Chapter 5: Dante’s Three Beasts

This chapter gives Dante’s literary biography, as had Dorothy Sayers with the Inferno, in these three parts. Its Leopard section discusses his youthful writings, which include perhaps the Mare amoroso, his lyric poetry of sung canzoni, beginning, he tells us, with “A ciascun’alma presa, e gentil core” at eighteen, and the “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore”, which he then embeds in Vita nova XIX and at Purgatorio XXIV.49–51, as well as its presence in the Vatican Canzoniere. His Vita nova creates prose autobiographical incarnational chapters as frames for the poems, in prosimetron, as Boethius had also done. The Lion section of this chapter will discuss Dante’s tragic Exile and his espousal of Empire, with his restless and usually unfinished prose writings of the De monarchia, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Convivio, in Latin and Italian prose. Its Wolf section, his Commedia, recalls Saint Francis’ conversion of the Wolf of Gubbio as Dante’s taming of the tragedy of his Exile; the Libro del Chiodo, metamorphosed into the Pilgrimage of his Commedia, his returning to the beauty of the poetry of his youth from his bitter middle period of unfinished prose writings about poetry and politics.