ABSTRACT
Whatever knowledge Søren Kierkegaard might have had of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri or his works, we know that he conceived of Dante as a “brooding genius,” a thinker who “contemplated the mysteries of eternal life” and a poet whose imaginative poetry did not “suspend the effect of the ethical verdict.”1 It might be said that these words also apply to Kierkegaard himself; especially if we consider that for Kierkegaard “eternal life” is to be found within lived experience, we might say that Kierkegaard is a “peculiar kind of poet or thinker” in precisely these ways. We find in Dante, as in Kierkegaard, a devout but fiercely critical religious thinker and a poet who is both richly imaginative and ethically insightful.
