[In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1960, Brandeis describes the Paradiso as “the supreme test of Dante's poetic power,” since this work presented the formidable challenge of conveying transcendent experience using worldly language and conventional poetic devices.]

The third canticle [of The Divine Comedy] is the supreme test of Dante's poetic power, since here he faces the virtually impossible task of making the concrete world of images suggest an experience which is totally foreign to almost every reader, and which, by its very nature, would seem untranslatable into words. It is a supreme test of the reader, too: if he is honest, he will see that the book has no easy charm; he must give it the severest attention before he can come to its severe and radiant beauty. He must lay aside altogether the comforting vain little joke about the boredom of the eternal hosannas of Heaven as compared with the liveliness of Hell. Lastly, if he have not yet lifted up his neck for bread of angels, he must wish to try.

As for the critic, all persons who write or talk about the Paradiso must not merely take heed of Dante's perfectly serious warning to those who try to follow him in little skiffs¹—which is warning with regard to the high sense of the poem—but must, whatever the size of their craft, beware of pursuing a poetic effect as though it were a murderer at large. For it is one thing to shoot a desperado, and another to make an interesting corpse of so living and resistant a work of art. I give notice that I am aware of these dangers; and, being perhaps about to fall into the trap (when all I mean to do is to report certain facts), I warn the reader duly. Let him keep the text of the Paradiso in his hand; it has for over six hundred years successfully protected itself against critical shrinkage and deformation.

The pilgrim's voyage in the Paradiso is in its simplest sense an effortless rising from sphere to sphere of a concentric, ten-sphered universe, with the earth at centre and the unmoving Empyrean outmost. It is at the same time the travelling of an immaterial path of intellectual light, educating him in the relation of human life to eternal being, and of human judgment to absolute truth; leading him finally to a momentary glimpse of the ordering and limiting principle of all existence, the totally immaterial Goal and Source of all thought and all matter.

But this is far easier to state neatly than truly, for a precision of ideas, if one can reach it, is no more the ideal key to the final poetic experience than to the spiritual transformation Dante is attempting to render. The lovely verb trasumanar, a key-word to the canticle, opening and locking at the same time, epitomizes our difficulty: if the poet speaks as one transhumanized, he must borrow and patch up human language to express this state; while the reader, as he grasps the notion of transhumanization, grasps also the fact of his own remoteness from it.

By its imaging process the poem develops this necessary sense of remoteness, with its implicit insights. The literal journey does not, as in the earlier canticles, form a concrete and easily grasped starting point for the steps of the figurative journey. In the Paradiso as the goal of the whole action is more and more closely approximated to light, the field of the literal journey thins away into the airiest remnant of concreteness; the travellers enter into the body of the moon; they halt on the body of the sun, unscorched; there is no visible landscape whatever on the planets, and nothing meets the eye but souls and soul-formations. Furthermore, nothing that is witnessed in Heaven—neither the appearances of souls nor their motions—corresponds to any familiar experience. The souls are sparks and torches; they move in garlands, in cross-form, in eagle-outline. There is no anchorage in the home world of solid things for these strange sights. We are lifted from firm ground and set down on, surrounded by, discoursed to by light. Too much of it? More variations, embellishments and contradictions of experience than the reader can take in? But surely nobody ever knew better than Dante what he risked, as well as what he stood to gain. Surely he meant to press the reader beyond the commonplace, saturate him with light, force him to struggle with it in difficult symbols and interlocked analogies, to feel it as energy and delight in the innumerable splendours, sparklings, whirlings, brightenings, with their musical quality and their dancing motion. He meant to inundate the reader with images of light until the incandescence, increased beyond anything that might be mistaken for mere visibilia—the outrageous incandescence—together with all the things seen which could not possibly be seen by eyes, suggest what they are intended to mean, and precipitate an intellectual atmosphere filled with the exultancy of understanding and its consequent love. We are supposed to understand Beatrice well when she describes the Empyrean as composed of

“luce intellettüal, piena d'amore;
          amor di vero ben, pien di letizia;
          letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.”

“light intellectual full-charged with love, love of true good full-charged with gladness, gladness which transcendeth every sweetness.”

