ABSTRACT
Robert Duncan's way with Dante Alighieri looks as though it grew from a feeling of confident familiarity. None of the other writers included in The Poets' Dante take quite such liberties with their subject, though many write of him with the kind of relaxed perceptiveness that derives from long acquaintance. In The Poets' Dante, both are much in evidence as perceptive and creative are combined in varying proportions and to differing ends. Submerged in The Poets' Dante is evidence for a sociology of Dante commentary, a study of what kind of poet has wanted or been invited to pronounce upon him, and in what circumstances. The editors' aim is to provide 'something more primary than the thoughts of literary critics', a rationale which both gestures towards the workaday distinction between primary and secondary sometimes drawn in bibliographies, and, being framed as a comparative, 'more primary', spurns it.
