Dante's Craft

<div> <p><i>Dante's Craft</i> was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.</p> <p>In a series of nine essays Professor Cambon discusses Dante's language and style and the influence of his poetry on later writers. The first section a group of six essays is devoted to the critical studies of Dante's own work. A second section consists of chapters devoted to Dante's influence on the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico on certain American writers chiefly Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and on the contemporary Italian poet Eugenio Montale.</p> <p>The pertinence of Dante today is emphasized by Professor Cambon in his introduction to the volume. He writes: Dante's viability for modern literature springs from the depth and latitude of his own probing into the tangled darkness and light of human existence; and as some of the essays here collected attempt to show I have come to believe that Dante can give invaluable clues to the reader of contemporary poetry whether in its expression of derangement in a new Dark Wood or in its rare glimpses of felicity and wholeness.</p> </div>