American Dante Bibliography for 1958

Anthony L. Pellegrini

This bibliography is intended to include the Dante translations published in this country in 1958, and all Dante studies and reviews published in 1958 that are in any sense American. 

 

Translations

Dante Alighieri.  The Divine Comedy. Translated into English Unrhymed Hendecasyllabic Verse by Mary Prentice Lillie (Mrs. Albert W. Barrows). 3 vols. San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1958.

A fine, large-page, limited (300 copies) edition, without notes. Volume I contains a brief “Translator’s Note.” The translation retains the eleven-syllable line, but with an occasional ten-syllable line “when pause or emphasis is needed”; preserves the line count of the original; and usually keeps “the structure of thought terzina by terzina.” The translator has “not, however, attempted to be so literal as to make line-for-line comparison with the original possible at all times,” since she has “always made intelligibility the first consideration.”

Dante Alighieri.  Selected Poems in The Penguin Book of Italian Verse. Introduced and edited by George Kay. Plain Prose Translations. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958.

The anthology contains thirteen of Dante’s shorter poems (pp. 74-100), including six from the Vita Nuova and three petrose, all printed in the original Italian and each followed by a “plain prose translation.”

 

Studies

M. H. Abrams, ed., Literature and Belief. English Institute Essays, 1957. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Contains, besides minor references to Dante passim, a Dantean discussion in the first essay, by Professor Abrams, on “Belief and the Suspension of Disbelief,” stressing the distinction between didactic content and its poetic presentation, the essential part of any poem, which must appeal to the common bonds of humanity with the reader. Providing the emotional power for engaging his reader is “Dante’s invention of himself” (as wayfarer), which “is the supreme artistic achievement of the Divine Comedy.”

Eugene Arden. “The Echo of Hell in ‘Prufrock’.” Notes and Queries, V (1958): 363-364.

In T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock’s self-comparison with John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet is seen as a parallel with Dante’s own protests of unworthiness in Inferno II and therefore as a like expression of humility, implying the accessibility of grace and salvation.

Erich Auerbach. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958.

These four essays, posthumously published, trace, by stylistic analysis, the development from the classical grand style to the medieval sermo humilis, with its new sense of the sublime, and examines the complex relations between author and public throughout medieval literature. In this context, the chapter on “Camilla oder über die Wiedergeburt des Erhabenen” contrasts with the ancient Homer’s neutrality in narration Dante’s personalized presentation, with the narrator himself as protagonist. In another chapter, on “Das abendländische Publikum und seine Sprache,” Professor Auerbach discusses the question of who read the dolce stil novo and examines Dante’s address to the reader in Paradiso X in an elaboration of his previous study, “Dante’s Addresses to the Reader” Romance Philology, VII (1954): 268-278. Indexed. (For reviews, see below)

Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. London: Mayflower Publishing Company, 1958.

This is a British paperback edition of Auerbach’s well-known work. (See 68th-72nd Reports, 43-44, 74th Report, 58 and 62, 75th Report, 30 and 38, and 76th Report, 41, 56, 59 and 61.)

Samuel Borton. “A Tentative Essay on Dante and Proust.” In Delaware Notes, XXXI (1958), 33-42.

While disclaiming any direct influence of Dante on Proust and acknowledging the risk of pressing the comparison too far, the author submits a series of very general parallels in their respective masterpieces. For example, both Dante and Proust experienced stages of emergent psychic evolution; both were guided by love remembered, Dante by Beatrice and Proust by Albertine; structurally, the Vita Nuova is to the Divine Comedy as Swann’s Way is to the Remembrance of Things Past; both masterpieces belong to the genre of commedia in the Dantean sense; both evince trinary and septenary divisions; both writers were skilled in combining elements of ritual, allegory and metaphor; the characters, Virgil and St. Loup, play analogous roles with respect to Dante and Proust, respectively; multiple levels of meaning are discernible in both works.

Erich Berger. Randbemerkungen zu Nietzsche, George und Dante. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1958.

Contains three Dantean pieces: (1) “Eine Vermutung, Stefan Georges Übertragungen aus der Göttlichen Komödie betreffend,” originally published in Monatshefte, XLVIII (1956), 345-359 (See 75th Report, 20-21); (2) “Eine Dantestelle in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus,” originally published in Monatshefte, XLIX (1957), 212-214 (See 76th Report, 41); and (3) “Dante und ‘die gefrässigen Deutschen’,” not previously published. In the latter piece, the author discusses some attempts, for example, by Paul Pochhammer, to re-interpret the phrase, “li tedeschi lurchi” (Inferno XVII, 21) and concludes that the usual reading, unflattering to the Germans, must stand, citing an incident from the Villani Chronicle (VI, lxxvi) in evidence of what perhaps determined Dante’s very limited and unfavorable impression of the Germans.

