ABSTRACT
Written on the occasion of Della Terza Dante’s 700th anniversary in 1965, Susanna Pasolini’s first extensive article on the Comedia, ‘La volonta di Dante “a” essere poeta’, can be read today as just a fragment, though one of the most eloquent, of his Dantism. Especially in the twentieth century, the intertextual relationship between Dante and other authors has been largely treated, as Zygmunt Baranski rightly stressed, as the study of the ‘explicitly marked, often learned, and normally intentional borrowing from Dante’. Giorgio Barberi Squarotti remarked that Pasolini was the closest writer to Dante in post-war Italy. The posthumous publication of Petrolio, including the infernal representation of ‘La visione del Merda’, certainly contributed to a more extended investigation of Pasolini’s Dantism. Pasolini’s considerations on Dante’s realism developed at a time when debates on neorealism, and then on socialist realism, dominated the Italian cultural panorama.
