This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary
philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious
undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of
poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology,
poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.
The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres
that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from
the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and
Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in
the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical
allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but
it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia
Virgil is Dante's guide.
The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy,"
and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety
of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of
poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of
literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people
stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is
concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits,
historical and otherwise.
Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of
the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli,
Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature
and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato,
Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and
Hölderlin, among others).
