. Ibid. 167. ‘La favola degli antichi tra l’origine dalle cose fisiche e civili … poesia primitiva che sgorga ‘spontanea da quelle epoche singolari’. Foscolo, La Chioma di Berenice, Edizione Nazionale VI, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (1972), p. 302. 168. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 4.

Notes 199 169. In the same poem, Dante is similarly characterised according to his political beliefs as ‘il ghibellin fuggiasco’ [the fugitive Ghibelline] (Dei Sepolcri, 173–4). Ugo Foscolo, Poesie e Carmi, Edizione nazionale, I: ed. Francesco Pagliai et al. (1985), 125–34. 170. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 14. 171. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, p. 209. 172. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 42. 173. Foscolo, Primo articolo, pp. 42, 44. 174. The first passage relates to the expulsion of the serpent from the terrestrial paradise, recorded in Canto VIII of the Purgatorio, imitated by Gray in his Elegy. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 44. 175. Foscolo, Primo articolo, p. 54. 176. Rogers’s acquaintance with The Vision resulted in his rediscovery of Dante’s homeland in the poem Italy. He did not publish other criticism on Dante. Samuel Rogers, The Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers (London: George Bell, 1875), pp. 188–361. 177. See Allen’s letter to Foscolo of April 1818 and Jeffrey’s letter of 8 May 1818, Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, pp. 314, 317–18. 178. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, p. 253. 179. ‘The limits of a late Number precluded us from entering, as fully as we would have wished, into the subject of Dante. We resume it the more willingly, from our having just received a work, published two or three years ago in Italy, but almost unknown in England, having for its object to ascertain, whether this great poet was an inventor, or an imitator only.’ Foscolo, ‘Secondo articolo della Edinburgh Review’, Edizione nazionale, IX, p. 58. 180. Foscolo, Secondo articolo, p. 98. Foscolo must have later developed some friendship with August Wilhelm Schlegel since in October 1823 he wrote a letter of introduction for him. See, Mario Fubini, ‘Foscolo e i fratelli Schlegel’, in Saggi, studi e note, Strumenti (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1978), pp. 605–8. 181. Foscolo’s references to the English literary background have provoked scepticism: Corrigan suggests the intervention of the translator for some of them. In the second article, however, the references to Ginguené, Schlegel and Hallam are certainly a central part of the argument since they are included in one of the manuscripts of the article that have been preserved. Corrigan, ‘Foscolo’s Articles on Dante’, pp. 216–17. Foscolo, Secondo articolo, pp. 638–40. 182. Foscolo, Viaggio Sentimentale di Yorick Lungo la Francia e l’Italia, in Prose Varie d’arte, ed. Mario Fubini, Edizione nazionale (1951), V, pp. xxxvi–lviii, 35–186. Foscolo was introduced to Gray by his tutor Angelo Dalmistro who had translated the poet in 1792. See Camillo Antona Traversi and Angelo Ottolini, Ugo Foscolo, 4 vols (Milano: Edizioni Corbaccio, 1927–28), I, pp. 73–7. Gray, Ossian, Thompson, Milton and Shakespeare were mentioned in Foscolo’s ‘Piano di studi’ of 1796. Foscolo, Scritti Letterari e Politici, ed. Giovanni Gambarin, Edizione nazionale (1972), VI, pp. 4–5. 183. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, p. 199. 184. Foscolo, Epistolario, VII, pp. 255, 273. 185. Foscolo, Secondo articolo, p. 102.

200 Notes 186. Foscolo, Secondo articolo, p. 110. 187. Foscolo, Secondo articolo, p. 118. 188. For Foscolo’s statement on the possibility for the Italian language to acquire the cadence of the Greek, in Epoche della lingua italiana, see Saggi di Letteratura Italiana, ed. Cesare Foligno, Edizione nazionale (1958), XI, p. 214. For his translations see Foscolo, Esperimenti di traduzione dell’Iliade, Edizione nazionale, III, ed. Gennaro Barbarisi, 3 vols (1967). 189. Foscolo, ‘Sulla traduzione dell’Odissea’, Esperimenti di traduzione dell’ lliade, I, p. 205. 190. Foscolo, Essays on Petrarch, Edizione nazionale, X, ed. Cesare Foligno (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1953), pp. 109–38. 191. Foscolo, Essays on Petrarch, p. 114. 192. Foscolo, ‘Guido Cavalcanti’, Edizione nazionale, X, p. 425. 193. Henry Francis Cary, The London Magazine 7 (1823), pp. 562–564 (pp. 563–4). 194. Mario Fubini, Romanticismo italiano, 2nd edition (Bari: Laterza, 1973), p. 17. 195. Conciliatore, 70 (1819), reprinted and ed. Vittore Branca, 3 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1948, 1953–54), vol. II, p. 519. 196. John Taaffe, A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (London: Murray, 1822); London Magazine, 7 (1823), pp. 317–24, 396–404. 197. See Taaffe’s letter of 25 February 1825, C.L. Cline, Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle (London: Murray, 1952), pp. 219–20; Antologia, 7 (1822), pp. 103–4. 198. Monthly Review, 102 (1823), pp. 225–42. A note of praise accompanied by an informative footnote on Taaffe’s Comment appeared also in Liberal, 1 (1822), p. 111. 199. Compared to similar other Italian ventures the journal stands out for its moderate character: it is not rare to find articles of literary opponents of Romanticism such as Mario Pieri and Urbano Lampredi. 200. Antologia 7, p. 103. 201. ‘l’opera inglese ci è sembrata giudiziosa’. Antologia 7, p. 104. 202. A. Benci, Discorso intorno alla Cantica di Dante; Elogio di Giulio Perticari, Antologia, 7 (1822), pp. 105–29, 130–46. 203. Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, IV, p. 214. 204. Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, IV, pp. 226–7; II. 136–9, 142–5. 205. Like Ugo Foscolo, Gabriele Rossetti and Antonio Panizzi, many Italian refugees succeeded in earning their living as authors. Among the second wave of Italian exiles of particular interest are the brothers Agostino and Giovanni Ruffini, who had accompanied Giuseppe Mazzini into his exile in Switzerland and in England. They contributed to an increase in English interest in the Italian revolutions. See Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940). 206. John Taaffe Jr, A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (London, Murray: 1822), pp. xix–xx. 207. Taaffe, A Comment, p. xxi. 208. London Magazine, 7, p. 319. 209. ‘I cannot but object to the very title, Vision, instead of that chosen by the author.’ A Comment, p. xxvi. Cary stubbornly defends his choice quoting the different titles given to Dante’s poem, such as ‘Capitola’, ‘Terze Rime’,

Notes 201

210.

211. 212. 213. 214.

215. 216.

217.

‘Rime’, ‘Lo Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso’, ‘Commedia, or Comedia’, ‘Visione’. London Magazine 7, p. 320. In his notes on Inferno II, he writes: ‘Mr Cary calls the “three maids” Divine Mercy, Lucia, and Beatrice; an odd jumble of fact and allegory’. A Comment, pp. xxix–xxx. A Comment, p. xxvii. Dante: the Divine Comedy: the Vision of Dante, trans. Henry F. Cary, ed. Ralph Pite, Everyman (London: Dent, 1994), p. xxiii. London Magazine, 7, p. 317. Taaffe’s chief merit is stated to consist ‘chiefly in this light, as a general comment on the more obscure portions of the Divina Commedia’. The reviewer welcomes two of Taaffe’s most original views: the identification of the three beasts of Inferno, I with Florence, the King of France and Boniface VIII, and his interpretation of Dante’s nonsensical line ‘Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!’ (Inferno, VII, 1) as a Hebrew quotation. Monthly Review, 102, pp. 227, 229. See Cline, Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle. In fact Rossetti and Taaffe shared the same sources, such as Paolo Costa’s commentary of the Divine Comedy. See La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri con Comento Analitico di Gabriele Rossetti, 2 vols (London, Murray, 1826); La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri con le note di Paolo Costa e gli argomenti dell’ Ab. G. Borghi, 3 vols (Bologna, 1826). See also Edoardo Crisafulli, ‘Anticlericalismo ed esoterismo dantesco: la fortuna di Rossetti in Inghilterrae alcune osservazioni sull’ermeneutica di Umberto Eco’, in Sotto il Velame, 2 (Special issue: Temi e Interpretazioni dell’esoterismo dantesco), pp. 47–87. He thus states his intention to understand Dante ‘as a man of science, a politician, and a theologian’, and explains Dante’s orthodoxy: ‘The dogmas of Dante’s Church did not prescribe any order for the placing of his personages either in Paradise, or in Hell; but equally prohibited his representing them in either.’ A Comment, xii, pp. 227–8.

4. ‘L’ amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’: Shelley on Dante and love 1. See Charles S. Singleton, ‘Journey to Beatrice’, Dante Studies, 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 5, 9. As Singleton points out, the phrase can also be ‘Itinerarium mentis in deum’ on the basis of St Bonaventura’s treatise bearing this title. See St. Bonaventurae, s. r. e. , episc. card., Itinerarium mentis in Deum, in Opera Omina, ed. PP. collegii a S. Bonaventura, 10 vols (Quaracchi, Florence: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), V, pp. 293–316. 2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin text, English translation, introduction and notes, ed. David Brooke and Arthur Littledale, 61 vols (London and New York: Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill, 1964–80), XXIX, 1a2ae.101, a. 2 resp. 3. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, p. 10. 4. References to the Defence of Poetry are to the second Norton edition: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, second edition, selected and edited by Donald H.

