Dante and Glück...(continued...)

I thought about comparing Dante's "Vita Nova" written in the 13th

century with Glück's "Vita Nova" published in 1999, the year I submitted

my MFA ms. to Vermont College which, later, became "A Woman By

A Well". Pardon my quasi-narcissistic digression but, I think, that most

writers are so and this defense mechanism takes the form of confession,

irony, personification, and the different degrees of metaphorization.

The greatest difference between Dante's world and Glück's resides

in their versification of corporeal demands. In Glück's poetry, the tension

between corporeality and incorporeality is clearly felt by the modern reader.

In Dante's 13th century, the heart was the domain of reason while

desire and the passions resided in the liver whereas the instincts

(what Freud called the drives) were lodged in the brain.

These forces were regulated by psychological spirits located

in the different organs and an excess of one or the other caused

human malady or melancholy. With Glück's 21st century, we have

attained the objectification of experience through scientific or philosophical

knowledge. Yet, both poets express the memories of their life-experience

through lived and felt experience. So, both for Dante and Glück, memory

is the foundation stone of their poetry. In both poetry is time-framed.

Their main difference in this domain lies in the organic remembrance faculty

we find and feel in Dante versus the tension between the body and the mind

we feel in Glück's poetry. Melancholy is expressed by both poets.

I think that this linked to the expression of Thanatos by both.

Whereas Dante almost dies mourning Beatrice's death, Glück delves

into her memory and regresses to her experience of hunger and loss

of her early adolescence, almost rejoicing in them through sublimation.

Yet, in both Death assumes a central role in their lives. Both fight against

Death with the experience and the felt presence of Love or the remembrance

of the love-experience albeit it be a transient one. At the end of Dante's "Vita Nova"

the quest for love expands to the divine, foreshadowing Dante's synthetic

vision through which he will create the trilogy of "The Divine Comedy".