ABSTRACT
The Paradiso's saturation with effects of self-reflexion makes it only the more manifestly a quintessence of lyric. In the Paradiso, the lyricism of Dante's epic and prophetic poem, the Commedia, intensifies, just as its narrative and dramatic features, in certain respects, attenuate. The Paradiso's language is peculiarly designed not so much to represent Paradise as to presence it-to render it palpable as a sensuous plenitude in the experience of poetic language itself. An intensively lyrical poetics of presence in the Paradiso is felt fully and is brought to the center of attention in Dante's first encounter with souls in Paradise. Everything, as it appears in the poem, is given from a conceptual creation that the poem itself engenders and that actualizes Paradise as the immediate experience of divine presence. Dante’s careful conceptual elaborations give his language a sense of stability as anchored to a reality that is beyond language.