202 Notes

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: Norton, 2002), henceforth abbreviated as Norton Shelley. Here, Norton Shelley, p. 525. The facsimile edition edited by Michael O’ Neill has also been consulted: The Defence of Poetry Fair Copies: a Facsimile of Bodleian MSS. Shelley e. 6 and adds. d. 8, edited by Michael O’ Neill, the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, XX (New York and London, 1994). References to the earlier poems of Shelley are to the Longman edition, The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (London: Longman, 1989, 2000), vol. 2. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) has been consulted as well. For Shelley’s prose works the two following editions have also been consulted: The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E.B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), vol. I; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernest Benn, 1926–30). References to other editions will be specified in the notes. Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: the Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) and The Supplement of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Karen A. Weisman, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). See, for instance, Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: the Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Michael O’ Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Shelley’s Poetry: the Divided Self (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 92. Norton Shelley, p. 512. Norton Shelley, p. 513. Ibid. Ibid. Norton Shelley, p. 526. Ibid. Norton Shelley, p. 525. Norton Shelley, p. 527. Corrado Zacchetti, Shelley e Dante (Milano: Sandron, 1922), p. 158. Thomas Medwin, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (1847), ed. Harry Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 178–9. Norton Shelley, p. 514. Norton Shelley, pp. 517–18. Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), II, p. 8. Henceforth abbreviated as Letters. Shelley, Letters, II, p. 114. Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 8; see Shelley’s Pisan Winter Notebook: a Facsimile of Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. 8, ed. Carlene A. Adamson, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI (1992), 167r, 168r; Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, ed. P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, XIV (1993), pp. 337–41.

Notes 203 23. Mary Shelley requested that Mrs Gisborne buy an edition of the Bible with the Apocrypha. The edition was received in February and Shelley read from it Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Ecclesiasticus. See Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennet, 3 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–88), II, pp. 128–9. All subsequent references are to this edition. 24. Robert A. Hartley, ‘Shelley’s Copy of Dante’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), pp. 22–9. 25. Shelley, Letters, I, p. 575. 26. Shelley, Letters, I, p. 586. 27. The notebook of spring 1817, Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 14. Drafts for Laon and Cythna, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts XIII (1992), 38r. 28. Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), p. 244. 29. Donald H. Reiman ed., Shelley and his Circle, 8 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961–86), V, p. 344. 30. Reiman, Shelley and his Circle, V, p. 397. 31. La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, Tratta da quella che pubblicarono gli Accademici della Crusca l’Anno 1595 col comento del M.R.P. Pompeo Venturi, 3 vols (Venezia: Giambattista Pasquali, 1793). 32. Reiman, Shelley and his Circle, V, p. 344 n. 33. Purgatorio, xx, 43–5, 49–54, 94–6; Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 9; Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook, p. 259 [transcription of pp. 364 and 365]. For the dating of the manuscript see the introduction, especially p. xxii. According to the editors the lines may have been written while he was working on ‘On the Devil, and Devils’. 34. Pite, Circle of our Vision, p. 168n. 35. Mary Shelley, Letters, III, p. 160; Shelley, Letters, II, p. 112. 36. Drafts for Laon and Cythna, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, XIII, 38r. 37. Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry, p. 64. 38. Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and the Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 112. 39. Shelley, Letters, I, p. 563. 40. The Poems of Shelley, II, p. 258. All further references to the poem are from this edition. 41. Here Cary is close to Dante’s text, but prefers to insert the noun ‘air’ and use serene as an adjective: ‘Vapori accesi non vid’io sì tosto / di prima notte mai fender sereno, / né, sol calando, nuvole d’agosto / che color non tornasser suso in meno;’ (Purgatorio, V, 37–40) 42. Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 109–13. 43. Ancient Mariner, iii, 139–200, Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Dent, 1993); Ahrimanes, I, iii, The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. F.B. Brettsmith and C.E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1924–36). 44. The Poems of Shelley, II, p. 69 n 262. 45. I have discussed this aspect of Dante’s approach to language in a forthcoming article, ‘Dante and Translation: Untranslatability as Metaphor in Dante’s Works’, in Language and Style in Dante, ed. C.O. Cuilleain and M. Zaccarello, to be published by Four Courts Press, Dublin.

204 Notes 46. Laon and Cythna, LIV and LV and Paradiso, XXX–XXXI. As in Dante’s Paradiso, the narrator calls the pilgrim’s attention to one of the thrones that is empty. 47. ‘The first, two glittering lights were seen to glide / In circles on the amethystine floor, / Small serpent eyes tralling from side to side, / Like meteors on a river’s grassy shore, / They round each other rolled, dilating more / and more’. Laon and Cythna, LVI. Examples of Dante’s use of the same device recur in most cantos of Paradiso. 48. See Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, translated by James Scully and C.J. Herington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 144–9. 49. Fred L. Milne studied Shelley’s later use of ice imagery in The Cenci and its connection with Dante’s frozen lake of Cocitus in the last two cantos of the Inferno. Fred L. Milne, ‘Shelley’s The Cenci: the Ice Motif and the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Hell’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 22 (1977), pp. 117–32. 50. Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 3. 51. Oscar Kuhns, Dante and the English Poets (London: Bell, 1904), p. 188. 52. Stuart Peterfreund, Shelley among Others: the Play of the Intertextual and the Idea of Language (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 225–7. 53. Stuart Peterfreund, Shelley among Others, p. 229. 54. Shelley, Letters, II, pp. 262–3. 55. Shelley, Letters, II, p. 363. 56. Shelley writes: ‘The “Epipsychidion” I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. If you are anxious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof.’ Shelley, Letters, II, p. 434. 57. Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 12 Tatsuo Tokoo, ‘The Composition of Epipsychidion: Some Manuscript Evidence’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 42 (1993), pp. 97–103. 58. Tokoo, ‘The Composition of Epipsychidion’, p. 103. Tokoo supports the findings of Carlene A. Adamson, who believes that the MS adds e. 8 was, in fact, the main one in use by Shelley in alternation with MS adds e.12. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI, p. 16. 59. In Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 8. Shelley most probably wrote the introduction when the work was almost complete. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI, p. 16. 60. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI, p. 16. 61. See Kuhns, Dante and the English Poets, p. 186. 62. Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 8. This happens, for instance, in Inferno, XX, 19; XXXIV, 21; Purgatorio, VIII, 19; IX, 70; XVII 1; Paradiso, XXI, 106. 63. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula Friedman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), I, pp. 351–3. 64. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI, 167rev; 168rev. 65. Shelley copied part of Dante’s song Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, as well as part of the following commentary, adding brief notes of his own. He further copied a brief passage from Convivio, Book III in which Dante

Notes 205

66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

defines love as ‘nothing other than a spiritual union between the soul and the thing loved’. Dante, The Banquet, trans. by Christopher Ryan (Saratoga, Ca.: ANMA libri, 1989), p. 81. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, VI, 167rev–68rev. The Norton Shelley, p. 392. See Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1886), II, pp. 373–7; The Manuscripts of the Younger Shelley, II, ed. D. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 11. Cited in Francesco Rognoni, Shelley; Opere (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1995), p. 1610. That the metaphor was created by Pacchiani is reported by Dowden, The Life of Shelley, II, p. 369. Dante mentions the Seraphim in Paradiso, XXVIII and he similarly associates them with the ‘first circles’ [cerchi primi] (Paradiso, XXVIII, 98). See also Inferno, V, 100, which Cary’s translates as: ‘Love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt’ (The Vision, Hell, V: 99). See The Vision, Paradise, IV, 40–3: ‘Thus needs, that ye may apprehend, we speak: / Since from things sensible alone ye learn / That, which, digested rightly, after turns / To intellectual.’ Vita Nuova, ed. Michele Barbi, edizione nazionale delle opere di Dante Alighieri (Firenze: Bemporad, 1932); the translation is from Vita Nuova, translated with an introduction by Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The Authorized Version of the English Bible 1611, ed. William Aldis, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), III, viii: 1–2. Richard E., Brown, ‘The Role of Dante in Epipsychidion’, Comparative Literature, 30 (1978), p. 227. See Paradiso, XXVIII, 124–5. See Paradiso, XXV, 106. Cary translates it as ‘effulgence’. Earl Schulze, ‘The Dantean Quest of Epipsychidion’, Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), pp. 191–216 (p. 199). See Joseph Raben, ‘Milton’s Influence on Shelley’s Translation of Dante’s “Matilda Gathering Flowers”’, Review of English Studies, n. s. 14 (1963), pp. 142–56 (p. 156); Bradley, A.C., ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, Modern Language Review, 9 (1914), pp. 441–56 (pp. 442–3). In Canto VII Virgil tells Dante that he lost the sight of ‘l’alto Sol che tu disiri’ (26) [the high sun which you aspire to], and in Canto XIII he addresses the sun to ask for guidance (Purgatorio, XII, 16–21). See Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: a Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 15. Peterfreund, Shelley and the Others, p. 59. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: a Critical Study. All references to the poem are to this edition. The verb occurs in the same musical context at line 276. For Shelley’s increasing fondness for the verb, see Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, p. 451. Shelley undertook the translation in early 1822. The text, edited both by de Palacio in 1962 and by Webb in 1976, has recently been fully transcribed by Carlene E. Adamson. Jean de Palacio, ‘Shelley traducteur de Dante. Le Chant XXVIII du Purgatoire’, Revue de littérature comparée, 36 (1962), pp. 571–8; Webb, The Violet in the

