Beatrice and the Poetry of Dante

Abstract

In sketching the portrait of Virgil I have tried to show the earthly reality, the humanity, naturally imperfect, that belongs to him and confers upon him his corresponding poetical perfection. He germinates from the stratum of everyday experience, the kind that anyone can have with his contemporaries, and if the person enjoying such experience is a great poet the result is a poetical figure like that of Dante's Virgil. Exactly the opposite happens in the case of Beatrice. She had to be from the beginning something supernatural, something perfect, not earthly but celestial. She was not to resemble the young woman of Florence whose name she bore: she was to be as different from the latter as an angel is different from a woman. We shall have to see whether the poet succeeded as well in creating a woman on the plane of the other world as he did in creating a man grown in the soil of earthly experience.