M. W. Bloomfield. “Symbolism in Medieval Literature.” Modern Philology, LVI (1958): 73-81.

Contends that, in light of contrary medieval evidence, much current practice of interpreting secular works of literature symbolically or polysemously, by transferring to them the exegetical method of the early Middle Ages designed for biblical interpretation, is mistaken and historically untenable. A possible exception might be made for the Divine Comedy, and even there it is impossible, beyond a few obvious symbols, to work out a consistent fourfold scheme of meaning.

Maud Bodkin. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination. New York:Vintage Books, 1958. “Vintage Books,” K-57.

Contains substantial interpretations of Dante’s poem, among others, in relation to the argument of the book, based on an hypothesis formulated in Jungian terms that archetypal patterns, or images, are present within the experience communicated through poetry, and may be discovered there by reflective analysis. The author dwells on the Divine Comedy particularly in the essays on “The Archetype of Paradise-Hades, or of Heaven and Hell,” which deals with such matters as the cavern image, the temporal pattern of rebirth (combining descent into dark depths followed by ascent), the timeless, spatial pattern of Heaven and Hell, the imagery of light, and the communication of supersensuous vision through empathic perception; on “The Image of Woman,” which focuses on the glorified image of woman as idealized beloved and divine mother and guide in the Divine Comedy; and on “The Image of the Devil, of the Hero, and of God,” which holds Dante’s Paradiso as best illustrating the dynamic image of God, as not thwarting but fulfilling the needs of man’s nature. There are further references to Dante passim. Indexed. This work was first published in 1934, with subsequent reprintings in 1948 and 1951, by Oxford University Press.

G. A. Borgese. Da Dante a Thomas Mann. “I Quaderni dello ‘Specchio.’“ Giulio Vallese, trans. Milan: Mondadori, 1958.

Contains three essays on Dante previously published in English and here translated by Vallese: (1) “Introduzione a Dante,” originally published as “Dante and His Time,” as the introduction to an edition of the Divina Commedia (New York, Henry Regnery, 1950) and, in a shortened version, as an article, in Diogenes (See 73rd Report, 64-65); (2) “L’Ira di Dante,” originally published as “The Wrath of Dante,” in Speculum, XIII (1938), 183-193; and (3) “Della critica dantesca,” originally published as “On Dante Criticism,” in 52nd-54th Annual Reports of the Dante Society, and, in Italian translation, in Acme (See 76th Report, 59).

Samuel Borton. “A Tentative Essay on Dante and Proust.” Delaware Notes, XXXI (1958): 33-42.

While disclaiming any direct influence of Dante on Proust and acknowledging the risk of pressing the comparison too far, the author submits a series of very general parallels in their respective masterpieces. For example, both Dante and Proust experienced stages of emergent psychic evolution; both were guided by love remembered, Dante by Beatrice and Proust by Albertine; structurally, the Vita Nuova is to the Divine Comedy as Swann’s Way is to the Remembrance of Things Past; both masterpieces belong to the genre of commedia in the Dantean sense; both evince trinary and septenary divisions; both writers were skilled in combining elements of ritual, allegory and metaphor; the characters, Virgil and St. Loup, play analogous roles with respect to Dante and Proust, respectively; multiple levels of meaning are discernible in both works.

Van Wyck Brooks. The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958.

Contains references, passim, to the influence of Italian artists and writers, especially Dante. Indexed.

C. F. Brown and Company. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” W. F. Bryan and Germaine C. Dempster, eds. New York: The Humanities Press, 1958.

Cites four Dantean passages which inspired portions of the Canterbury Tales. Indexed. This is a re-issue, identical to the original edition published by Chicago University Press in 1941.

Jacob Burckhardt. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Illustrated edition. Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. “Harper Torchbooks,” 40, 41.

Contains references to Dante, passim, in the context of Burckhardt’s thesis. This paperback edition reproduces the much reprinted Middlemore translation from the fifteenth German edition with added notes by Ludwig Geiger and Walter Götz. There is also a new introduction by Benjamin Nelson and Charles Trinkaus.

Glauco Cambon. “Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Meeting of Dante and Brueghel.” Sewanee Review, LXVI (1958): 1-32.

Points out several Dantean echoes as well as the general Dantean compactness and ruggedness of language in Montale’s poetry, especially in “I Morti,” “Tramontana,” “Scirocco,” “Personae separatae,” “L’Orto,” “Proda di Versilia,” etc.

C. T. Davis. Dante and the Idea of Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

American imprint of the work, originally published in England. (See 76th Report, 42. For reviews, see below.)

Enrico De’ Negri. “Tema e iconografia del Purgatorio.” Romanic Review, XLIX (1958): 81-104.