206 Notes

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

Crucible, pp. 313–14; The Witch of Atlas Notebook: a Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e.6, edited by Carlene A. Adamson, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts V (New York: Garland, 1997). For the influence of Cary on Shelley’s translation see also Antonella Braida, ‘Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision; its Literary Context and its Influence’ (Oxford: unpublished D Phil, 1997), pp. 165–70. All editors underscore the divergence of the version included in Shelley MS adds e. 6 from the version published by Medwin in The Angler in Wales in 1834 and in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and from the version published by Garnett in Relics of Shelley. See Thomas Medwin, The Angler in Wales; or Days and Nights of Sportsmen, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1834), II, pp. 219–20; Garnett ed., Relics of Shelley, pp. 56–8. Pite, Circle of our Vision, pp. 168–9. Peter Vassallo, ‘From Petrarch to Dante: the Discourse of Disenchantment in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 1 (1991), pp. 102–110 (pp. 105–6). Shelley, Letters, II, p. 339. Pite, Circle of our Vision, p. 182. See Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, pp. 442–3; Folliot, Shelley’s Italian Sunset, pp. 91v9; Alan M. Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 234. See Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, p. 443; Folliot, Shelley’s Italian Sunset, p. 92; Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience, p. 235; Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, pp. 265–75; P.H. Butter, ‘Sun and Shape in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life’, Review of English Studies, 14 (1963), pp. 40–50; Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’, pp. 62–6; Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 31. The Poems of Shelley, II, p. 172. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 441–2. Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), p. 223. Schulze, ‘The Dantean Quest of Epipsychidion’, pp. 199–204. Pite, Circle of our Vision, p. 165n. Peterfreund, Shelley and the Others, p. 26. Rajan defines Romantic poetry as ‘a literature involved in the restless process of self-examination, and in search of a model of discourse which accommodates rather than simplifies its ambivalence towards the inherited equation of art with idealization’. Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: the Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 25. See n. 82. Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 310. According to Medwin, Shelley used to say ‘that reading Dante produced in him despair’. Medwin, Life, p. 249. Thomas Jefferson Hogg writes extensively on his and Shelley’s progress in the study of Italian. After Tasso, they read Ariosto, whom Shelley found ‘a novelty, altogether new in matter and manner, in substance and in language’. Shelley then resumed his Italian studies at Bracknell, in the company of Mrs Cornelia Turner. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy

Notes 207

100. 101.

102. 103.

Bysshe Shelley, 4 vols (London: Moxon, 1858), II, pp. 376, 380–1; Shelley, Letters, I, pp. 383–4. See also Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols (London: Secker and Warburg, 1947), II, p. 327. Shelley translated Dante’s Sonnet IX and Cavalcanti’s reply S’io fossi quello che d’amor fu degno. The first poem was published by Shelley in the Alastor volume, while the second was first published by Forman in his edition of Shelley’s works. See The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry B. Forman, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1876–77), I, pp. 57–8. See J.L. Bradley, A Shelley Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 56. Further evidence for more precise dating may be found in each work’s relationship to Epipsychidion; the complex compositional history of the poem, the drafts for which can be found in six different notebooks, accounts for the difficulty of establishing a more accurate dating. For a discussion of Shelley’s knowledge of Italian see Antonella Braida, ‘Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision: its Literary Context and its Influence’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1997, pp. 148–61. As he stated in the fragment ‘On Love’, ‘What is Love? Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God’. Norton Shelley, p. 503. ‘A Defence of Poetry’, Norton Shelley, p. 525.

5. John Keats and Dante: speaking the gods’ language 1. Giorgio Padoan, Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), p. 7 [My translation]. 2. Padoan, Il pio Enea, p. 19. 3. Keats’s interpretation of Dante’s classical references has recently been discussed by Nick Havely in ‘“A Wreck of Paradise”: Epipsychidion and Dante’s Ulysses’, in Shelley e l’Italia, ed. L.M. Crisafulli and A. Goldoni (Naples: Liguori, 1997). As Havely points out, Leigh Hunt’s article on Dante’s Homer proves that by 1819 Keats knew that Dante could not read Greek. See Leigh Hunt, ‘More News of Ulysses’, The Indicator, 1 (8 December 1819), pp. 65–6. 4. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), I, p. 294. 5. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence; Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), pp. 95–134. 6. Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. Medwin, The Life of Shelley (1913), pp. 178–9. 8. The Letters of John Keats, I, p. 194. According to Hyder Edward Rollins, Keats probably heard about Shelley’s difficulties from Godwin, whom he met on 25 December. 9. Keats writes: ‘I have not yet read Shelly’s poem – I don’t suppose you have it at the Teignmouth Libraries’. The Letters of John Keats, p. 237. 10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1995 edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 11. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 55. All subsequent references to Keats’s poems are to this edition, unless otherwise stated.

208 Notes 12. See especially The Novel’s Seductions: Staël’s Corinne in Critical Inquiry, ed. Karyna Szmurlo (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999). See also Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 13. A sonnet dedicated to Cowden Clarke dated September 1816 in 1817, indicates that Keats had discussed, if not read, Tasso’s poetry with him. Keats pays homage to Charles Cowden Clarke’s knowledge of Tasso: ‘small good it were / To take him to a desert rude, and bare, / Who had on Baiæ’ shore reclin’d at ease, / While Tasso’s page was floating in a breeze / That gave soft music from Armida’s bowers, / Mingled with fragrance from her rarest flowers’ (27–32). Keats, Poems, pp. 60–1. See also Keats’s letter to B.R. Haydon of 8 April 1818, to John Taylor of 5 September 1819 and Keats to George and Georgiana Keats of 21 September 1819. Keats, Letters, I, p. 265, II, pp. 157, 212. 14. Keats, Letters, I, p. 155. 15. He must have read the poem soon after its publication in February 1816 since his poem ‘Specimen of an Induction to a Poem’ is clearly influenced by it. Keats, Poems, pp. 47–49, 549n; The Poems of John Keats, ed. De Selincourt (London: Methuen, 1905), p. 391n. 16. The Story of Rimini, III, 606; Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H.S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), pp. 1–33. 17. See Byron, Letters and Journals, VI, p. 45. 18. Proof of Keats’s reading of Cary’s The Inferno is an article he wrote for The Champion on 21 December 1817; here he quotes from The Inferno and compares Edmund Kean to Dante’s Saladin: ‘And sole apart retir’d, the Soldan fierce’. Forman published Keats’s notes for the article. ‘On Edmund Kean as a Shakespearian Actor’, Keats, Works, ed. Forman, III, pp. 3–6 (p. 5). A copy of Cary’s 1805 The Inferno was found in Keats’s ‘Chest of Books’ after his death, as mentioned by Charles Armitage Brown. This copy, now lost, may have been the source of Keats’s quotation. John Saly quotes Lord Houghton’s statement in his Life and Letters of Keats that ‘the family of George Keats in America possess a Dante covered with his brother’s marginal notes and observations’. John Saly, ‘Keats’s Answer to Dante: The Fall of Hyperion’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 14 (1965), pp. 65–78 (p. 65n). Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Keats Circle, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), I, pp. 253–60. 19. He acquired his copy in June 1818. See Robert Gittings, The Mask of Keats (London: Heinemann, 1956), p. 7. He then expresses to Bailey his intention of bringing ‘those minute volumes of carey[sic]’ on the Scottish tour’. Keats, Letters, I, p. 294. 20. Keats, Letters, I, p. 294. 21. Keats, Letters, I, p. 296. 22. Keats, Letters, I, p. 343. 23. The sonnet was composed in April 1819. 24. Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism, pp. 304–5. 25. See Gittings, The Mask of Keats, pp. 5–44. 26. Saly, ‘Keats’s Answer to Dante’, p. 66. 27. Keats, Letters, I, p. 361.

Notes 209 28. R.S. White, for instance, uses Keats’s statement when assessing his annotations of Shakespeare. R.S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: the Athlone Press, 1987). Ralph Pite finds a similarity between Keats’s annotations to Paradise Lost and those to The Vision. See Pite, Circle of our Vision, pp. 119–60. 29. Keats, Letters, II, p. 167. 30. Gittings, Appendix A. Keats’s copy of The Vision is in a private collection. 31. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 553. See also Gittings, The Mask of Keats, p. 10. Gittings dates it to approximately August 1819. 32. See, The Vision, Hell, XIV, 89–8. ‘“In midst of ocean,” forthwith he began, / “A desolate country lies, which Crete is named; / Under whose monarch, in old times, the world / Lived pure and chaste. A mountain rises there, / Call’d Ida joyous once with leaves and streams, / Deserted now like a forbidden thing. / It was the spot which Rhea, Saturn’s spouse, / Chose for the secret cradle of her son; / And better to conceal him, drown’d in shouts / His infant cries”.’ 33. Fra Pomey, The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods and Most Illustrious Heroes in a Short, Plain and Familiar Method, by Way of Dialogue, revised trans. by Andrew Tooke (London: Charles Harper, 1713); J. Lemprière, Bibliotheca Classica, or a Classical Dictionary (London: Cadell, 1792). 34. Saly, ‘Keats’s Answer to Dante’, pp. 65–78; Robert Bridges, John Keats: a Critical Essay (privately printed, 1895), pp. 40–1; J. Livingston Lowes, ‘Hyperion and the Purgatorio’, Times Literary Supplement (11 January 1936), p. 35; Dorothy Hewlett, Adonais: a Life of John Keats (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1937), p. 310. 35. Keats, Letters, II, p. 157. 36. Keats, Letters, II, p. 212. 37. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (21 January 1835) (London: Charles Knight), II, p. 17. 38. Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy: or Sections from the English Poets, Illustrative of those first Requisite of Their Art (London: Smith, 1894), pp. 331–2. 39. See Greg Kucich’s interpretation in ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition and the Politics of Historiographical Invention’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 40. Cary uses ‘serene’ in Hell, IV, 156 and Heaven, XIX, 60–1. An equally influential precedent is offered by Coleridge’s Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni, 72. John Livingston Lowes opted for the latter echo on the basis of Keats’s interest in Coleridge revealed by the 1817 letters. However, as discussed above, Keats knew Cary’s The Inferno, or even possessed a copy of it, by the end of 1817. Both Cary’s and Coleridge’s usage therefore are possible sources for Keats. 41. Lowes, ‘Hyperion and the Purgatorio’, p. 35. 42. Kenneth Muir, ‘The Meaning of “Hyperion”’, in John Keats: a Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), p. 111; Stuart M. Sperry, ‘Keats, Milton and The Fall of Hyperion’, PMLA, 77 (1982), pp. 77–84.

