ABSTRACT
Certain prejudices die hard, in life as in literature, and Dante has suffered his share of critical prejudice. From Hegel to Victor Hugo, from Fauriel to De Sanctis, and during the whole of the present century, from Saint-John Perse to Mandelstam to Borges, there has been a frequent insistence on the monumental character of Dante’s poem, on its architectonic compactness; it has been compared at times with the powerful structure of a Gothic cathedral, at times with the miraculous play of correspondences visible in a crystal. Others have insisted on the steely, four-square character of Dante himself, passing severe verdicts on humanity from his eternal judgment seat. In fact, nothing is philologically further from the truth, whether we consider the genesis of the work (certainly not created at a stroke or in one individual block), or whether we consider the temperament of the author. He has his nuanced zones, certain contradictions, even a personal fragility, but in addition, and this is a constant, that intrepid ability to begin again from zero, enriched by all his previous experiences, which make him out to be, as Gianfranco Contini rightly saw, the supreme champion of experimentalism.
