The Poets' Dante

Essays on the most celebrated Italian poet by the eminent poets of the twentieth century.

This collection is a testament to Dante's continuing, uncanny presence in twentieth-century poetry; a presence that appears, as Robert Lowell observed, "in the way most gratifying to a poet — in the works of his fellow poets who write long after, in other styles and other languages." The collection brings together previously published essays by some of our most renowned poets: Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Montale, Borges, Lowell, Merrill, Nemerov, Auden, and Heaney. But the editors have also commissioned new reflections on Dante by a number of others: Charles Wright, Jacqueline Osherow, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Geoffrey Hill, Rosanna Warren, W. S. Di Piero, Daniel Halpern, Alan Williamson, Mark Doty, C. K. Williams, Mary Campbell, and Edward Hirsch. These poets approach Dante as both model and foil, in fresh responses to his legacy that are contentious as well as admiring. Together they attest to what Mandelstam called Dante's "inexhaustible contemporaneity."

Peter S. Hawkins is Professor of Religion and Literature at Boston University and director of the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts. Rachel Jacoff is Professor of Italian at Wellesley College.