210 Notes 43. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 424. 44. Lowes, ‘Hyperion and the Purgatorio’. 45. Gittings, The Mask of Keats. 46. Saly, ‘Keats’s Answer to Dante: The Fall of Hyperion’, p. 69. 47. Pite, Circle of our Vision, p. 129. 48. Keats, Poems, p. 638. 49. Keats, Letters, I, p. 207. 50. Endymion (1818): a Facsimile of Woodhouse Annotated Copy in the Berg Collection, ed. Jack Stillinger, The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics (New York and London: Garland, 1985), pp. 399, 441n. 51. Keats, Poems, p. 103. 52. For an in-depth discussion of the topic, see M.L. West, Theogony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); also, The Iliad: a Commentary, ed. G.S. Kirk, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), note to 1, 403 ff, p. 94 ff.; vol. 5: ed. Mark W. Edwards (1991), note to 20, 73 ff, p. 297. 53. Dante offered two contradictory solutions to the question of pre-Babelic speech: in the De Vulgari Eloquentia he states that Adam and his descendants spoke Hebrew, while in Paradiso, XXVI Adam himself reveals to Dante that the language he spoke had disappeared before the construction of the Tower of Babel. 54. Cary reproduces Dante’s nonsensical line. 55. Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, p. 554. 56. See Gittings, The Mask of Keats, pp. 20–1. See also The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 397n. 57. See Gittings, The Mask of Keats, pp. 25–6. 58. For the influence of Egyptian statuary on Hyperion, see Helen Darbishire, ‘Keats and Egypt’, The Review of English Studies, 3 (1927), pp. 1–11. 59. Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, p. 559. 60. Hazlitt, ‘On Milton’s Versification’, Works, IV, pp. 38–9. 61. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 259–60. As far as we know Keats missed one lecture: ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’, delivered on 20 January. 62. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 17. 63. Hazlitt, Works, V, p. 66. 64. Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, p. 556. 65. Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, p. 559. 66. The Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), I, pp. 639–41; Coleridge, Poems, p. 199. 67. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 391. 68. Keats, Letters, II, p. 212. 69. Keats, Letters, I, pp. 278–9. 70. Keats, Letters, I, p. 282. 71. Keats, Letters, I, p. 387. 72. Ibid. 73. Keats, Letters, II, p. 102. 74. Keats, Letters, II, p. 116. 75. ‘in sogno mi parea veder sospesa’ (Purgatorio, IX: 19) [in dream I thought I was seeing poised].

Notes 211 76. Cary typically adapts the Italian form ‘cornice’. The Vision, Purgatorio, X, 24; XI, 23; XVII, 129. He uses, instead, ‘circuit’ in XIII, 3. 77. Lowes, ‘“Hyperion” and “The Purgatorio”’, p. 35.

6. William Blake: the Romantic illustrator of Dante 1. Despite Blake’s religious eclecticism an interesting similarity can also be found between the later Trinitarianism of Jerusalem and the Everlasting Gospel and Dante’s Catholicism. According to Gilchrist, in his later years Blake expressed some form of admiration for the Catholic religion: ‘He had a sentimental liking for the Romish Church’. G.E. Bentley, Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 42. 2. Albert S. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 32–3; Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 257. All references to Dante plates for the Divine Comedy are from Milton Klonsky’s edition with commentary Blake’s Dante: the Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980). 3. For Dante’s political views, see Dante and Governance, ed. John Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Cecil, Grayson, The World of Dante and his Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Rachel, Jacoff, The Cambridge Companion to Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. Irene Tayler, Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 7. 5. Blake’s friendship with Flaxman dates from about 1778, while he befriended Fuseli recently returned from Italy, in 1780. 6. Public Address, p. 51 in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), p. 572. All subsequent references to Blake’s poetry will be to this edition unless otherwise stated. Hereafter cited as Blake’s Poetry and Prose. 7. See David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), Plate 128. 8. See Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), II, plates 207r; 208 and 207v. 9. See Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s Grave of 1808. Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ Illustrated by William Blake: a Study with a Facsimile (London: Scolar Pess, 1982). When he was illustrating the Divine Comedy Blake reworked the composition, inserting two angels hovering above Ugolino in a triangular composition. Ugolino with His Sons and Grandsons in Prison (1827) is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 10. ‘Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. And from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number. But when he has done this, let him not

212 Notes

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 21) Tinkler-Villani finds an analogy between Dante’s method and Blake’s: ‘The “infernal” method which Blake uses for his engravings he also uses to compose his poetry: his acid, apocalyptic words seem destructive, but finally bring revelation … Dante’s technique is indeed similar to Blake’s. Dante’s reader is made to react to the protagonist, following the guiding voice of the poet.’ Visions of Dante, pp. 249–50. The statuary posture of the group makes Ugolino and his children a symbol of the oppression quite divorced from Dante’s text. William Blake’s ‘Heads of the Poets’ for Turret House, the Residence of William Hayley, Felpham (Manchester: William Morris Press, 1969). Blake’s Poetry and Prose, pp. 633. Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante, p. 252. Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 633. Ibid. Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 634. Ibid. Cited in Blake Records, 42. Poesie e Carmi, ed. Francesco Pagliai et al., Edizione nationale, I (1985), lines 173–4. Dante’s republicanism has been approached by Hollander and Rossi and by Peter Armour. Their articles refer extensively to Charles T. Davis’s contribution to the subject in Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984) and in Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). Peter Armour, ‘Dante and Popular Sovereignty’; in Woodhouse, ed., Dante and Governance, pp. 27–45; Robert Hollander and Albert Rossi, ‘Il repubblicanesimo di Dante’, in Cecyl Grayson, ed., The World of Dante, pp. 297–322. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13 (1823), pp. 141–57 (p. 154). A third reference to the illustrations records the meeting between Blake and the German painter Götzenberger on 2 February 1827. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, pp. 344–5. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, plate 7, p. 138. ‘But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!’ Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 5, in Blake’s Poetry and Prose, pp. 34–5. See also Damon, A Blake Dictionary, pp. 186–7. In On Virgil (c. 1821) Blake had condemned Roman and Greek poetry for their appraisal of war; ‘Homer Virgil & Ovid confirm this opinion and make us reverence The Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War. Virgil in the Eneid Book VI. line 848, says Let others study Art: Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War & Dominion.’ Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 270. The passage occurs after Robinson’s entry for 10 December 1825. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 326. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 326. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, for instance, Blake includes ‘those who were not in the Line of the Church and yet were Saved from among the

Notes 213

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

Antediluvians who Perished’. Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 560. He similarly rejects the notion of a Last Judgement as such; in the notebook entry just quoted he further states that ‘Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’. Ibid. For Blake’s evolving theology, see also Thomas J. Altizer, The New Apocaplypse (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 1967). Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 327. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 329. Robinson, Reminiscences, cited in Blake’s Records, ed. G.E. Bentley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 544. In On Books and their Writers Robinson writes the following account: ‘as he spoke of Milton’s appearing to him I asked whether he resembled the prints of him. He answered: “All!” “Of what age did he appear to be?” “Various ages; sometimes a very old man”.’ Robinson, I, p. 330. Pamela Dunbar, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), Plate 78 and p. 161. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 330. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 327. Robinson, On Books and their Writers, I, p. 329. ‘There, not inactive, though sixty-seven years old, but hard-working on a bed covered with books sat he up like one of the Antique patriarchs, or a dying Michael Angelo. Thus and there was he making in the leaves of a great book (folio) the sublimest designs from his (not superior) Dante!’ The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer Painter and Etcher, ed. A.H. Palmer (London: Eric and Joan Stephens, 1892; facsimile reprint 1972), pp. 9–10. Klonsky correlates Linnell’s gift of a folio of Dutch watercolour paper with the ‘great book (folio)’ mentioned by Palmer. He further suggests that Blake might have begun the illustrations even before the agreement with Linnell. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, 7n. Edwin Wolf Jr, ‘The Blake-Linnell Accounts in the Library of Yale University’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37 (1943), pp. 1–22; Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 212. Alfred T. Story, The Life of John Linnell, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1892), I, pp. 230–1. Edwin J. Ellis, The Real Blake (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907), p. 410. John Linnell Jr. gives ‘the latter end of 1825’ as the beginning of the payments to Blake. Roe, however, suggests that payments did not start until the engravings were begun. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, 5n. According to John Linnell Jr, Blake received £103.5s. 6d. See Ellis, The Real Blake, p. 410. On the controversy between Mrs Blake and John Linnell over the payment, see Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of William Blake (New York: The Grolier Club, 1921), pp. 182–5; 221–9, and Linnell’s Journal for 27 January 1829, cited in G.E. Bentley Jr, Blake Records Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 110. Keynes, A Bibliography of William Blake, p. 182. The frontispiece reproduced by Keynes further says: ‘Seven Plates, designed and engraved by W. Blake, Author of “Illustrations of the Book of Job” andc., andc. Price £2.2s. India Paper’. The seven quotations from Cary each consist of two lines from the translation.

