University of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

2012

The American Alighieri: receptions of Dante in the

United States, 1818-1867
Joshua Steven Matthews
University of Iowa

Copyright 2012 Joshua Steven Matthews

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2939

Recommended Citation
Matthews, Joshua Steven. "The American Alighieri: receptions of Dante in the United States, 1818-1867." PhD diss., University of
Iowa, 2012.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2939.

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 THE AMERICAN ALIGHIERI:
RECEPTIONS OF DANTE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1818-1867

by

Joshua Steven Matthews

An Abstract

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

May 2012

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Ed Folsom

 1

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medieval Florentine poet Dante

Alighieri was an almost completely unknown figure in the United States. Yet, by mid-

century, he was considered by many Americans to be one of the world’s greatest poets and

his major epic, the Divine Comedy, was translated during the Civil War by the most popular

American poet at the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This dissertation examines

Dante’s nineteenth-century emergence in the United States and the historical and cultural

reasons why Dante, for many nineteenth-century Americans, became a highly-regarded

literary figure and an unexpectedly popular poet during the Civil War. Using new historicist

and book studies methodologies, it argues that Dante was widely viewed as an important

theological-political poet, a cultural representative of Italy and nineteenth-century Italian

nationalism and liberalism, one who spoke powerfully to antebellum and wartime issues of

national disunity, states’ rights, the nature of empire, and the justice and injustice of civil war.

American periodicals and English-language translations of the Comedy touted Dante as a

great national poet—a model who might inspire any would-be national poet of the United

States—while interpreting his biography and the Comedy in terms of American and

transatlantic political events, ideologies, and discourses. Aware of such promotion, many

American writers, including Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt

Whitman, read and interpreted the Comedy in terms of national politics and, by the early

1860s, the Civil War. Given its relevance and popularity during the 1860s—numerous books

by or about Dante were published in the United States during this decade—the Divine Comedy

thus became an important epic poem of the Civil War, a poem that Longfellow and Walt

Whitman turned to while constructing their wartime and Reconstruction-era poetry.

 2

Abstract Approved: ________________________________________________

Thesis Supervisor

________________________________________________
Title and Department

________________________________________________
Date
 THE AMERICAN ALIGHIERI:
RECEPTIONS OF DANTE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1818-1867

by

Joshua Steven Matthews

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

May 2012

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Ed Folsom

 Copyright by

JOSHUA STEVEN MATTHEWS

2012

All Rights Reserved

 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________

PH.D. THESIS
_____________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Joshua Steven Matthews

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in English at the May 2012 graduation.

Thesis Committee: _____________________________________________________

Ed Folsom, Thesis Supervisor

_____________________________________________________
Matthew P. Brown

_____________________________________________________
Deborah Contrada

_____________________________________________________
Kathleen Diffley

_____________________________________________________
Laura Rigal
To Cailan

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

So much from others went into this dissertation that it is certainly not wholly my

own. This project could not exist without Ed Folsom, a true scholar and model, a wonderful

teacher and colleague. Ed spent countless hours reading through draft after draft of each

chapter, writing long comments and emails, and showing tremendous perseverance by

working with me almost solely by email. More than teaching me to be a better writer, editor,

and researcher, Ed has shown me how to be a mentor. Hopefully I can do for others at least

a small fraction of what he’s done for me. I sincerely thank him for everything.

The English Department at the University of Iowa and many friends and colleagues

there were helpful in numerous ways, including Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp, Adam Bradford,

and Rob McLoone. The staffs at the University of Iowa libraries, the Michener library at the

University of Northern Colorado, and the Widener and Houghton libraries at Harvard

University were tremendously helpful in the research for this dissertation. I could not have

completed this work without the massive digital libraries, accessible from nearly anywhere,

on Google Books, Proquest’s American Periodical Series database, and the Walt Whitman

Archive. Internet access to numerous works saved me a tremendous amount of time and

travel expense.

I thank my dissertation committee—Matt Brown, Laura Rigal, Kathleen Diffley, and

Deborah Contrada—for their time in reading, critiquing, and offering advice.

