ABSTRACT
The theological bent or bias is potentially present within this tradition from its origins, but Dante makes theology programmatically the originary ground of the poetic and prophetic word in his Commedia. The scene is described with an insistence on self-reflexivity that brings to culmination this overarching motif structuring in filigree Dante's entire text. Nonetheless, the positive potential and fecundity of reflection is presupposed and is already clamoring for notice among the Troubadours at the courtly origins of modern lyric poetry, and for Dante its basis is theological. Dante celebrates a new awakening to awareness of self as reflected in the Other in the fresh light of springtime as urged on by the innate promptings of desire, the natural animations of love, in a self-reflexive rhetoric that expresses a budding sensibility and consciousness.