214 Notes 42. Blake, The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 149. 43. Blake, Letters, pp. 160–1, 166, 170. 44. Ibid. 45. William Blake; The Illustrator of the Grave, andc., The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, sciences, andc., 552 (August 12, 1827), pp. 540–1. 46. These were issued in 1551, 1554, 1564, 1571, 1578 and 1596. See Bentley, Blake Records, p. 349. 47. Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante’, p. 135n. 48. The Letters of William Blake. Together with a Life by Frederick Tatham, ed. Archibald G.B. Russell (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. 32–3. 49. Bentley, Blake Records Supplement, pp. 124–5. 50. Bentley is of the same opinion. See Bentley, Blake Records, pp. 315n, 349n and Blake Records Supplement, p. 125. 51. Willian Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette till 1850, wrote that ‘William Carey was the chief contributor’ to the early numbers of the journal. The Autobiography of Willian Jerdan (London: Arthur Hall, 1852), II, p. 176. Bentley suggests that he was most probably in charge of the art sections of the journal. Blake Records, p. 350n. 52. Bentley, Blake Records, p. 350n. The articles are reprinted in Keynes, A Bibliography of William Blake, pp. 467–8. 53. Literary Gazette 552, p. 540. 54. Keynes, A Bibliography of William Blake, pp. 467–8. 55. The reviewer gives the previous Monday rather than Sunday as the day of Blake’s death; he further claims that Blake was 66 years old instead of 67. See Literary Gazette, 552, p. 541. The mistakes are pointed out by Bentley, Blake Records, p. 349n. 56. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist, ed. A.G. Doyle, 2 vols (Wakefield, Yorkshire: EP Publishing, 1973), I, p. 367. 57. King, The Translator of Dante, pp. 170–1. 58. Blake, Letters, p. 122. 59. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations. Milton Klonsky’s edition with commentary uses the same approach and is heavily indebted to Roe’s study. 60. Rodney M. Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante in a Different Light’, Dante Studies, 105 (1987), pp. 113–36; David Fuller, ‘Blake and Dante’, Art History, 11 (1988), pp. 349–73. 61. Fuller, ‘Blake and Dante’, p. 349. 62. Michael J. Tolley, ‘Words Standing in Chariots: the Literalism of Blake’s Imagination’, in Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1992), pp. 125–42 (p. 127). Stephen C. Behrendt has similarly revised the problem of the relationship between text and image in the illuminated books and concludes that ‘Blake’s illuminated poems generate what is essentially a “third text”, a meta-text that partakes of both the verbal and the visual texts, but that is neither the sum of, nor identical with, either of those texts.’ Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts’, in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1999), pp. 78–95 (p. 81).

Notes 215 63. Fuller, ‘Blake and Dante’, p. 353. 64. See Inferno, XVIII, 10–18; XXX, 25–7; XXVIII, 118–22. 65. Blake’s illustrations will be referred to according to Klonsky’s catalogue. Further reference to the plates that I have consulted will be found in the bibliography. 66. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, plate 28; Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 68. 67. See Edoardo Crisafulli, ‘Dante’s Puns in English and the Question of Compensation’, The Translator, 2 (1996), pp. 259–76. 68. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (1989), p. 376. 69. In Milton, Blake defines his concept of the ‘vortex’: ‘The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its / Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity / Has passd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind / His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: / Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty … / Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth / A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity.’ Milton, Plate 15 [17], 21–25, 34–35, Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 40. 70. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, p. 74. 71. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, p. 141. 72. ‘E già venìa su per le torbide onde / un fracasso d’un suon, pien di spavento, / per cui tremavano ambedue le sponde, / non altrimenti fatto che d’un vento / impetüoso per li avversi ardori, / che fier la selva senz’alcun rattento / li rami schianta, abbatte e porta fori; / dinanzi polveroso va superbo, / e fa fuggir le fiere e li pastori.’ (Inferno, IX, 64–72). 73. My definition of Dante’s simile is based on Richard H. Lansing, From Image to Idea: a Study of the Simile in Dante’s Commedia (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1977). 74. In Cary’s translation: ‘More than a thousand spirits / Destroyed, so saw I fleeing before one / Who passed with unwet feet the Stygian sound’ (The Vision, Hell, IX, 79–80) 75. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, plates 542 and 577. 76. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, plates 868 and 870. In his long letter to Ozias Humphry on the composition of The Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake explains the symbolism of the eyes: ‘The Four Living Creatures filled with Eyes attended by the Seven Angels with the Seven Vials of the Wrath of God and above these there are Seven Angels with the Seven Trumpets.’ Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, pp. 467–8. 77. Dunbar, Blake’s Milton, plate 77. 78. Ezekiel, I, 16. 79. Ezekiel, I, 20. 80. W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 137–8. 81. For Blake’s debt to the theatre, see especially Janet A. Warner, Blake and the Language of Art (Kingston and Montreal: McGill, Queen’s University Press, 1984). 82. For a fuller discussion of the identification, see A. Braida, ‘The Literalism of Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, pp. 96–7. 83. Andrew Wright, Blake’s Job: a Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), plate 11; Blake’s Milton, ed. Dunbar. Plate 87, the Satan of ‘Christ’s

216 Notes

84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

Troubled Dream’ similarly holds snakes hanging from his right arm, while lightning is unleashed from the left. As for the four women enclosed in the cloud, which separates the upper and lower part of the picture, in order to identify them one needs to disentangle the narrative structure of canto II. Dante has Virgil himself relating his mission to Dante by reporting Beatrice’s words: ‘In high heaven a blessed dame / Resides, who mourns with such effectual grief / That hindrance, which I send thee to remove, / That God’s stern judgment to her will inclines. / To Lucia calling, her she thus bespake: / ‘Now doth thy faithful servant need thy aid, / ‘And I commend him to thee’. At her word / Sped Lucia, of all cruelty the foe, / And coming to the place, where I abode / Seated with Rachel, her of ancient days’ (The Vision, Hell, II, 93–102). Blake’s flying females clearly illustrate the encounters related by Virgil. The narrative describes the exchange between the Virgin and St Lucy and St Lucy and Beatrice, while Rachel is described as sitting. I would be inclined to identify the two flying females with St Lucy at the right and the Virgin at the left, since the latter is shown descending from the higher realm of the false God thus illustrating the Virgin’s power to plead for mankind. Rachel is shown sitting at the loom under a vine and Beatrice is shown in the forefront in a posture that Blake consistently repeats in the illustrations to the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, p. 53. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, plate 3 and p. 137. ‘The Immortal stood frozen amidst / The vast rock of eternity; times; / And times; a night of vast durance: / Impatient, stifled, stiffend, hardned.’ The Book of Los, Chapter II, 1, Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 92. See Four Zoas, Plate 56, 19–20. ‘And first he found the Limit of Opacity and namd it Satan / in Albions bosom for in every human bosom these limits stand’. Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 337. Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, plate 22, p. 142. Dante descends on Dis’s ‘vellute coste’ [felty ribs]; Inferno, XXXIV, 73. The Vision, Purgatory, IX: 40–1. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, p. 140. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, p. 145n. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, plates 494, 894. See Baine, Blake’s Dante, p. 120. Blake uses the same figure to represent the Christian Church in The Vision of the Last Judgment. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, plate 642. See Purgatorio, XXIX, 121–9. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations, p. 168; Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, p. 159; TinklerVillani, Visions of Dante, p. 279. Fuller, ‘Blake and Dante’, p. 356; Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante’, p. 118. See Purgatorio, XXXI, 106–45. Blake writes ‘Pg Canto 29 and 30’, but his illustration refers to the following two cantos as well. Blake, Milton: a Poem, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, The Illuminated Books (1991). See, for instance Paradiso, II: ‘Beatrice upward gazed, and I on her; / And in such space as on the notch a dart / Is placed, then loosened flies, I saw

Notes 217

102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

myself / Arrived, where wondrous things engaged my sight’ (The Vision, Paradise, II, 23–6) Botticelli did, in fact, draw his designs for the Paradiso in the same way, by focusing on the two lovers’ final reunion. See Venturi Adolfo, Il Botticelli interprete di Dante (Florence: Le Monnier, 1922); Donati Lamberti, Il Botticelli e le prime illustrazioni della Divina Commedia (Florence: Olschki, 1962); and Jeremy Harding, Sandro Botticelli: the Drawings for Dante (London: Royal Academy, 2001). In canto XXV the spirits of St Peter and St James are compared to the wheels of the mechanism of a clock; see Paradiso, XXV, 103–8. Milton, Nativity Ode, 110–11, Poems, II, 113; Dunbar, Blake’s Milton, plates 55 and 56. Dunbar, Blake’s Milton, plates 72 and 75. Among other possible sources for Blake’s spheres are the woodcuts from the Sessa brothers’ edition of the Divine Comedy found in his possession at his death. The artist similarly enclosed the three saints in a halo of light. These, however, are grouped together, and the halo that surrounds them is not continuous. Dante con l’espositione di Cristoforo Landino, et di Alessandro Vellutello, … (Venice: Giovambattista, Marchiò Sessa, and fratelli, 1564), pp. 361, 364, 389. As Baine points out, the mystic Jacob Boehme wrote in his treatise on the Incarnation that Mary acts as ‘a Looking-Glass of the Holy Trinity’. Baine suggests as a source also Cary’s argument to Paradiso III: ‘Beatrice beholds, in the mirror of divine truth, some doubts which had entered the mind of Dante’ (III, 258). Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante’, p. 131. See Paradiso, XXXI, 70–90. Dunbar, Blake’s Milton, plates 25 and 26. See Dunbar, Blake’s Milton, plates 26, 33, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91; Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of Blake, pp. 316–72. Jerusalem, IV, plate 96, 23–8; Blake’s Poetry and Prose, p. 256.