XXX, 40-42

By the time we reach the final three heavens with their increasingly extraordinary sights, Dante has led us to feel suspended between two kinds of being: cut away from the almost familiar variety in which ideas are couched in matter, and craning forward towards the ideal, where they exist in total independence. Deliberately and gradually he has undone our sense of an abiding metaphor under whose terms we have been able to view alternately two sorts of reality, two sorts of brightness—the one sensible, the other ideal—and has left us with a peculiar new awareness of the two as integrated, absolute, as one thing, perfectly real, but of which we cannot say what thing it is. This entity is what the transhumanized eyes see. It is what the reader is left craning forward towards, with the feeling that the very slightest additional push would precipitate him, too, into it. Dante has led us as close as he could to an approximation of what he understands to be at the heart of existence. How close, how worth following, each reader determines for himself.

Two images based on light—one at the beginning, one close to the end of the canticle—gather up between them and summarize the great theme of God's action, both creative and resumptive, as an eternal shattering of his light into the universe and a gathering back of its reflections from every member of the creation. The first of these images describes the primal issuing of the One into the Many, and governs all the analyses of the poem. It is extremely brief:

La gloria di colui che tutto move
          per l'universo penetra e risplende
          in una parte più e meno altrove.

The glory of him who moves all things penetrates throughout the universe and reglows in one place more and in another less.²

I, 1-3

The second describes the essential interrelationship of all created things and their attributes, celebrating the consummation of universal wholeness in God. It governs the syntheses of the poem, and is their final statement. The pilgrim, looking into the absolute light, records this:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
          legato con amore in un volume,
          ciò che per l'universo si squaderna;
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume,
          quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo
          che ciò ch'i' dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
          credo ch'i' vidi …

Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe: substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame.

The universal form of this complex I think that I beheld …

XXXIII, 85-92

If one reads the opening triplet in the popular mood suggested by Dante's reputation as a “beautiful” poet, it is quite likely that one will pass it with no more than a vague impression that something grand and vaguely pious has been uttered. If, however, one expects something more precise of the terms, they will, without losing the grandeur they possess (in Italian), show that they are clearly chosen and distinguished in a carefully balanced statement, meaningful down to the very order in which the words appear. The glory comes first—the radiance of God as logical subject of the whole passage. The all-mover occupies a stirring, yet merely descriptive, attributive clause. The two actions of the glory—penetrates and reglows—seem at first to balance one another perfectly, each with its modifying phrase, the one expressing the outgoing, the other the return of light; reglows, however, is weighted by its position at the end of the line, stopping us for a moment as though the train of thought were completed. The final phrase, which does complete the thought, surprises and challenges, and invites us to ask: why, in what way, by what cause does the reflection from the creation differentiate the light which comes to it without distinction of kind or quantity?

The canticle will be at work above all to answer this. It will revert again and again to all these terms, developing each in a variety of instances; but it will be a poem chiefly concerned with the reflected splendour of the universe. Eventually this opening image will expand over the whole range of the canticle until all its terms and their relations are as acutely felt as they are articulated. They will be felt as celebratory of what is and must remain a mystery, yet, as always with Dante, they themselves will be unfolded with utter lucidity and exquisite precision.

The first simple statement of the glory is clarified in the traditional matter of the canticle dealing with the divine mystery by which God produces the plurality of the creation. He who moves all things is shown to be in essence Absolute Truth (that truth … beyond which no truth hath range³); in manifestation Absolute Light (that deep light which in itself is true⁴); and in action glory or radiance. The glory is shown penetrating equably throughout the universe, distinct and yet not separate from God (the living light issues in such a way from its source that it departeth not therefrom⁵), and emerges more and more clearly as signifying Christ, the Logos or Word of God (the splendour of that idea which our Sire begets in loving⁶), until the full radiance of creative energy becomes synonymous with the Son of God.

But the second statement of the opening image is of more than equal weight and of greater expansion in the poem. The reglow is the testimony, by light, of God's presence in creatures. It is the reverberation of light from the creation's mirroring of God. The most superb poetry of the Paradiso arises from Dante's concern with this response of the universe to the light that forms and informs it. That every least creature furnishes a gleam or a splendour according to its kind and capacity—so that a blade of wheat and a king testify to the same formative Intelligence and the same ultimate goal, while their excellence or failure results from the conditions of their receptivity—this is what the poet feels wherever his eye falls on the pursuit each creature so painstakingly makes of its own entelechy; this is what he unfolds in instance after instance, full of love, pity, wonder and awe. This is the subject he is in love with. The world points to God, instructs him in God; and God sends him back again, with certain lessons learned, into the world.

