Theodore Ell

One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us somewhere entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disruption in very different ways, demonstrating some of the pathways available between poet and reader.

One of the dangers of academia is that ego interferes with the formation and sharing of knowledge. Colleagues are enemies, discussion is manipulation, subject matter is weaponised. British author James Cahill studied at Oxford and Cambridge, worked at a gallery in London, and recently joined King’s College London, but his first novel, Tiepolo Blue, is burdened with a feeling that these environments have few redeeming features. In a different tone, the novel could have been a satire, but if Cahill exposes his characters to ridicule, it is to make us recognise the sadness and loneliness behind the veneer of dignity. Cahill’s vision is tragic, not absurd. In Tiepolo Blue, love, for persons as much as for intellectual subjects, is stifled by power plays and abominable behaviour. Cahill’s academia is self-defeating because it poisons self-knowledge.

In Italy, Dante is known as il sommo poeta (‘the supreme poet’). Ironically, such reverence obscures the creative personality. We know Dante responded to the shock of being exiled from Florence in 1302 by writing a visionary poem of hell, purgatory, and paradise, in which his tormented life and feuding world were set right – but why did he do it? With little biographical evidence and no original manuscripts of the Commedia surviving, most translators and commentators prefer to concentrate on Dante’s myriad historical and theological sources. It takes a simple shift of logic to search them for the missing psychological evidence.

How would we have viewed the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death if there had been no Covid-19? The editors of Divining Dante are candid about their fears that the pandemic might narrow their celebratory anthology to poems of doom and disaster. After all, the cosmic system of Dante’s Comedy is one of the few fictional creations to match the scale and reach of the pandemic. Dante’s souls are aware of their insignificance among millions, but their pain or bliss is unique and absolutely meaningful. Punishments or blessings are matched to their deeds; character is fate. Today we, too, are confined to private places and must face whatever we find there. The times suit that side of Dante.