Works Cited and Additional Bibliography Manuscripts British Library, Holland House Papers, adds MSS 52181, folios 106r–107v. Bodleian Library, Bodleian Shelley MS adds e. 6, folios 39–42. Bodleian Shelley MS adds c. 4, folder 11, folios 84–88. Bodleian Shelley MS adds c. 4, folder 28, folios 248–80.

Marginalia British Library, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Vision 1819.

Blake’s Dante plates British Museum, cat. Roe 21, 48, 50, 82, 87, 96, 72, 101, 38, 45, 68, 91, LB4311brv (Klonsky: 21, 22, 27, 40, 47, 51, 53, 71, 75, 85, 90, 93, 99). Ashmolean Museum: Klonsky 89, 96, 100. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery: Klonsky 3, 10, 44, 68, 84, 95. The Tate Gallery, London: Klonsky 2, 4, 8, 12, 14, 25, 36, 42, 46, 48, 50, 56, 61, 63, 73, 76, 81, 83, 91, 101.

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220 Works Cited and Additional Bibliography Blake, William, The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). ——, William Blake’s ‘Heads of the Poets’ for Turret House, the Residence of William Hayley, Felpham (Manchester: William Morris Press, 1969). Blake’s Dante: the Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, ed. Milton Klonsky (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980). ——, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn, by David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). ——, Jerusalem, ed. Morton D. Paley, The Illuminated Books, 6 vols (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1991–95) (1991). ——, Milton: a Poem, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, The Illuminated Books (1993). Bloom, Harold, Shelley’s Mythmaking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959). ——, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961). ——, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Bonaventurae, Saint, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, in Opera Omina, ed. PP. collegii a S. Bonaventura, 10 vols (Quaracchi, Florence: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902). Bone, Drummond, ‘On “Influence”, and on Byron’s and Shelley’s use of Terza Rima’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 32 (1981), 38–48. Bordes, Philippe, ‘Jacques-Louis David’s Anglophilia on the Eve of the French Revolution’, Burlington Magazine, 134 (August 1992), pp. 482–90. Boyd, Henry, A Translation of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri in English Verse with Historical Notes, and the Life of Dante, to Which is Added, A Specimen of a New Translation of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto (Dublin: Byrne, 1785). ——, Dante Alighieri: the Divina Commedia, translated into English verse, with preliminary essays, notes, and illustrations, 3 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802). Bradley, A.C., ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, Modern Language Review, 9 (1914), 441–56. Bradley, J.L., A Shelley Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1993). Braida, Antonella, ‘Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision: its Literary Context and its Influence’, Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997. ——, ‘The Literalism of Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, in Reflections of Word and Image from the Middle Ages to the Modernism, ed. Antonella Braida and Giuliana Pieri (Oxford: Legenda, EHRC, 1993), pp. 89–113. ——, ‘William Huggins’, New Dictionary of National Biography, forthcoming. Branchini, Charles, ‘Poet Father and Painter Son: the Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844) and his son Francis Stephen Cary’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n. s. 60 (1987), pp. 122–30. Brand, Charles Peter, Italy and the English Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). ——, ‘Ugo Foscolo and The Edinburgh Review: unpublished letters to Francis Jeffrey’, The Modern Language Review, 70 (1975), pp. 306–23. ——, ‘Ugo Foscolo e i periodici inglesi. I rapporti con Francis Jeffrey’, in Atti dei Convegni Foscoliani (1978–1979) (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1988) III, pp. 169–80.

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222 Works Cited and Additional Bibliography ——, ‘Ode ad Nympham Fontis’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 59 (1789), pt. I, p. 553. ——, ‘Obscure Versifiers of Psalms; The Merits of Dryden Particularly Investigated; In Rosam Epigrammata’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 59 (1789), pt. II, 618; pp. 682–3, 937. ——, ‘On the Comparative Merits of Pope and Dryden; Beauties of an Italian Sonnet’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790) pt. I, pp. 120–1, 523. ——, ‘Letter from Bernardo Tasso to his Daughter’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (1791), pt. I, pp. 125–6. ——, ‘On the Tomb of Rosamond; Chaucer’s Habitation’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (1792), pt. I, pp. 212, 532. ——, ‘A Remark of Winkelmann on Imagination Controverted; Remarks on the Picturesque Beauties of this Island’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (1792), pt. II, pp. 605–6,1190–1. ——, ‘Remarks on the Provençal Poetry: the Troubadours’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793), pt. I, pp. 520–2. ——, ‘Remarks on the Writing of some Provençal poets; Gerard de Borneil’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 63 (1793) pt. II, pp. 912–3, 1097–8. ——, ‘On Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” and his Dispute with Anna Seward’; ‘The Mountain Seat’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 64 (1794), pt. I, pp. 120, 161–2. ——, ‘Arabian Tales’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 64 (1794), pt. II, pp. 783–4. ——, ‘Skating’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 68 (1798), pt. II, p. 1013. ——, ‘Sermons IV, VIII, XII’, in Edward Pye Waters, Sermons on Various Subjects (Birmingham: Pearson, 1800), pp. 46–64, 129–42, 207–16. ——, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, 2 vols (London: Carpenter, 1805). ——, The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1814). ——, ‘Valentines’ [Four poems on the prefatory page] Gentleman’s Magazine, 88 (1818), pt. I. ——, ‘Poetical Imitation’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 88 (1818), pt. II, p. 415. ——, The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819). ——, ‘To Lord Eldon’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 90 (1820), pt. II, p. 554. ——, ‘On Gray’s Opinion of Collins, with a Sonnet from Costanzo’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 13–15. ——, ‘Zariadres and Odatis; a Grecian Story’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), p. 27. ——, ‘On Sadoleti’s Dialogue on Education, with a Poem from Fracastorio’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 180–3. ——, ‘Travels of Cosmo the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Through England, in 1669’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 156–60. ——, ‘Review – Méditations Poétiques, par M. Alphonse de Lamartine’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 277–8. ——, ‘Estephania de Gantehnes, a Tale of the Middle Ages’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 379–83. ——, ‘Song, Imitated from the Italian’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), p. 411. ——, ‘On the Songs of Thibaut, King of Navarre’, London Magazine, 4 (1821), pp. 472–5 [my attribution]. ——, ‘Specimen of a Translation from Valerius Flaccus’, London Magazine, 5 (1822), pp. 121–4. ——, ‘On the Early French Poets: Hugues Salel, and Oliver de Magni’, London Magazine, 5 (1822), p.p 157–60.