Analyzes in close iconographical detail the structure of the seven terraces of Dante’s Purgatorio (IX-XXVII) and demonstrates, with diagrams, their mutually perfect symmetry with respect to arrangement of the custodian angels, the parallel series of exemplary reliefs, and the number and distribution of the purging souls encountered. Besides this “horizontal” structure the author sees a corresponding vertical structure exemplified by Dante’s journey up the mountain and his own participation in the purgatorial process. Both structures are found to reflect the major theme of the purgatorial process: the soul’s conversion to the virtues of love and humility. Also discussed are several related matters, such as the distinction between good and bad wrath, to explain Dante’s invectives in the poem; the distinction between the moral system of the Inferno and that of the Purgatorio, based on the Augustinian doctrine of love and its perversions; the poet’s skillful variation of the otherwise rigidly symmetrical treatment of each terrace; and various other stylistic, structural, and doctrinal elements.

G. P. Elliott. “Getting to Dante.” Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

Though a review-article, this constitutes an essay on Dante and Mr. Elliott’s own approach to him, as opposed to that of others. He firmly contends that one’s reading of the Divine Comedy cannot be done in an aesthetic vacuum, but must be related to Dante’s moral “message.”

Ruth Mary Fox. Dante Lights the Way. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1958.

A comprehensive volume on Dante and his work, divided into three major parts and comprising ten chapters: (1) “An Introduction to Dante and the Divine Comedy,” with chapters on The Times and the Book, The Author and the Book, The Divine in Human Love, and Charting the Journey; (2) “Ideas Central to Dante’s Thought,” with chapters on Dante and the Angels, Dante and the Virgin Mary, Dante and the Deity, and Son of God and Son of Mary: Dante’s Christology; and (3) “The Road to Peace,” with chapters on Purgation for Perfection and All Day with God. There is also a “Note on Translations and Other Matters,” a prologue, an epilogue (“Dante Speaks to Us”), an appendix, with eight illustrations pertaining to Dantean matters, and a detailed index.

J. G. Fucilla. “Annual Bibliography for 1957: Italian Language and Literature.” PMLA, LXXIII (April 1958): 244-262.

Contains a substantial list of selected Dante studies published both here and abroad (pp. 247-248).

Alfred Galpin. “Italian Echoes in Albert Camus: Two Notes on La Chute. I. Dante in Amsterdam.” Symposium, XII (1958):  65-72.

Traces analogies in Camus’ novel between Amsterdam and the Dantean Hell, between the chute of the protagonist, Clamence, and Satan’s fall, and between Clamence’s moral degradation and Dante’s damned souls, including the element of contrapasso.

G. H. Gifford. “A Note on Dante and Virgil.” Italica, XXXV (1958): 88-90.

Points out two parallels and holds that (1) the Virgilian image in Aeneid I, 726-727, confirms the interpretation of Dante’s “foco / ch’emisperio di tenebre vincia” (Inferno IV, 68-69) as a source of light vanquishing or beating back the darkness, and (2) Dante’s presumably reading according to the Ptolemaic cosmology the astronomical image in Aeneid II, 8-9, yields a sharpened horological exactitude in Inferno VII, 98-99, where the “falling” stars designate the hour as past midnight.

Albert [L.] Guérard. Fossils and Presences. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Originally published in 1957 by Stanford University Press, this volume contains an essay on “Dante and the Renaissance.” (See 76th Report, 45.)

H. A. Hatzfeld. “Il Canto V del Purgatorio.” Letture Dantesche. II. Purgatorio. A cura di Giovanni Getto. Florence: Sansoni, 1958, 99-120.

This “lectura Dantis,” prepared expressly for the volume, analyzes particularly the triply graduated structural pattern and the stylistic development of the canto.

Ulrich Leo. “Il Canto XXVII del Purgatorio.” In Letture Dantesche. II. Purgatorio, edited by Giovanni Getto (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 539-559.

This “lectura Dantis,” prepared expressly for the volume, emphasizes the canto’s stylistic mixture of idyllic-elegiac qualities which reflect a spiritual state hovering between illusion and reality; for Virgil, in his own “humanistic illusion,” gives Dante-wayfarer to believe he has reached the ultimate goal, whereas the real situation, already known to Dante-poet, will be revealed with the advent of Beatrice. A German version of this essay was published in Professor Leo’s Sehen und Wirklichkeit bei Dante (See 76th Report, 46).

C. S. Lewis. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. “Galaxy Books,” 17.

Contains direct references to Dante, passim, and generally bears on Dante’s poetic world in various ways related to the author’s treatment of courtly love and allegory. The work was first published in 1936 (London, Oxford University Press) and has undergone several reprintings. Paperback edition.

J. C. Mathews. “Bryant and Dante: A Word More.” Italica, XXXV (1958): 176.

Minor addenda to the author’s article on “William Cullen Bryant’s Knowledge of Dante,” published Italica, XVI (1939): 115-119.

J. C. Mathews. “Dr. Holmes and Dante: A Postscript.” Italica, XXXV (1958): 10.

Slight addenda to the author’s article on “Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Dante,” Italica, XXXIV (1957): 127-136.

