Bloom, H. “The Strangeness of Dante.” In The Western Canon, 76–104. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Excerpt:

The new historicists and allied resenters have been attempting to reduce and scatter Shakespeare, aiming to undo the Canon by dissolving its center. Curiously, Dante, the second center as it were, is not under similar onslaught, either here or in Italy. Doubtless the assault will come, since the assorted multiculturalists would have difficulty finding a more objectionable great poet than Dante, whose savage and powerful spirit is politically incorrect to the highest degree. Dante is the most aggressive and polemical of the major Western writers, dwarfing even Milton in this regard. Like Milton, he was a political party and a sect of one. His heretical intensity has been masked by scholarly commentary, which even at its best frequently treats him as though his Divine Comedy was essentially versified Saint Augustine. But it is best to begin by marking his extraordinary audacity, which is unmatched in the entire tradition of supposedly Christian literature, including even Milton. Nothing else in Western literature, in the long span from the Y ahwist and Homer through ] oyce and Beckett, is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice, sublimated from being an image of desire to angelic status, in which role she becomes a crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation. Because Beatrice initially matters solely as an instrument of Dante’s will, her apotheosis necessarily involves Dante’s own election as well. His poem is a prophecy and takes on the function of a third Testament in no way subservient to the Old and the New. Dante will not acknowledge that the Comedy must be a fiction, his supreme fiction. Rather, the poem is the truth, universal and not temporal. What Dante the pilgrim sees and says in the narrative of Dante the poet is intended to persuade us perpetually of Dante’s poetic and religious inescapability. The poem’s gestures of humility, on the part of pilgrim or of poet, impress Dante scholars but are rather less persuasive than the poem’s subversion of all other poets and its persistence in bringing forward Dante’s own apocalyptic potential.

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