Dante: Poet of the Secular World

This major work by Erich Auerbach asserts that the "Divine Comedy" contains a conception of art and reality which influenced all later poets and artists. Dante, Auerbach believes, turned away from the idea of man as an abstract or legendary formulation of a moral type, seeing him rather as a known, living, historically bound individual.
The book traces the idea and history of man in poetry from Homer to Provencal literature. Dante's early poetry is discussed, together with his love for Beatrice and his political activities. The various influences that shaped the "Divine Comedy" - Virgil, the philosophers, the Provencal poets - are studied, as well as the construction of the poem on the plan of the three orders: the order of the physical universe, the moral order, and the historical-political order. The subject and teaching of the "Divine Comedy" are considered the roots of its poetic beauty, but, even more fundamentally, Auerbach argues that Dante restored to poetry that sense of human presentness, never so fully realized before him, which had ever since been a mimetic constant of great Western art.