J. C. Mathews. “Melville’s Reading of Dante.” Furman Studies, VI, (1958): 1-8.

Submits evidence that Melville was reading in Dante’s Comedy (Cary’s translation) from 1848 or 1849 and cites Dantean parallels in Melville’s subsequent writings, especially Pierre. His attention centered perhaps exclusively on the Inferno, which he appreciated only in limited fashion: while impressed by its qualities of vividness, truth to human experience, etc., he was too much inclined to see in the Inferno the spirit of pessimism and revenge. (This paper is part, with minor changes, of the Harvard Dante Prize essay of 1938.)

J. C. Mathews. “Mr. Longfellow’s Dante Club.” 76th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1958): 23-35.

To supplement and correct previously published accounts of the Dante Club, the author has drawn upon manuscript journals, letters, and other papers in the Longfellow House. He documents in particular the beginnings, in 1838, and subsequent progress of Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy and the circumstances leading to the eventual formation, by 1865, of an informal Dante Club, which held regular meetings until May, 1867. This Dante Club, of course, helped pave the way for the founding of the present Dante Society in 1881. See, for example, G. H. Gifford, “A History of the Dante Society,” 74th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1956): 3-27.

F. O. Matthiessen. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry. Third Edition. With an Additional Chapter by C. Lombardi Barber. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Contains frequent references to direct and indirect Dantean influences in Eliot’s poetry. Matthiessen’s work was first published in 1935 by Oxford University Press. Indexed.

Sister Mary Maura. The Word is Love. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Contains a poem entitled “Tourist in Dante,” originally published in Accent, XVI (1956): 191-192.

J. A. Mazzeo. “Dante and Epicurus.” Comparative Literature, X (1958): 106-120.

Demonstrates the error of interpreting (cf. Busnelli and Vandelli) Dante’s view on Epicurus in the Convivio in terms of Inferno IX-X, which represents a later, changed position. At the moment of the Convivio, for lack of true understanding of Epicureanism, Dante’s attitude, based on Cicero’s De finibus, is very tolerant and favorable towards Epicurus as a virtuous pagan, along with the Stoics and Peripatetics. But in the Inferno, when fully aware of the unfavorable medieval Christian tradition regarding Epicureanism, best exemplified by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies, Dante even excludes Epicurus from Limbo, treating him, rather, as a traditional typological figure of the heretic, based on the Epicurean denial of the soul’s immortality.

J. A. Mazzeo. “Light Metaphysics, Dante’s Convivio and the Letter to Can Grande della Scala.” Traditio, XIV (1958): 191-229.

Reconstructs in detail the doctrine of light metaphysics (from its earliest conception through the Neo-Platonists, the Fathers, and the Pseudo-Dionysius and later medieval elaborations) as available to Dante, who in turn reflects especially the Liber de Causis and Pseudo-Dionysius in his discussions of light metaphysics throughout the Convivio, passim, and in the Letter to Can Grande, in which the light metaphysics doctrine is most fully worked out, revealing its intimate relationship to the Paradiso. Professor Mazzeo concludes: “Thus the hierarchies of being, truth, beauty, perfection, indeed of all value, are reduced to a hierarchy of light ascending to the very Primal Light itself, spiritual, uncreated, divine, the vision of which is the vision of all. The doctrines we have considered are the bare bones of the most important part of Dante’s universe. The flesh and substance is the Paradiso.”

J. A. Mazzeo. “A Note on the ‘Sirens’ of Purgatorio XXXI, 45.” Studies in Philology, LV (1958): 457-463.

Relates the ‘sirens’ to the pargoletta (verse 59), interpreting both references as, literally, carnal sin and, figuratively, the misuse of philosophical knowledge, along the lines suggested by Grandgent for the pargoletta alone, whom he identified with the donna gentile of the Vita Nuova and Convivio. Professor Mazzeo finds Dante’s source for this conception of the ‘sirens’ in Cicero’s De finibus V, xviii-xix, 48-50, a passage known to Dante and shown by Nardi to be the core of Dante’s Ulysses episode (Inferno XXVI).

J. A. Mazzeo. Structure and Thought in the “Paradiso.” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958. Also a British edition, issued simultaneously with the American edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Contains six studies which are collected and revised from articles previously published independently in various journals between 1955 and 1957, though even originally they were conceived as an interrelated whole focusing on the Paradiso. The studies, or portions thereof, here reprinted with some changes are: (1) “Dante and the Phaedrus Tradition of Poetic Inspiration,” originally published as “Dante the Poet of Love: Dante and the Phaedrus Tradition of Poetic Inspiration” (See 74th Report, 51-52); (2) “Dante’s Conception of Poetic Expression” (See 75th Report, 25); (3) “Dante’s Conception of Love and Beauty,” originally two articles –“Dante’s Conception of Love” (See 76th Report, 48) and “The Augustinian Conception of Beauty and Dante’s Convivio” (See 76th Report, 47); (4) “Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision” (See 76th Report, 47-48); (5) “Plato’s ‘Eros’ and Dante’s ‘Amore”‘ (See 76th Report, 60); and (6) “Dante’s Sun Symbolism and the Visions of the Blessed,” drawn partly from an article on “Dante’s Sun Symbolism” (See 75th Report, 25). Indication of the original places of publication of these studies is duly given. A section of notes and an index complete the volume.