As an early Americanist, diving into the world of Dante was an unexpected and

unusual task. Books and commentaries by Dorothy Sayers, Charles Till Davis, Erich

Auerbach, and Teodolinda Bartolini were helpful. I found Giuseppe Mazzotta’s books and

online course to be not only instructive and profound, but also inspirational for this project.

Even though I do not know him personally, he taught me much. During the project, I
iii
gained a deep appreciation for Dante himself, who in my view is the master craftsman of

poets.

I’d like to acknowledge some odd beginnings for parts of this project. Much of this

dissertation was created in the oilfields of northern Colorado, where I worked while writing

it. While in the oilfield, walking through snow and driving on roads that aren’t even dirt

patches, I listened to numerous audiobooks as I tried to think about how to structure this

dissertation and its various arguments; the most memorable books, which oddly led to great

insights into this project, were those by Niall Ferguson, Anthony Trollope, and Terry

Pratchett. (Pratchett’s novels especially provided welcome humor, and Great A’Tuin’s

sluggish trek through the universe provided a nice metaphor for this dissertation’s pace.)

Somewhere in this dissertation, perhaps, is Ferguson’s critique of World War I, the county of

Barchestershire, and Discworld.

Finally, my family deserves more than I could ever give them back. To thank them

justly would take up too many books. My parents and brother are wonderful. ’Lias, Boppy,

and Giddy are the best kids any dad could have. My dear wife Cailan is the world. I love her

dearly.

iv
 ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medieval Florentine poet Dante

Alighieri was an almost completely unknown figure in the United States. Yet, by mid-

century, he was considered by many Americans to be one of the world’s greatest poets and

his major epic, the Divine Comedy, was translated during the Civil War by the most popular

American poet at the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This dissertation examines

Dante’s nineteenth-century emergence in the United States and the historical and cultural

reasons why Dante, for many nineteenth-century Americans, became a highly-regarded

literary figure and an unexpectedly popular poet during the Civil War. Using new historicist

and book studies methodologies, it argues that Dante was widely viewed as an important

theological-political poet, a cultural representative of Italy and nineteenth-century Italian

nationalism and liberalism, one who spoke powerfully to antebellum and wartime issues of

national disunity, states’ rights, the nature of empire, and the justice and injustice of civil war.

American periodicals and English-language translations of the Comedy touted Dante as a

great national poet—a model who might inspire any would-be national poet of the United

States—while interpreting his biography and the Comedy in terms of American and

transatlantic political events, ideologies, discourses. Aware of such promotion, many

American writers, including Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt

Whitman, read and interpreted the Comedy in terms of national politics and, by the early

1860s, the Civil War. Given its relevance and popularity during the 1860s—numerous books

by or about Dante were published in the United States during this decade—the Divine Comedy

thus became an important epic poem of the Civil War, a poem that Longfellow and Walt

Whitman turned to while constructing their wartime and Reconstruction-era poetry.

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES viii

LIST OF FIGURES ix

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER

I. THE CONSTITUTIONAL ALIGHIERI: DANTE AND

AMERICAN POLITICS, 1818-1865 20

The Coincidence of Italian Unification and American

Division 26
Dante in the South: The Divine Comedy for Nullification
and States’ Rights 33
Dante for the Union: New England Views of the Divine
Comedy 49
Dante in the Civil War: Guelphs versus Ghibellines,
North versus South 58

II. DANTE AS A BOOK: MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE DIVINE COMEDY 70

Henry Francis Cary and His Competitors 73

Longfellow Enters the Competition 86

III. THE UNION’S DANTE: HENRY WADSWORTH

LONGFELLOW’S 1867 TRANSLATION OF THE DIVINE
COMEDY 96

Longfellow the Political Poet 102

The Divine Comedy for the American Civil War 122

IV. WALT WHITMAN’S INFERNO: DANTE IN LEAVES OF

GRASS 158

Whitman Reads Dante, 1859-1891 163

Whitman’s Hell and the “Interior History” of the War 171
Sailing into the Afterlife with Ulysses 202

POSTSCRIPT: DANTE IN MODERN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE 209

