Robert Hollander - William Stull, Colgate University

This reflection was originally presented as a talk during an online tribute to Robert Hollander (1933-2021) and John Freccero (1931-2021) presented by the Dante Society of America following its 140th annual meeting on May 7, 2022. For more information about the tribute, including a videorecording and links to the remarks given by other presenters, please see "Quel Savio Gentil: Remembering our Teachers," posted under the "Pedagogy" section of Dante Notes.


One piece of wisdom I try to pass along to my academic advisees is that in selecting classes they should, as the saying goes, “choose the professor, not the course.” Unlike some of the other advice I freely dispense, I know this is useful, since it was my own decision to follow it, as a Princeton sophomore in 1991, that led me to study Dante with Robert Hollander. In those days I knew little about Dante and felt no burning desire to spend a whole semester reading him. Yet I had heard from several people —older friends in college and even my high school Latin teacher (an alumnus from the 1960s)— that a course with Hollander was among the best that Princeton had to offer. I had noticed, too, that students in a Hollander course sometimes kept talking about the material even outside the classroom. That level of intellectual engagement was not always easy to find at Princeton, and I had been searching for more of it. Thus, it came about that I signed up for Romance Languages 303, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and duly purchased the required nine books: three volumes of Sinclair’s translation and six of Singleton’s text and commentary.

The first impressions I formed of Bob during that semester never really changed through all the years of knowing him. From the start, he radiated seriousness and dedication —and for that reason was intimidating in the best possible way. He made no bones about the fact that he intended his course to be challenging (“The Organic Chemistry of the Humanities,” some called it, and Bob seemed to relish that description), and he never apologized for his enthusiasm, his high standards, his strong opinions, or his conviction that we should work as hard at knowing and understanding Dante as he did. One of the items he distributed on the first day was a substantial packet containing passages drawn from nearly every canto of the Comedy. As he handed this out, he explained its origin: years earlier he had noticed that the students had grown slack —they weren’t doing the reading and their exams were slipshod— so, in response, he had put together a comprehensive list and established the expectation that students needed to be able to write intelligent, wide-ranging commentary about every passage on it. I think it was also on that first day that Bob told us about his “Dante dream.” One night, he said, the spirit of Dante had appeared before him . . . and instead of using the opportunity to ask questions of the great poet, Bob had begun explaining a crux in the Comedy to its own author. This episode of exegetical overreach came to an abrupt end when the dreamer awakened bathed in sweat!

As a lecturer and seminar leader, Bob had a kind of charisma that I have rarely encountered and wish I possessed myself: a gift for capturing and holding an audience’s attention without needing to resort to dramatic flourishes. Again, the crucial element was seriousness. When Bob talked about Dante, one had the sense of a vigorous mind wholly and perpetually engaged. Every part of the poem was worth pondering, and every interpretation had a long history of scholarship behind it. At the same time, for all the power of his presence, the depth of his learning, and the vigor of his (often polemical) views, it was clear that the focus was never on Hollander but always on Dante. Influential though he was in the lives of many, Bob wanted his students to see themselves as fellow scholars and explorers, not as acolytes. He demanded not that we agree with him, but that our arguments be developed and presented with care.

I think I learned more in that course about the study of literature at a high level —not only what it involved but also why it could be exciting and important— than in any course I ever took, graduate or undergraduate. Partly this was a matter of the format. There is a lot to be said for spending an entire semester reading a single work twice over, under the guidance of someone who knows it backwards and forwards and requires that you do the same. Partly it was a matter of Dante, of course, who is inexhaustible and all-encompassing. And partly it was a matter of the kinds of students that Bob attracted, a quirky and varied group of undergraduates who were not put off by the intricacies of medieval literature or by high academic standards. I still recall a somewhat eccentric member of the class who one day excitedly made a comparison to something in the works of Prudentius. That kind of thing did not typically happen in Princeton classrooms.

Behind it all, though, was Bob’s steady insistence that details mattered, that being well- and deeply read was non-negotiable, and that an interpretation was only worthwhile if it relied on something more than sentiment and could withstand criticism. Working through an episode of the Comedy with Bob meant embarking on an exhilarating journey that might include, in varying measures and often in unexpected and intricate ways, the Bible, the ancient Roman epics, and the Christian authors of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. One quickly learned how many gaps there were in one’s knowledge and how urgently they needed to be filled. Woe to anyone who tried to get through that semester without knowing, just for starters, the Aeneid, the Psalms, and the Confessions of St. Augustine.

In addition to its seriousness of purpose, the other defining feature of Bob’s teaching, at least in the early 1990s, was its unusually successful blending of tradition and technology. Strangely enough, it was owing to Dante that I opened my first email account and discovered the internet, which was just then entering the general consciousness. This occurred because Bob’s class had its own email listserv that we were all required to join. The idea here was that we could use group messages to share questions or observations, and thus keep class discussion going around the clock. And I really do mean “around the clock,” since Bob would routinely answer queries, whether deep or trivial, at 3:00 AM.

Perhaps more profoundly, Bob also introduced us to the Dartmouth Dante Project. Databases are a dime a dozen now, but back then, before anybody had uttered the phrase “digital humanities,” the DDP was a revelation: six centuries’ worth of commentary, in multiple languages, all devoted to one poem, all available and searchable remotely. Not only had Bob been a prime mover in founding the DDP (what vision he must have had to do that back in the early 1980s); he also knew how to use it effectively, encouraging us in turn to explore its riches, and to see ourselves as participants in a conversation that had been going on, with copious amounts of learning, enthusiasm, and controversy, through the ages.

That last point seems to me the fundamental one. In fact, everything about Bob’s teaching and research reflected a belief that the conversation never ends, and that all of us potentially have something to contribute to it. Just as Dante wrote in continual engagement with earlier history and literature, creating a comprehensive vision that embraced past, present, and future, so Dante’s readers, the dead as well as the living, approach his poem in ongoing dialogue with one another, sometimes enlightening, often contentious, but always worth taking seriously. There was no room for temporal, professional, or social chauvinism in Bob’s class, in his style of interpretation, or, I daresay, in his approach to life as a whole. As its readers cannot help but notice, Bob’s own commentary on the Comedy is unique in this regard (and not just in Dante studies), in that its citations include not only the expected range of ancient sources, medieval commentators, and modern scholars, but also many of Bob’s undergraduate students, whose classroom observations are scrupulously recorded by name and date. And the same impulse lay behind Bob’s idea of holding Dante reunion seminars to which all his former students were invited annually. For a couple of hours each May those who were able to attend these reunions could see old friends, make new ones, and once again discuss Dante under Bob’s mildly intimidating guidance. When all was said and done, there were over 40 such gatherings, running from 1975 to 2019.

There is much more I could say about Bob—about the experience of co-authoring an article with him (something which a number of his students did, over the years), about the determination with which he faced health challenges during his retirement years, about the partnership with his wife Jean and their joint work in translating the Comedy. But perhaps it is best to leave it there, with the thought of generations of Bob’s students partaking in an ongoing communion. What could be more Dantean, after all?