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224 Works Cited and Additional Bibliography ——, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 6 vols (New York: Princeton, 1957–89). ——, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rook, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1969). ——, The Watchman (25 March 1796), ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge, 1970). ——, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R.A Foakes, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987). ——, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1983). ——, Marginalia, ed. G. Whalley (London: Routledge, 1980). Collison-Morley, Lacy, Giuseppe Baretti; With an account of his Literary Friendships and Feuds in Italy and in England in the Days of Dr Johnson (London: Murray, 1909). Conciliatore, 70 (1819), reprinted and ed. Vittore Branca, 3 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1948, 1953–54). Cooksey, Thomas L., ‘Dante’s England: the Contribution of Cary, Coleridge and Foscolo to the British Reception of Dante’, Papers on Language and Literature, 20 (1984), pp. 355–6. Corrigan, Beatrice, ‘Foscolo’s Articles on Dante in the Edinburgh Review: a Study in Collaboration’, in Collected Essays on Italian Language and Literature Presented to Kathleen Speight, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), pp. 212–26 Costa, Paolo, La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri con le note di Paolo Costa e gli argomenti dell’ Ab. G. Borghi, 3 vols (Bologna, 1826). Cowper, William, The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, Translated into English Verse by William Cowper (London: Johnson, 1791). ——, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ry Skamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86). Crabbe, George, The Life and Poetical Works of George Crabbe by His Son (London: Murray, 1901). Crisafulli, Edoardo, ‘Dante’s Puns in English and the Question of Compensation’, The Translator, 2 (1996), pp. 259–76. ——, ‘Anticlericalismo ed esoterismo dantesco: la fortuna di Rossetti in Inghilterra e alcune osservazioni sull’ermeneutica di Umberto Eco’, Sotto il Velame, 2 (Special issue, 2001: Temi e Interpretazioni dell’esoterismo dantesco), pp. 47–87. ——The Vision of Dante (Market Harborough: Troubador Press, 2003). Crisafulli, L.M. and Goldoni, A. eds, Shelley e l’Italia (Napoli: Liguori, 1997). Critical Review, 37 (1803), pp. 241–9 (p. 245). Critical Review, 3rd series, 6 (1805), pp. 113–26. Critical Review, 4th series, 5 (1814), p. 647. Critical Review, 59 (1785), pp. 401–10. Critical Review, 2nd series, 4 (1792), pp. 560–9. Cumberland, Richard, The Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, ed. Richard J. Dircks (New York: AMS Press, 2002). Cunningham, Gilbert F., The Divine Comedy in English: a Critical Bibliography 1782–1900, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1965–66). Curran, Stuart, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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226 Works Cited and Additional Bibliography Ellis, Steve, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Erdman, David V., ed., The Illuminated Blake (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Essick, Robert N. and Paley, Morton D., Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ Illustrated by William Blake: a Study with a Facsimile (London: Scolar Press, 1982). Farinelli, Arturo, Dante in Spagna, Francia, Inghilterra, Germania (Torino: Bocca, 1922). Ferrante, Joan, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Flick, Adrian, ‘Dante in English Romanticism: Aspects of English Critics, Translators’ and Creative Artists’ Response to the Commedia (1782–1822) as it Helps to Define their Aims and Achievements’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1977). Fochi Caturegli, Anna, ‘Shelley interprete di Dante e Guido Cavalcanti’, Italianistica, 13 (1984), pp. 47–56. Fogle, Richard Harter, ‘Dante and Shelley’s Adonais’, Bucknell Review, 15 (1967), pp. 11–21. ——, ‘John Taaffe’s Annotated Copy of Adonais’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 18 (1969), pp. 31–52. Folliot, Katherine, Shelley’s Italian Sunset (East Molesey, Surrey: Forge Press, 1979). Foscolo, Ugo, Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura, ed. Emilio Santini, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, 22 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1933–94) (1933), VII. ——, Epistolario, ed. Mario Scotti, Edizione nazionale, 9 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1949–94). ——, Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia, in Prose varie d’arte, ed. Mario Fubini, Edizione nazionale (1951), V, 35–186. ——, Essays on Petrarch; ‘Frederick the Second and Pietro delle Vigne’; ‘Guido Cavalcanti’, ed. Cesare Foligno, Edizione nazionale (1953), X, pp. 109–38, 399–411, 423–35. ——, Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Giovanni Gambarin, Edizione nazionale (1955), IV. ——, Saggi di letteratura italiana, ed. Cesare Foligno, Edizione nationale (1958), XI. ——, Esperimenti di Traduzione dell’Iliade, ed. Gennaro Barbarisi, Edizione nazionale, 3 vols (1967), III. ——, La Chioma di Berenice, ed. Giovanni Gambarin, Edizione nazionale (1972), VI. ——, Scritti Letterari e Politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin, Edizione nazionale (1972), VI. ——, Studi su Dante, ed. Giovanni da Pozzo, Edizione nazionale (1979), IX, pt. I. ——, Poesie e Carmi, ed. Francesco Pagliai et al., Edizione nazionale (1985), I. Foster, Gretchen M., Pope Versus Dryden: a Controversy in Letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine: 1789–1792 (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1989). Franzero, Carlo Maria, Ugo Foscolo a Londra (Parma: Guanda, 1971). Fubini, Mario, Romanticismo italiano, 2nd edition (Bari: Laterza, 1973), p. 17.

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236 Works Cited and Additional Bibliography Weisman, Karen A., Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Wellesley Index of Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, ed. Walter E. Houghton, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966–89). West, M.L., Theogony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). White, Florence Donnel, Voltaire’s Essay on Epic Poetry (New York: Phaeton Press, 1970). White, R.S., Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (London: the Athlone Press, 1987). Wilkie, Brian, Romantic Poets and the Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). William Blake; The Illustrator of the Grave, andc., The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, sciences, andc., 552 (August 12, 1827), pp. 540–1. Williams, David, ‘Voltaire: Literary Critic’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 48 (1966), pp. 314–41. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970). Wolf, Edwin Jr, ‘The Blake-Linnell Accounts in the Library of Yale University’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37 (1943), pp. 1–22. Wood, Gillien D’Arcy, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Wood, Theodore E.B., The Word Sublime and its Context, 1650–1760 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972). Woodhouse, John, ed., Dante and Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Wordsworth, William, The Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). ——, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt, second revised edition, ed. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–88). Wright, Andrew, Blake’s ‘Job’: a Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Yates, Frances A., ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 10 (1951), pp. 27–82. Zacchetti, Corrado, Shelley e Dante (Milano: Sandron, 1922). Zardo, Antonio, ‘La censura e la difesa di Dante nel sec. xviiii’, Giornale Dantesco, 24 (1906), pp. 145–67. Zuccato, Edoardo, Coleridge in Italy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).

Index Abrahams, M.H., 125 Adamson, Carlene A., 111 Aeschylus, 97, 107, 110 Aglionby, William, 10 Alighieri, Dante, 1–6, 9–21, 23–8, 31–41, 43–54, 56–89, 91, 95–112, 114–41, 143–78 Allen, Graham, 4, 5 Allen, John, 68, 78, 79, 80 Ariosto, Ludovico, 13–16, 27, 56, 72, 144 Aristophanes, 39 Aristotle, 175 Armstrong, John, 47 Augustine, St, 95 Bailey, Benjamin, 131 Baine, Rodney M., 162, 172 Baker, Carlos, 102 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4 Banks, Thomas, 18 Baretti, Giuseppe Marc’Antonio, 13, 57, 58 Barilli, Renato, 25 Bartolini, Francesco, 20 Bate, Walter Jackson, 129 Bellay, Joachim du, 72 Benci, Antonio, 87, 88 Bettinelli, Saverio, 58 Biagioli, Giosafatte, 58, 80 Birch, Walter, 35 Blair, Robert, 161 Blake, Mrs, Catherine Boucher, 159 Blake, William, 5, 6, 21, 28, 66, 122, 151–78 Bloom, Harold, 4, 126, 129, 143 Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 18, 20 Boileau Despreaux, Nicolas, 19 Borsieri, Pietro, 87 Boyd, Henry, 3, 6, 24, 27, 31–5, 42, 59, 61, 62, 71, 89, 91, 154 Boydell, John, 23 Brand, Charles Peter, 10, 78

Bridges, Robert, 135 Brown, Charles Armitage, 135 Brown, Marshall, 27 Brown, Richard E., 116 Bunyan, John, 56 Burgess, Thomas, 9 Burke, Edmund, 20, 21, 43 Burton, Robert, 53 Butlin, Martin, 154 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 5, 6, 87, 88, 90, 152 Calbo, Andrea, 79 Campbell, Thomas, 60 Cancellieri, 83 Carey, William, 161 Cary, Henry, 1, 38, 40, 70, 151, 152 Cary, Henry Francis, 1–4, 6, 9, 17, 23–4, 26–8, 30–1, 33–55, 58, 60–5, 67, 69–70, 76–7, 82–90, 100–1, 103, 105, 108–9, 113–19, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 132–6, 139, 146–7, 149, 158, 160–1, 164, 171, 178 Cassiani, Giuliano, 36 Casti, Gian Battista, 64 Castiglione, Baldassare, 10 Catullus, 81 Chalmers, Alexander, 60 Chapman, George, 27, 128, 137 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 87 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 37, 72, 73, 82, 84 Clare, John, 39, 165 Clark, Charles Cowden, 130 Coburn, Kathleen, 70 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 2, 17, 38, 41, 46, 54, 63, 65–77, 80, 84, 91, 103, 142 Cooksey, Thomas L., 47, 65, 67, 77 Corrigan, Beatrice, 80 Coutts, Thomas, 18 237

238 Index Cowper, William, 26, 36, 38, 43, 45, 46, 47, 53, 83, 84 Crabbe, George, 68, 84 Crowe, Eyre Evans, 64, 156 Crisafulli, Edoardo, 4, 28, 30, 42, 49, 51, 61, 77, 78, 79, 91 Cunningham, Alan, 39 Cunningham, Gilbert F., 1, 42 Darwin, Erasmus, 39 David, Charles T., 77 David, Jacques-Louis, 23 Dayman, John, 64 De Piles, Roger, 182 n 21 De Quincey, Thomas, 4, 5, 136 De Sua, William J., 42 Delille, Jacques, 81 Desmaizeaux, Pierre, 13 Dixon, John, 23 Donne, John, 76 Dorris, George E., 57 Dryden, John, 27, 29, 30, 75 Dunbar, Pamela, 158 Dunlop, John Colin, 60, 27 Dyce, Alexander, 69 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 126 Ellis, Steve, 108 Euripides, 99 Ferrante, Joan, 50 Fidanza, Paolo, 26, 154 Flaxman, John, 15, 18, 21, 24–6, 153, 154, 162 Foscolo, Ugo, 3, 4, 17, 54, 63–5, 67, 69, 75, 77–87, 89–91, 152, 155 Frere, John Hookham, 68 Fubini, Mario, 49, 87 Fuller, David, 162 Fuseli, Henry, 3, 18–24, 26, 151, 153, 161, 165 Genette, Gérard, 5 Gibson-Wood, Carol, 10, 11 Gilchrist, Alexander, 155, 161 Gilpin, William, 66 Ginguené, Pierre Louis, 83 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 78 Gisborne, John, 110, 111