T. E. McCrory. “Browning and Dante.” Dissertation Abstracts, XIX (1958):  813. (Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1958.)

Traces the Dantean influence in Robert Browning’s works and investigates to what extent Browning shared in, or differed from, the attitude of his age towards Dante. While somewhat reflecting “the conception represented by the nineteenth-century English attitude towards Dante, as a Protestant, a nationalist, and a Romanticist,” and while largely sharing the contemporary conception of Dante as the poet of the dread Inferno and the tender Vita Nuova, Browning’s attitude differed in knowledge and intensity and he departed especially from the tastes of his age, in drawing upon the Purgatorio for his Sordello.

Rocco Montano. “Erich Auerbach e la scoperta del realismo in Dante e in Boccaccio.” Convivium, XXVI (1958):  16-26.

A substantial review-article prompted by two essays, “Farinata and Cavalcanti” and “Frate Alberto” (Boccaccio), in Professor Auerbach’s Mimesis (See especially 68th-72nd Reports, 43-44, and 76th Report, 41). While approving of much contained in the essays, Professor Montano has much to add regarding Dante’s language and style, and he contends that neither the Divina Commedia nor the Decameron quite fits into the pattern of what he considers the author’s general thesis of progressive laicization of representations of reality in Western literature. He further emphasizes that Professor Auerbach fails properly to consider the philosophical-religious basis of Dante’s realism in the poem; and that Boccaccio’s realism in the Decameron is not dependent on the example of Dante’s realism, but is simply a refinement of a preexistent realism common in medieval literature.

Rocco Montano. “I Modi della narrazione in Dante.” Convivium, XXVI (1958): 546-567.

Discusses the remarkable objectivity of Dante’s narrative art, with all its dramatic evocativeness, in the Divina Commedia, and emphasizes that it is supported by a lofty, unitary religious spirit, to which indeed all the single episodes must be related if they are not to be humanistically or Romantically misunderstood. The author’s thesis is illustrated with interpretive comments on the figures of Francesca, Farinata, Brunetto, Ulysses, and Ugolino.

Rocco Montano. “La Poesia di Dante: I. L’Inferno.” Delta XV-XVII (1958): 1-93.

This entire issue of Delta is devoted to a pre-printing of the first part of a general volume being prepared by Professor Montano on Dante’s thought and work, aimed at correcting some of the current, largely fragmentary Dante criticism of De Sanctis-Croce orientation, and at understanding the poet in a more organic, unitary way.

J. C. Nelson. Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s “Eroici furori.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Devotes a portion of Chapter I on “Prose Commentaries on Verses” to Dante’s doctrine of love as elaborated in the prose of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, along with other pre-Brunian commentaries and treatises, in order to show the strong influence of the tradition of such treatises upon the Eroici furori.

P. R. Olson. “Two Sonnets of Heavenly Vision.” Italica, XXXV (1958): 156-161.

Compares Dante’s Oltre la spera (Vita Nuova XLI) and Petrarch’s Levommi il mio penser (Canzoniere CCCII) and demonstrates their considerable differences in inspiration: whereas it is Dante’s sospiro, an affective faculty, that figuratively journeys to the Empyrean itself, where Beatrice is transfigured, with the whole cast in terms of timelessness and ineffability; Petrarch’s io is transported by a patently retrospective penser to the sphere of Venus, where Laura retains her earthliness, with the whole expressed in fairly explicit, sensuous terms. The two visions differ qualitatively also, due to the different intuitional experiences concerned, one oriented to the Creator, the other to the creature. It is suggested, moreover, that only after a “mirabile visione” could Dante employ the kind of io that appears in the Commedia.

Donald Pearce. “The Castle: Kafka’s Divine Comedy.” In Franz Kafka Today. Angel Flores and Homer Swander, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 165-172.

Contends that Kafka is as representative of our age as Dante was for his and that there is a strong correspondence between the aims and methods of the two writers: “both the Divine Comedy and The Castle are quests; their ultimate objectives are identical—the Absolute; the way there and the conditions and difficulties thronging it alone are changed.” The author traces many parallels of symbolism in the two works.

A. L. Pellegrini. “American Dante Bibliography for 1957.” 76th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1958): 39-61.

With brief analyses.

Mario Praz. The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. “A Doubleday Anchor Original,” A 132.