The whole hierarchy of created things, from angels to clods, lies somewhere in the light-path, unequally open to it, according as their substance is of one kind or another, and, within kinds, of one degree or another of receptivity:

Nell'ordine ch'io dico sono accline
          tutte nature, per diverse sorti,
          più al principio loro e men vicine;
onde si muovono a diversi porti
          per lo gran mar dell'essere, …

In the order of which I speak all things incline by diverse lots more near and less unto their principle; wherefore all move to diverse ports o'er the great sea of being …

I, 109-113

The angelic host receive the light directly, divide it piecemeal among themselves, and in their reglow shed it downward and outward into the creation as from so many mirrors wherein it breaketh.⁷ And mirrors they are, of the periscope variety, receiving from above and reflecting into the world below. Intent forever upon God, the angels are pure receptacles of light; they contain nothing else, no medium intervenes between them and their object of contemplation, they are aware of none of the differentiations of time or space.⁸ Indifferent in the same sense as God to where the light falls in its reflection from them, they make no distinction between one or other tenement⁹ that may be open to receive it.

The souls of the blest, too, stand in the direct path of the light, and reglow to the point where nothing else of them but their light is visible: in the seven planetary heavens they are perceptible to the pilgrim's eye only as sparks, torches, splendours. But whereas the angels are composed of light, these are swathed with it, each according to its greater or lesser capacity sharing sweet life, with difference, by feeling more and less the eternal breath.¹⁰ And while direct intelligence of God is in the angelic being, the souls perceive God as external to themselves, however close, and everywhere deeper and wider than their capacity to scan or plumb. Turned directly towards him, they look into him as into the veracious mirror which doth make itself reflector of all other things,¹¹ and read there accurately whatever the scope of their own vision permits. This is what the soul of St Thomas means when he says to the pilgrim:

“Così com'io del suo raggio resplendo,
          sì, riguardando nella luce etterna,
          li tuoi pensieri onde cagioni apprendo.”

“Even as I glow within its ray, so gazing into the eternal light I apprehend whence thou dost take occasion for thy thoughts.”

XI, 19-21

And similarly Cacciaguida to the pilgrim:

“… i minori e' grandi
          di questa vita miran nello speglio
          in che, prima che pensi, il pensier pandi.”

“… less and great in this life gaze on the mirror whereon, ere thou thinkest, thou dost outspread thy thought.”

XV, 61-63

The God-light when it enters the world, as we have seen, is indirect, reflected down from the angelic receivers, and thus tempered to weak receptacles. Each creature, well-made or poorly such as Nature furnishes it—takes what it can of the proffered light; each makes a fresh alloy with it, and reglows accordingly. Let men not complain of this differentiation of individuals, for it is not the amount of light he may be able to receive that determines how well a man may live, but his clear or sullied use of it.¹² Great and small minds are found in Hell and Heaven. Further, this differentiation is man's collective boon: because of it man may live diversely and with diverse offices,¹³ and from the varied human membership create the ordered unity of the state.

Differentiation that resolves itself in unity, unity that gives birth to plurality—this is the way of God (as the two great images beginning and ending the Paradiso indicate), and the model followed as nearly as possible by man. The human intelligence divides its single light among the several faculties with which it explores experience; but, too, it strives to unify its perceptions in speculation. Now speculation, as we have already observed, is in Dante's view the supreme function of the human race. And, whether he judges entirely by the distinction this ability confers on man, or in part by the value he, himself, sets on it, Dante's strong sense of order is also pleased to observe that speculation has its divine archetype. How this may be we can see by examining the word speculation which proves, like its counterpart, reflection, to be a metaphor, and to mean in its literal sense, mirroring. Thus the human speculator who begins by mirroring such bits of truth as he may, copies the mirror of all mirrors which captures everything.¹⁴

Some mortal mirrors are darkened, as we have noted in Hell; but however faint or falsely coloured the light which reglows from these, it is one with that which illuminates the saints. For if aught else than the eternal good seduce your love, naught is it save some vestige of this light, ill understood, that shineth through therein.¹⁵

