Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York Review Books (Paperback))

Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity. CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy" IV. The Structure of the "Comedy" V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index

Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.

CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"
V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index

This major work by Erich Auerbach asserts that the "Divine Comedy" contains a conception of art and reality which influenced all later poets and artists. Dante, Auerbach believes, turned away from the idea of man as an abstract or legendary formulation of a moral type, seeing him rather as a known, living, historically bound individual. The book traces the idea and history of man in poetry from Homer to Provencal literature. Dante's early poetry is discussed, together with his love for Beatrice and his political activities. The various influences that shaped the "Divine Comedy" - Virgil, the philosophers, the Provencal poets - are studied, as well as the construction of the poem on the plan of the three orders: the order of the physical universe, the moral order, and the historical-political order. The subject and teaching of the "Divine Comedy" are considered the roots of its poetic beauty, but, even more fundamentally, Auerbach argues that Dante restored to poetry that sense of human presentness, never so fully realized before him, which had ever since been a mimetic constant of great Western art. A precursor and companion to Erich Auerbach's majestic Mimesis, Dante: Poet of the Secular World is both a comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the greatest poets and a brilliantly provocative and stimulating essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, acclaimed by writers and scholars as various as Terry Eagleton, Guy Davenport, and Alfred Kazin as one of the greatest critics of the twentieth century, argues paradoxically but powerfully that it is to Dante, supreme among Christian poets, that we owe the concept of the secular world. Dante's poetry, Auerbach shows, offers an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, and individual and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity