Milton and Mazzoni: The Genre of the "Divina Commedia"

Abstract

CRITICISM of Paradise Lost and the Divina Commedia has been all too often a comparison of incommensurables'.1 In the long history of this hackneyed parallel' as Mario Praz has termed it,2 few critics have given adequate emphasis to the fundamental difference in literary species and its bearing on the structure, orientation, and style of either work. A closely related problemMilton's awareness of this basic difference in genre-has likewise been neglected. The very critics who have expatiated most glibly on the imagined similarities and differences of the two poems, who have placed the greatest emphasis on Milton's respect for Dante as evidenced in his Commonplace Book, his letters, his poetry, and his pamphlets, have failed to inquire precisely what sort of poem Milton conceived the Commedia to be. What, in Milton's eyes, was the genre of Dante's poem? How far did its generic attributes render it-in theme, structure, and style-incommensurable with Paradise Lost? On these pointsvital to the whole problem of his relation to Dante-Milton himself