Actually the notion of this single light, everywhere given and everywhere sought after, running along so many strands of thought and action throughout the Comedy, is at the heart of the poem's deep life, so that one is false to it to some extent in every schematic or localized discussion. It yields, for example, an acute and profound approach to the tragic quality of man's existence, nowhere stated but built into the whole poem, hint by hint, from the earliest cantos. For we see that man's supreme objective is that unqualified absolute Light which is his source. We see that it was desire for this that engendered his first disobedience and brought about his Fall. In the world he is cut off from it, striving for it. In his notion of truth, which he holds to in his dispossession, and even in pagan ignorance, lies his guarantee that it exists. After long ages of bridgeless remoteness, it has again been made accessible by the Redemption. Yet it is still distant; and man is born with fallible senses and no knowledge of the roads. Material things lure him into their comfortable shadow; they generate the Dark Wood of desire into which he is virtually sure to stumble; they generate the three Beasts who, if he cannot circumvent them, will press him by their own paths into the darkest region of all, where he can no longer distinguish the cause of his suffering nor, therefore, cure it. But should he escape the Beasts, he must still pass through Hell and face its dangers in almost naked ignorance, in order to get the first glimmering of the light he so intensely desires and cannot yet locate. And if he emerges (the risk is very great), he must face the arduous purgatorial journey into that submission of self to a power greater than self, which Adam refused, and at which the Old Adam still rebels.

Between the downpouring of the light described in the first lines of the canticle and the gathering of the whole created universe into God at the end, lies the path travelled by Dante's pilgrim, from the condition of moral enlightenment in which he left Purgatory to the instant of transcendent illumination that completes the narrative. His moral education occurred under the light of the natural sun, the greatest minister of nature, who with the worth of heaven stampeth the world,¹⁶ displaying to him the practical good—the achievements of making and doing, witnessed in the things done and made there on the mountain. But doing and making are paths; they are undertaken for the sake of something else. If this is so they must come to an end when their goal is reached. And Dante takes this goal to be the perfect understanding that transcends all phenomena, together with its natural consequence of love for that which is understood. The souls of the elect in Paradise have come to the natural end of action, the natural end of their craving for things, and into the possession of them all in flawless contemplation.

The light that fills these souls they reflect willingly upon the living pilgrim. They shower him with discursive lessons, they teach him by their altered and still altering appearances, by their audible harmony and visible grace and ardour, until he begins to know how to winnow the phenomena of space and time for their concealed truths and how to value these on an eternal scale.

Beatrice, too, reflects her light on him. It is by gazing into her eyes and imitating her glance that he rises into the first heaven. With every lesson he masters, because he can see better, more brilliance is made manifest to him in her. She explains this to him in the first sphere:

“S'io ti fianmeggio nel caldo d'amore
          di là dal modo che 'n terra si vede,
          sì che delli occhi tuoi vinco il valore,
non ti maravigliar; che ciò procede
          da perfetto veder …”

“If I flame on thee in the warmth of love, beyond the measure witnessed upon earth, and so vanquish the power of thine eyes,

marvel not; for this proceedeth from perfect vision …”

V, 1-5

and adds:

“Io veggio ben sì come già resplende
          nell' intelletto tuo l'etterna luce …”

“Well do I note how in thine intellect already doth reglow the eternal light …”

V, 7-8

More and more refulgent until her beauty, which is a transcript of her light, is beyond the poet's ability to describe, Beatrice leads him from sphere to sphere of insight. With every apparent brightening we know that some further film of the human limitation has been lifted from his eyes. In the upper heavens he is blinded three times. The first of these seizures follows his seeing Christ as a sun surrounded by the lamps of the elect, in the Starry Heaven. Recovering, he records only that he now saw Beatrice with new clarity. Next blinded during his catechism by St John, he is restored by Beatrice and better than before I saw thereafter.¹⁷ Finally his vision is dazzled out by the living web of light that surrounds him when he enters the Empyrean; and, recovering, he notes that there is no such brightness unalloyed that mine eyes might not hold their own with it.¹⁸

There comes to his view at once a new sort of vision: a river of light from which emerge living sparks that drop into the cups of flowers along the banks. The sparks are angels; the flowers the redeemed. In this beguiling and surprising figure—which shows the One as a stream, always yet never the same, divided among its own drops and the flowers which these drops beget and nourish—Dante intends a thinning of the already tenuous symbolic mask that separates the pilgrim's mind from essential reality. Yet these appearances, however they enter his new eyes, are still, Beatrice warns, merely the shadowy prefaces of their reality.¹⁹ The pilgrim drinks the river with his eyes²⁰; at once it changes into a rose of light bearing on its petals the hosts of the redeemed visible in yet one more new way. It is impossible for the poet to convey how he beheld them. But as folk under masks seem other than before, if they do off the semblance not their own wherein they hid them,²¹ both angels and the elect are now truly visible.

