Dante

Dante

By R. W. B. Lewis
$15.00
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“History, literature, love, and religion come together in this graceful biography of the world’s most revered and influential poet…Lewis makes palpable the intellectual and imaginative energy that fired…The author notes autobiographical elements in all Dante’s works without trivializing their creative majesty, and if the poet’s personality is somewhat muffled across the distance of eight centuries, his artistic presence still ‘sparkles and sings and smiles like one of the spirits in Paradise.’ Drawing cogently (and with generous acknowledgment) on previous scholarship, this volume worthily fulfills its mission as an entry in the excellent Penguin Lives series of short biographies for the general reader.”

Amazon.com, editorial review

In Dante, Lewis traces the life and complex development—emotional, artistic, philosophical—of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later. Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with life and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante’s own autobiography—and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies.
 
“Lewis has an uncanny ability to capture crucial moments in Dante’s life and development as an artist.”—Booklist