Contains references to Dante in the introduction, which is a rapid survey of “Literary Relations between Italy and England from Chaucer to the Present” (pp. 3-28) and in the first essay, on “Chaucer and the Great Italian Writers of the Trecento” (pp. 29-89), and shows in the final essay, on “T. S. Eliot and Dante” (pp. 348-374), that Eliot’s interpretation of Dante and Dante’s influence on his poetry reflect a blend of various elements under the stimulus chiefly of Ezra Pound and also Santayana and Grandgent. Indication is duly given of the original places of publication of the introduction and the essays. Paperback edition. (For reviews, see below.)

Ernst Pulgram. The Tongues of Italy. Prehistory and History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Contains considerable discussion of Dante’s linguistic theory and example in relation to the development of Italian, especially on pp. 54-65, 340-344, and 411-417. Indexed.

Herbert Read. The Nature of Literature. New York: Grove Press., 1958. “Evergreen Books,” E-92.

This is a paperback edition of the work, which contains a discussion of Dante in relation to metaphysical poetry. (See 76th Report, 60.)

George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. London: Mayflower Publishing Company, 1958.

A British paperback edition of the work, which contains Santayana’s famous essay on Dante. (See 74th Report, 61.)

T. R. Selby. “Filippo Villani and His ‘Vita’ of Guido Bonatti.” Renaissance News, XI, (1958): 243-248.

Includes references to Villani’s Dante lectureship, as well as an account of his extensive use of Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary on the Divina Commedia for revising, in 1395, his vita of Bonatti (Inferno XX, 118).

C. S. Singleton. Dante Studies 2: Journey to Beatrice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Passing from his general examination of the poem’s structure in Dante Studies 1 (See 73rd Report, 60-61), Professor Singleton here focuses on the allegory of the Comedy, which he re-affirms is an imitation of God’s allegory, is a vital, yet long deemed negligible, part of the poem, and has not claimed adequate study as a continuous dimension of the poem. The volume falls into two major parts: (1) “Journey to Beatrice”—with chapters on The Allegorical Journey; The Three Lights; The Three Conversions; Justification; Advent of Beatrice; Justification in History; The Goal at the Summit (See also below, under Addenda); and Lady Philosophy or Wisdom; and (2) “Return to Eden”—with chapters on A Lament for Eden; Rivers, Nymphs, and Stars; Virgo or Justice; Matelda; Natural Justice; and Crossing Over into Eden. There are copious notes and a reference list of theological writings cited in the notes. Parts of the chapters, here retouched, have appeared in the Annual Reports of the Dante Society as “Justice in Eden,” in 68th-72nd Reports, 3-33, “Virgil Recognizes Beatrice,” in 74th Report, 29-38, and “Stars over Eden,” in 75th Report, 1-18. (See also 73rd Report, 61, 75th Report, 28-29, and 76th Report, 53, respectively.)

C. S. Singleton. An Essay on the “Vita Nuova.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. Also, a simultaneous British edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

This is a soft-cover edition, identical to the original hardcover edition of 1949.

Bernard Stambler. Dante’s Other World: The ‘Purgatorio’ as Guide to the ‘Divine Comedy.’ London: Owen Publishing, 1958.

Originally published by New York University Press in 1957. (See 76th Report, 53. For reviews, see below.)

J. M. Steadman. “St. Peter and Ecclesiastical Satire: Milton, Dante, and La Rappresentazione del dì del giudizio.” Notes and Queries, V (1958): 141-142.

Points out in the Paradiso, the Rappresentazione, and Lycidas the use of the figure of St. Peter as an ideal representative of the pastoral office to voice denunciation of its abuse.

Wylie Sypher. Four Stages of Renaissance Style. London: Mayflower Publishing Company, 1958.

A British paperback edition of the work (originally published as a Doubleday Anchor Book, New York, 1955), which contains considerable reference to Dante. (See 74th Report, 55 and 60, and 75th Report, 33.)

Archer Taylor. “Dante, a German Incantation, and an Apocryphal Gospel.” 76th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1958): 37-38.

Submits that an allusion in the twelfth-century Bamberger Blutsegen may explain Dante’s reference to Charles of Valois in Purgatorio XX, 73-74, since the common source seems to be the apocryphal incident recorded in the Arabic Evangelium infantiae, ch. 35, and very likely known to both authors via oral transmission.

W. Y. Tindall. The Literary Symbol. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1958. “A Midland Book.”

A paperback edition of the work (originally published by Columbia University Press), which contains ample references to Dante. (See 74th Report, 56, 75th Report, 33, and 76th Report, 58.)

Maurice Valency. In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Focuses, with the non-specialist in mind, upon the formative stages of the lyric tradition culminating in the Vita Nuova, and therefore Dante looms large throughout the volume, which ends with chapters on “The New Style” and “New Life.” Included are a preface, notes, a selective bibliography, and a detailed index.

Domenico Vittorini. High Points in the History of Italian Literature. New York: David McKay Company, 1958.

