ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a succinct overview of Edoardo Sanguineti's reading of Dante in order to show how it developed from a rigorously formalist analysis of Dante's language to such an easy appropriation of the medieval poet to the life and world of the twenty-first century. It suggests that San guineti's criticism positions Dante as a model for an ideologically engaged and ling uisti cally variegated poetics. In fact, the anthology begins with Sanguineti's introduction to the poetics of the Vita Nuova and ends with his essay on Dante's realism, both composed in 1964/65. Sanguineti's ideological critique of Croce veiled itself as a question of literary form, which was itself sustained by an insistence on historical awareness. In terms of Sanguineti's reading of the Vita Nuova, it is clear that Dante is a model for the poet who rejects the order of the lyric for the restlessness and disorder of a new kind of poetry.