One must assume that the last of the progressively thinner sensuous appearances of things has here been removed, and that the pilgrim now sees essences without veil. I say we must assume this because, while everything points to this, it is a change we cannot be asked to follow with our own eyes. And indeed, the poet's language still contradicts it, speaking of the appearance of the rose, its colour and breadth, the faces of angels and the countenances of the blest. But such language continues to appear for somewhat the same reason Dante invokes to explain why the Scriptures assign a human-like body to God²²: it is a language of accommodation, permitting the reader to grasp at least the nature, at least the direction, of the experience which—as experience—lies outside his reach.

Recognizing that the poem must either become silent at this point or else adopt the language of common reality, Dante makes the only choice possible to him. But we know that the faces and the petals of the rose which we imagine under sensuous form are not there at all in such form. They are in the pilgrim's mind. They are akin perhaps to what Kant calls intellectual or original perceptions, unmediated by time or space. The strongest proof that this is what Dante intends lies less in his repeated protests that he cannot tell what he saw than in the sudden, astonishing re-emergence of simple recognizability in the appearances of the blest. Heretofore all had been dazzling sparks of light. But St Bernard, appearing in Beatrice's place at the pilgrim's side as the rose comes to view, is an elder clad like the folk in glory. His eyes and cheeks were overpoured with benign gladness, in kindly gesture as befits a tender father.²³ And from here on each member of the host is recognized at a glance.

It follows that God, too, if seen at all, must be seen by direct intellectual perception, without sensuous intermediation. And what else can be meant by such language as: my sight, becoming purged, now more and more was entering through the ray of the deep light which in itself is true²⁴? What else (when the pilgrim fixes his eyes on the supreme light) can be meant by: Thenceforward was my vision mightier than our discourse, which faileth at such sight, and faileth memory at so great outrage²⁵? God is witnessed as light, yes—but light shorn of every physical attribute, light as an intellectual percept, and thus in a way quite unavailable to mortal minds. And yet—the poem can do what no reasoning could do. It has crammed and crowded the reader's mind with images of light, dazzled him out of sensuous response; so that what remains is the idea of light without specific form, and he can by the analogy of this experience move towards some fleeting sense of what it might be to be suffused with truth, yet not to see, feel, taste, touch or smell.

We come at this point in the narrative of the Comedy to the second of the two great images which divide the Paradiso's theme between them, and which begin and end the canticle. In it the poet records the final and culminating vision of pure light and of the totality and unity of being. Bound in the volume of that light are the contents of universal creation: the scattered leaves of all the universe, substance and accidents and their relations as though together fused, the universal form of this complex. What are we to understand by this miraculous summary? The light, we know, is God; and God, according to Dante's theology, is an unmoved mover, receiving nothing whatsoever from without. But Dante's image does not contradict this. God is an eternal mirror of his own radiance reflected back from every member of the creation. He is the point whereto all times are present.²⁶ Since his being is outside the dimension of time, there is no before or after in him, therefore his creative act and the response of his creatures throughout all time are, in his eternal dimension, simultaneous. Since his being is not in space, there is no place in him, and he is in no place; therefore all created things are, in his spaceless dimension, real yet without concrete form, and coexistent. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, both as men conceive these—in a series—and as he himself does, with no lapse whatever between. As light he sends forth the creative ray that sets up the temporal-spatial universe and illumines it. As light he mirrors eternally the totality of the result.

The stress in the whole final canto falls clearly on the mystery of the many in the one, as in the earlier parts of the canticle it fell on the issuing of the one into multiplicity. In the flame of the final vision the pilgrim sees gathered the scattered leaves of all the universe, the total record of all that tends towards being and all that achieves it, fused into a flawless, simple whole. In the flame the universe is resumed without seam or break, freed of its delusive extensions in time and space; the strewn puzzle is assembled, the harmony of all its fragments established. If the flame is God in his totality and simplicity, the gathered leaves are the presence in him of that Idea which he expatiates in the creation. The pilgrim, gazing at the one in the other, stands in the presence of that towards which the whole cure of his eyes has been directed: that good of the intellect which those in Hell have lost, the primal Truth from which all men's splinter truths derive and by which in turn they must be measured. He comes to this vision of wholeness, as the story has told us, after the bitterest experience of wrong seeing, loss of way, miraculous aid, and a journey that regenerates the mind's eyes. A glimpse is all he gets—or needs. The vision breaks. He is returned to the world as a homing pilgrim in whom desire and will are now rolled by divine love even as a wheel that moveth equally.

Thus the pilgrim becomes again the poet; the poet who was the pilgrim is ready to write down the story and the sense of his journey; and the wheel-shaped Comedy of Dante Alighieri begins again.