Contains seven Dantean essays: “Dante’s Contribution to Aesthetics,” “The Historical Reality of the Dolce Stil Nuovo” (See 75th Report, 29, on the original Italian version), “Dante and Courtly Language,” “Dante’s ‘The Court of Heaven’,” “Lights and Shadows in Dante’s Vita Nuova” (See 68th-72nd Reports, 48, on the original Italian version), “Dante’s Concept of Love,” and “Francesca da Rimini and the Dolce Stil Nuovo.” Indication is duly given of the original places of publication of these essays. (For reviews, see below.)

Karl Vossler. Mediaeval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times. Translated by William Cranston Lawton. 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1958. Also, a British edition, 2 vols, London: Constable, 1958. “Mediaeval Historical Series.”

Vossler’s well-known work is here reprinted from the original American edition (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), which was translated from the second German edition, under the title, Die Göttliche Komödie. Volume I deals with “The religious, philosophic, and ethical-political background of the Divine Comedy”; Volume II, with “The literary background and the poetry of the Divine Comedy.”

J. D. Williams. “Notes on the Legend of the Eaten Heart in Spain.” Hispanic Review, XXVI (1958): 91-98.

Notes that the figurative account of the eaten heart in Antonio de Torquemada’s Coloquios satíricos (1553) is apparently modeled on Chapter III of Dante’s Vita Nuova.

Edward Williamson. “De beatitudine huius vite.” 76th Annual Report of the Dante Society (1958): 1-22.

Focuses upon Dante’s Monarchia III, 16, and contends that, while the main issue of the treatise, regarding the proper relation between church and state, was a commonplace, Dante’s reason for his view, i.e., the separate beatitudes of man, is a striking and important novelty. Asserting the independence of earthly happiness in being and essence and its accessibility to virtuous pagan and Christian alike, Dante runs counter to the traditional scholastic notion of hierarchy concerning the two beatitudes and anticipates the spirit of the Renaissance. Highly original, also, is Dante’s conception of a universal temporal res publica, or humana universitas, extending indifferently over Christian and pagan and standing opposite a universal eternal church. In line with this interpretation of the Monarchia, Professor Williamson takes Virgil’s words, “te sovra te corono e mitrio” (Purgatorio XXVII, 142), as a stock phrase referring to the imperial coronation, symbol here of Dante’s attaining the earthly happiness which the Emperor assures; attainment of the heavenly happiness must be attributable to Beatrice’s guidance.

George Yost, Jr. “A Source and Interpretation of Keats’s Minos.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LVII (1958): 220-229.

Documents the source of the Minos reference in Keats’s sonnet, “The Town, the churchyard, and the setting sun” (1818), as a combination of Dante’s stern Minos (Inferno V) and the classically conceived good-natured Minos Keats knew from Joseph Spence’s Polymetis.

Floyd Zulli, Jr. “Dantean Allusions in La Comédie Humaine.” Italica, XXXV (1958):177-187.

Enumerates a considerable number of Dantean allusions in Balzac’s novels, to show he was more aware of Dante than is usually believed, but at the same time cautions against over-emphasizing the Dante-Balzac relationship, which is “no more than an interesting literary liaison between two great but highly different figures.”

 

Reviews

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated from the Italian into English Triple Rhyme by Geoffrey L. Bickersteth. Aberdeen: The University Press, 1955. Reviewed by:

            C. B. Beall, Romance Philology, XII (1958): 100-104.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by H. R. Huse. New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1954. Reviewed by:

            G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by G. L. Swiggett. Sewanee, Tenn.: The University Press of The University of the South, 1956. Reviewed by:

            H[elmut] H[atzfeld], Comparative Literature, X (1958): 81-184.

Dante Alighieri. The Inferno. Translated by John Ciardi. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954. Reviewed by:

            G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

Dante Alighieri. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell (L’Inferno). Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1949. Reviewed by:

            G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

Dante Alighieri. Purgatory. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955. Reviewed by:

            G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

Dante Alighieri. La Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Reviewed by:

T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958) 4: 79-85;

G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611;

Colin Hardie, Modern Language Review, LIII (1958): 442-443;

L. V. McDonnell, Catholic World, CLXXXVI (1958): 398-399;

J. H. Mahoney, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, VII (1958): 76-77.

Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: Il Realismo nella letteratura occidentale. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Reviewed by:

            Michele Messina, Studi Danteschi, XXXV (1958): 299-302.

