/lit/ - Literature

>Dante in a way is a stronger Milton, and his overcoming of all rivals, ancient and contemporary, is even more convincing than Milton's triumph, if only because Shakespeare always lingers on in Milton. Dante affects the way we read Virgil, and Shakespeare can severely alter our approach to Milton. But Virgil has little effect upon our understanding of Dante, because the actual Epicurean Virgil has been abrogated by Dante.
>The reader who comes freshly to Dante will see very quickly that no other secular author is so absolutely convinced that his own work is the truth, all of the truth that matters most. Milton and perhaps the later Tolstoy approximate Dante's fierce conviction of rightness, but they both reflect contending realities as well and show more of the strain of isolated vision. Dante is so strong-rhetorically, psychologically, spiritually-that he dwarfs their self-confidence. Theology is not his ruler but his resource, one resource among many. No one can deny that Dante is a supernaturalist, a Christian, and a theologian, or at least a the ological allegorist. But all received concepts and images undergo extraordinary transformations in Dante