Gittings, Robert, 132, 133, 136 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 121 Gough, Richard, 168 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo, 57 Gray, Thomas, 84, 153, 165 Gringore, Pierre, 39 Gros, Antoine-Jean, 23 Guerin, Pierre Narcisse, 23 Guittone D’Arezzo, 113 Hallam, Henry, 70, 74, 75 Harington, John, Sir, 27 Hartley, Robert A., 100 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 129 Hayley, William, 13, 15, 16, 17, 31, 39, 60, 154, 156 Hazlitt, William, 4, 23, 39, 59, 65, 66, 67, 84, 91, 141 Heines, Simon, 97 Henry VII of Luxembourg, 152 Hesiod, 137 Hobhouse, John Cam, 90 Hogarth, William, 13, 14 Holland, Henry Richard Vassal Fox, Lord, 78 Homer, 19, 25–7, 29, 30, 35–6, 43, 45, 66, 68, 81, 82–3, 98–9, 127, 137, 153, 154–156, 175 Hope, Thomas, 24, 153 Huggins, William, 13, 14, 15, 17, 31 Humberston, John, 35 Hume, Joseph, 64 Hunt, Leigh, 17, 65, 101, 130, 131, 135 Hyginus, 137 Jeffrey, Francis, 67, 68, 79, 80, 83, 84 Jeffrey, Sarah, 145 Jennings, Henry Constantine, 21 Kant, Immanuel, 74, 75 Keats, Fanny, 130 Keats, George, 129, 135 Keats, Georgiana, 135 Keats, John, 4, 5, 28, 39, 96, 98, 106, 127, 128–50, 176 Keats, Tom, 129 Keynes, Geoffrey, 159, King, W.J., 35, 40, 47, 51, 69, 78

Index 239 Klonsky, Milton, 163, 165, 170, 171 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 74 Kristeva, Julia, 4 Kuhns, Oscar, 108

Morehead, Robert, 62 Muir, Kenneth, 136 Muirhead, Lockhart, 63, 64 Murray, John, 87

Lackington, James, 100 Lamb, Charles, 3, 23, 30, 65 Landino, Cristoforo, 45, 160 Landor, Walter Savage, 35, 47 Le Brun, Charles, 167 Leighton, Angela, 96 Lemprière, John, 135, 137 Linnel, John, 159 Lisio, Giuseppe, 49–50 Lister, Thomas, 35 Little, Judy, 66 Lombardi, Baldassare, 45 Longinus, 19, 20, 43 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 2 Lowes, John Livingston, 135, 136, 147 Lucan, 99

Newlyn, Lucy, 4, 5, 132 Nollekens, Joseph, 18 Northcote, James, 21

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 76 Mackintosh, James, Sir, 79 Macpherson, James, 56, 68 Magiotti, Quirina Mocenni, 79 Marlowe, Christopher, 53 Marot, Clément, 39 Martinelli, Vincenzio, 57 Mason, William, 39, 56 McFarland, Thomas, 75 Medwin, Thomas, 98, 126, 129 Melbourne, Lord, 39 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 18 Metastasio, Pietro, 36, 57 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 23, 75, 165 Milbank, Alison, 10, 59, 91 Milton, John, 5, 11, 19, 24, 37, 43, 44–7, 51, 53, 56, 58–60, 62, 65–8, 72–6, 82, 84, 91, 98, 123, 129, 133–4, 136–7, 141–5, 155, 158, 166–7 Mitchell, W.J.T., 166 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 59 Moore, Thomas, 68, 69 More, Hannah, 9

Oliviero, Mr, 36 Ollier, Charles, 100, 110, 129 Ovid, 29, 18 Pacchiani, Francesco, 112 Padoan, Giorgio, 128 Palmer, Samuel, 159, 160 Panizzi, Antonio, 38 Parsons, William, 45 Paulson, Ronald, 14 Peacock, Thomas Love, 98, 99, 105 Percy, Thomas, 60 Peterfreund, Stuart, 110, 120 Petrarch, Francesco, 86, 96, 121, 127 Pierino da Vinci, 181 n 17 Pindar, 73, 82 Piroli, Tommaso, 24 Pite, Ralph, 24, 44, 77, 90, 101, 121, 124, 126, 136, 163 Placidi, G.B., 71 Plato, 75, 105, 138 Pope, Alexander, 11, 16, 27, 29, 30, 36, 43, 83 Postle, Martin, 23 Price, Thomas, 40, 41, 62, 63 Prior, Matthew, 11 Rajan, Tilottama, 5, 60, 126 Raphael, 26, 75, 154, 173 Reyman, Donald, 100 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 144 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 3, 15, 21, 23, 26, 133, 151, 153 Richardson, Jonathan, 10, 11, 12, 15, 153 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 71, 156–9, 161 Roe, Albert S., 152, 170, 171, 173 Roe, Nicholas, 129, 162, 163 Rogers, Charles, 17, 31, 42

240 Index Rogers, Neville, 104 Rogers, Samuel, 39, 68, 69, 77, 79, 82, 83 Rolli, Paolo, 57 Rose, William Stuart, 64, 68 Rossetti, Gabriele, 90, Said, Edward, 129 Saly, John, 132, 135, 136 Schelling, Friedrich, 68, Schiff, Gert, 18, 20 Schiller, Friedrich, 87 Schlegel, August von, 68 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 66, 68, 73–5, 83–4, 91, 141 Schulze, Earl, 117, 126 Scott, Walter, 87, 90 Sessa, Fratelli, 160 Seward, Anna, 30, 35–7, 39, 56, 57 Sgricci, Tommaso, 127 Shakespeare, William, 19, 24, 44, 51, 53, 68, 72, 75–6, 81, 83–4, 154 Shelley, Mary, 99, 101, 111, 118, 123 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 4, 5, 28, 66, 95–127, 136, 149, 150, 176 Shelley, William, 100, 148 Sismondi, Simonde de, 59, 66, 91 Smollet, Tobias, 14 Southey, Robert, 47, 60, 165 Spenser, Edmund, 32, 37, 72 Sperry, Stuart, M., 136 Spurgeon, Dicki A., 69 Staël, Madame de, 130 Statius, 128 Stendhal, (Henri Beyle), 87 Sterne, Lawrence, 84 Stradano, Giovanni, 18 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 157 Sydney, Philip, Sir, 45 Taaffe, John, 40, 87, 88, 89, 90 Tasso, Bernardo, 36 Tasso, Torquato, 56, 60, 64, 74, 99 Tatsuo Tokoo, 111 Tayler, Irene, 153 Taylor, John, 135 Thornhill, James, Sir, 13 Tinkler-Villani, Valeria, 12, 16, 17, 31, 32, 54, 163, 173, 180 n 2, 212 n 11

Todd, Henry John, 58 Tolley, Michael J., 163 Tooke, Andrew, 135, 137 Toury, Gideon, 185 n 3 Toynbee, Paget, 17, 18, 23, 31 Turner, Sharon, 192 n 27 Tytler, Alexander, Lord Woodhouselee, 29, 30, 45 Vallone, Aldo, 80 Vasari, Giorgio, 20, 181 n 17 Vassallo, Peter, 123 Vellutello, Alessandro, 45, 160, 217 n 106 Venturi, Pompeo P., 40, 45, 71, 72, 101 Venuti, Lawrence, 27, 29, 61 Vergani, Angelo, 36 Verner, Jacob, 57 Vico, Giambattista, 68, 81 Vieusseux, G.P., 87 Villani, Giovanni, 60 Virgil, 25, 27, 56, 62, 128, 138, 164 Viviani, Teresa, 111, 112, 117, 127 Volney, Constantin-François Chassebœuf, comte de, 105 Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet, de, 57, 58, 59 Wainewright, Thomas, 161 Wallace, William, 79 Walpole, Horace, 9, 12, 23, 54, 99 Warner, Janet A., 163 Warton, Joseph, 11, 39, 60 Warton, Thomas, 39 Watkins, Jon, 60 Webb, Timothy, 126 Weisman, Karen A., 96 Weston, Joseph, 30 White, George, 21 Wiffen, J.H., 64 Wilbraham, Roger, 83 Wilkie, Brian, 37 Williams, David, 58 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 18 Wood, Theodore, E.B., 19 Woodhouse, Richard, 137 Wordsworth, William, 3, 47, 69, 120, 142, 144

Index 241 Wright, Ichabod Charles, 64 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 45 Young, Edward, 16

Zacchetti, Corrado, 98 Zappa, Giovanni Battista Felice, 13 Zuccari, Federico, 18 Zuccato, Edoardo, 71

Dante and the Romantics

Plato and the English Romantics

Dante and the Empire

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Dante and the Three Religions

Dante and Hayley

And This Dante Do

Dante and the Franciscans (The Medieval Franciscans)

The Dante Club

The Dante Game

The Dante Encyclopedia

The Dante Game

Dante the philosopher

The Dante Killings

The Dante Club

The Dante Club

The Dante Club

dante-divinecomedy

Dante Alighieri

Becoming Dante

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Burning Dante

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Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy

Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy

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Alighieri, Dante - The_Divine_Comedy_of_Dante_(English_Tranlation_1)

Dante and the Romantics

Plato and the English Romantics

Dante and the Empire

Dante

Dante

Dante and the Three Religions

Dante and Hayley

And This Dante Do

Dante and the Franciscans (The Medieval Franciscans)

The Dante Club

The Dante Game

The Dante Encyclopedia

The Dante Game

Dante the philosopher

The Dante Killings

The Dante Club

The Dante Club

The Dante Club

dante-divinecomedy

Dante Alighieri

Becoming Dante

Becoming Dante

Burning Dante

The Last of the Great Romantics

The Last of the Great Romantics

Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom

Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy

Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy

Het masker van dante

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Alighieri, Dante - The_Divine_Comedy_of_Dante_(English_Tranlation_1)

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