C. P. Brand. Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Contains a chapter on “Dante,” pp. 49-72. Reviewed by:

            P. M. P[asinetti], Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958): 102-105.

E. R. Curtius. La Littérature européenne et le moyen âge latin. Traduit de l’allemand par Jean Bréjoux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956. Contains substantial sections on Dante. Reviewed by:

            W. T. H. Jackson, Romanic Review, XLIV (1958): 203-205.

C. T. Davis. Dante and the Idea of Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Reviewed by:

            H. G. Hall, American Oxonian, XLV (1958): 151-152.

Francesco De Sanctis. De Sanctis on Dante. Essays edited and translated by Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957. Reviewed by:

T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958) 4: 79-85;

Nicolae Iliescu, Delta (1958) 14: 65-68;

G. N. G. Orsini, Comparative Literature, X (1958): 174-176;

Nicolas Perella, Romance Philology, XI (1958): 415-416;

E. L. Rivers, Italica, XXXV (1958): 220-221;

J. A. Scott, Modern Language Quarterly, XIX (1958): 87-90.

Ruth Mary Fox. Dante Lights the Way. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1958. Reviewed by:

            V. R. Yanitelli, America, C (1958): 376-377.

Robert Gittings. The Mask of Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Reviewed by:

            C. D. Thorpe, Modern Language Notes, LXXIII (1958): 219-223.

Ulrich Leo. Sehen und Wirklichkeit bei Dante. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957. Reviewed by:

            H[elmut H[atzfeld], Comparative Literature, X (1958): 274-276;

            Hans Rheinfelder, Romanische Forschungen, LXX (1958): 393-404.

Letture Dantesche. I. Inferno. Edited by Giovanni Getto. Florence: Sansoni, 1955. (Contains a study of Inferno XIII by Leo Spitzer. See 77th Report, 61.) Reviewed by:

            Michele Messina, in Studi Danteschi, XXXV (1958), 294-297.

Penguin Book of Italian Verse. Edited by George R. Kay. Contains selected poems by Dante. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958. Reviewed by:

            T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, II (Spring 1958) 1: 69-70.

J. A. Mazzeo. Structure and Thought in the “Paradiso.” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958. Reviewed by:

            R[occo] M[ontano], Delta (1958) 14: 69-70.

Ezra Pound. Saggi letterari: Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Milan: Garzanti, 1957. Reviewed by:

            Domenico De Robertis, Studi Danteschi, XXXV (1958): 286-287.

Mario Praz. The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958.  Reviewed by:

            C. B. Beall, Comparative Literature, X (1958): 358-360.

Renato Poggioli. “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno.PMLA, LXXII (1957): 313-358. Reviewed by:

            Dante Della Terza, Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, VII (1958) 62: 384-387.

Elizabeth von Roon-Bassermann. Dante und Aristoteles: Das “Convivio” und der mehrfache Schriftsinn. Freiburg: Herder, 1956. Reviewed by:

            Ulrich Leo, Romanic Review, XLIX (1958): 125-129.

Dorothy L. Sayers. Further Papers on Dante. New York, Harper, 1957. Reviewed by:

T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958) 4: 79-85;

G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611;

Colin Hardie, Italian Studies, XIII (1958): 111-118;

L. V. McDonnell, Catholic World, CLXXXVI (1958): 398-399;

W. M. Miller, Italica, XXXV (1958): 211-214.

Dorothy L. Sayers. Introductory Papers on Dante. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954. Reviewed by:

T. G. Bergin, Speculum, XXXIII (1958): 319-322;

G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611.

C. S. Singleton. Dante Studies 1. Commedia: Elements of Structure. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954. Reviewed by:

            Andrea Ciotti, Convivium, XXVI, (1958): 101-105.

Leo Spitzer. “Il Canto XIII dell’ Inferno.” Letture Dantesche. I. Inferno. A cura di Giovanni Getto. Florence: Sansoni, 1955. Reviewed by:

            Michele Messina, Studi Danteschi, XXXV (1958): 294-297.

Bernard Stambler. Dante’s Other World: The ‘Purgatorio’ as Guide to the ‘Divine Comedy.’ New York: New York University Press, 1957. Reviewed by:

Lienhard Bergel, Books Abroad, XXXII (1958): 448-449;

T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958) 4: 79-85;

W. M. Crittenden, The Personalist, XXXIX (1958): 417-418;

G. P. Elliott, Hudson Review, XI (1958): 597-611;

Kenelm Foster, Blackfriars, XXXIX (1958): 427-428;

W. M. Miller, Italica, XXXV (1958): 211-214;

V. R. Yanitelli, America, C (1958): 376-377.

Domenico Vittorini. The Age of Dante: A Concise History of Italian Culture in the Years of the Early Renaissance. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1957. Reviewed by:

T. G. Bergin, Italian Quarterly, I (Winter 1958) 4: 79-85;

Vincenzo Cioffari, Books Abroad, XXXII (1958): 450;

A. J. De Vito, Modern Language Journal, XLII (1958): 158;

Pearl Kibre, American Historical Review, LXIII (1958): 647-648;

J. C. Nelson, American Scholar, XXVII (1958): 122-124.

Domenico Vittorini. High Points in the History of Italian Literature. New York: David McKay Company, 1958. Reviewed by:

            Sergio Pacifici, Saturday Review, XLI (3 May 1958) 18: 32.