ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the civic experience lived by Dante, and the civic ideal which lies at the heart of his moral vision, touch directly on the Commedia's poetics. It suggests how Dante's contact with the rich and varied experience of life in a medieval city may have influenced the plurilingual stylistic experimentation of the Com media. The chapter attempts to cast light on the links which Dante forges between his poem's underlying civic structure and his own fundamental need to communicate, through his writing, with a broad-based public. Babel becomes in Dante's account, a precise inversion of the political expedient of living 'diversamente per diversi offici'. Dante's apparent hostility towards the 'municipal languages of the Italian cities in the De vulgari eioquentia seems somewhat surprising in view of the centrality of the notion of the city elsewhere in the poet's work.