Notes

1. Par. II, 1-15

2. The Carlyle-Wicksteed translation has here been altered to follow the original more exactly.

3. IV, 125-126

4. XXXIII, 54

5. XIII, 55-57

6. XIII, 53-54

7. XXIX, 143-144

8. Dante follows Aquinas in his definition of angels: they are, according to the Convivio, “substances sejunct from matter, to wit Intelligences.” In the same book Dante supposes that Plato had the angels in mind when he postulated his Ideas. Plato, he says (II, V, 20 ff.), “laid down not only as many Intelligences as there are movements of heaven, but just as many as there are kinds of things … And Plato called them Ideas”. If one follows the lead of this reasoning, one will see something of the rationale of angels, and will understand the importance they had for Dante as filling a place which would otherwise have been left vacant in the hierarchy of substances—namely that of pure act, free of any potentiality (see Par. XXIX, 13-36). I do not mean, however, to overstress the logic of these beings. Their gleaming presences express something further, namely that Truth is otherwise to be perceived as beauty.

9. VIII, 129

10. IV, 35-36

11. XXVI, 103-108

12. See Piccarda's remarks in III, 70-87.

13. VIII, 118

14. It follows that eyes capable of looking at God must see the total contents of all the minor, differently angled mirrors of the creation—and among these the whole history of every mortal mind. So says the great image at the end of the poem.

15. V, 10-12

16. Par. X, 28-29

17. XXVI, 79

18. XXX, 58

19. XXX, 78

20. XXX, 88-89

21. XXX, 91-92

22. Cf. IV, 40 ff.

23. XXXI, 59-63

24. XXXIII, 52-54

25. XXXIII, 55-57

26. XVII, 17-18

Bibliography

I. Works by Dante

La Divina Commedia: the best standard Italian edition is that of the Società Dantesca Italiana, with copious notes and commentary by Scartazzini and Vandelli. This is revised and reissued at frequent intervals by Hoepli at Milan.

Le Opere: testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana. Florence, 1921.

Le Rime (ed. Gianfranco Contini). Turin, 1946.

Complete works in English translation, with the original printed on facing pages, except in the case of the Latin works; in five volumes, Temple Classics edition. London and New York.

II. Criticism and Aids to Criticism

Auerbach, Erich: Dante, Poet of the Secular World, transl. by R. Manheim. University of Chicago Press, 1961.

———. “Figura” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, transl. by R. Manheim. Meridian Books, New York, 1959.

———. Mimesis, transl. by W. Trask. Princeton University Press, 1953.

Bodkin, Maude: Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Vintage Books, New York, 1958.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K.: “Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought?” in volume of the same title. Luzac & Co., Ltd., London, 1946.

Croce, Benedetto: The Poetry of Dante, transl. by D. Ainslee. Henry Holt, New York, 1922.

De Sanctis, Francesco: Esposizione Critica della Divina Commedia. Naples, 1921.

Di Pino, Guido: La Figurazione della Luce nella Divina Commedia. Florence, 1952.

Dunbar, H. Flanders: Symbolism in Medieval Thought. Yale University Press, 1929.

Eliot, T. S.: “Dante” in Selected Essays. Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1932.

Fergusson, Francis: Dante's Drama of the Mind. Princeton University Press, 1953.

Fletcher, Jefferson B.: Symbolism of the Divine Comedy. Columbia University Press, 1921.

Gardner, Edmund: Dante's Ten Heavens. Constable & Co., Ltd., London, 1900.

———. Dante and the Mystics. Dutton, New York, 1913.

Malagoli, Luigi: Linguaggio e poesia nella Divina Commedia. Genoa, 1949.

Maritain, Jacques: “Dante's Innocence and Luck” in Kenyon Review. Gambier, Ohio, Spring, 1952.

Moore, Edward: Studies in Dante (in four series). Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1896-1917.

Santayana, George: Three Philosophical Poets. Harvard University Press, 1910.

Singleton, Charles: An Essay on the Vita Nuova. Harvard University Press, 1949.

———. Commedia: Elements of Structure. Harvard University Press, 1954.

———. Journey to Beatrice. Harvard University Press, 1958.

Stambler, Bernard: Dante's Other World. New York University Press, 1957.

Toynbee, Paget: Dante Studies and Researches. Milford, Oxford, 1921.

Wicksteed, Philip: Dante and Aquinas. Dutton, New York, 1913.

———. From Vita Nuova to Paradiso. Longmans & Co., Ltd., London, 1922.