The Paradiso [antikvár]

. ¦; ,( ' 1 Introduction ; i Dante's claim for the Paradiso, the last cantica of his poem, is as daring as it is clear: "My coiirse is set for an uncharted sea." History has in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the fiction of the poem, the pilgrim's course is privileged beyond the aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplishes what no other poet had ever dared. Throughout the Divine Comedy, the metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrim's journey and the progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new Jason, who returns widi the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of God and the poem that we read. For the twentieth-centmy reader, the fiction of the story requires a great effort of the imagination—few of us stiU believe in a paradise in any form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not the landscape, are quite familiar. For this reason, the Paradiso is often thought of as the most "medieval" part of the poem. This reputation should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it remains daring and even contemporary. By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since. The quest of Romantic poets and their successors for "pure poetry" has for its prototype the Paradiso. \ . i The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical de- ; ' i, ,! i parture from that of the Purgatorio, as the latter repre- i j. j'' 1 I I ' ' 11 I ' ¦