APPENDIX A. TABLES 216

APPENDIX B. FIGURES 220

vi
BIBLIOGRAPHY 236

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table A1. A Comparison between Cooke and Cary 217

Table A2. A Comparison of Longfellow’s translation to Rossetti’s and Carlyle’s 218

Table A3. A Comparison of some of Longfellow’s endnotes to footnotes

from Cary’s and Carlyle’s translations 219

viii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure B1. Page images from Botta’s Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet 221

Figure B2. The page layout of Henry Francis Cary’s 1805-1806 Inferno 222

Figure B3. Pages from Henry Francis Cary’s 1818 edition of The Vision
of Dante Alighieri 223

Figure B4. Versions of Cary’s Dante (title page and spine) 224

Figure B5. The page layout of Thomas W. Parsons’ 1843 The First Ten
Cantos of the Inferno 225

Figure B6. Front cover of the 1845 Appleton edition of Henry Francis Cary’s
The Vision of Dante Alighieri 226

Figure B7. Pages from Thomas Aitken Carlyle’s 1849 translation of the Inferno 227

Figure B8. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s proof of his 1867 translation of

the Divine Comedy 228

Figure B9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s proof of the endnotes to

Inferno XVI 229

Figure B10. Comparison of two “Table of Contents” 230

Figure B11. The page layout of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 Divine
Comedy 231

Figure B12. Modern Longfellow translation 232

Figure B13. Carlyle’s influence on Whitman 233

Figure B14. Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno XXVI 234

Figure B15. Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno I 235

ix
 1

INTRODUCTION

January 31, 2010. On this day during the Super Bowl, a video-game adaptation of a

fourteenth-century Italian poem was pitched in a television commercial. The game was

Dante’s Inferno. Electronic Arts (EA), one of the world’s largest video game corporations,

bought thirty seconds of advertising time to promote the game, guaranteeing for its product

the largest and widest possible television audience. To advertise for thirty seconds during the

Super Bowl, EA paid somewhere between two and three million dollars, a small part of the

multi-million dollar development cost for the game. Before it aired, the Dante’s Inferno

commercial had received media buzz because CBS executives had asked EA to change the

promotional tagline at the end of the ad, which told viewers to “Go to Hell.” This phrase

was considered too edgy for a Super Bowl family audience, even though the commercial’s

gothic violence was never questioned. So the tagline was amended to “Hell Awaits.” The

buzz over this changed tagline gave the video game a needed marketing boost since, by

Super Bowl standards, the commercial was a failure. Unlike most Super Bowl ads, it was not

memorably funny.

It was, however, memorable for its curious distortions of Dante’s famous epic. In

the commercial, Dante himself, the protagonist in the video game, is depicted as a crusading

knight.1 The first shot is of a big-bosomed blond woman, much cleavage exposed, holding

out her hand in an obvious plea for help. This is Beatrice. She is then consumed by the

smoke of Satan, who takes her into hell through a large hole in a field. The images make it

clear that she is Dante’s lover and that he, desperate, must save her from Satan. Dante jumps

into the large hole, falling hundreds of feet into hell’s depths. As monsters try to kill him, the

1See “Dante’s Inferno Commercial,” youtube.com, 1 Feb. 2010. Web. The URL is currently available at
< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rbeAGdYk_0>.
 2

soulful laments of Bill Withers’ 1971 song “Ain’t No Sunshine” (“Ain’t no sunshine when

she’s gone / And she’s always gone too long / any time she goes away”) add a melancholic

pop flavor to the gothic violence of the images. The commercial ends with Dante hacking

away at hundreds of ghouls and demons with a scythe, as the slogan “Hell Awaits” pops

onto the screen.

The surprisingly persistent presence of Dante in modern American popular and

literary cultures does not stop with this Super Bowl commercial, however. Recent films like

Se7en (1995) and Saint John of Las Vegas (2010) have plots based on the structure of the

Inferno. Mystery readers made Matthew Pearl’s 2003 novel The Dante Club a New York Times

bestseller, years after Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel Inferno (1976) was nominated

for the prestigious Hugo Award, for best sci-fi novel. Dante has even attracted American

poet laureates to translate his work, including Robert Pinsky (1994 translation of the Inferno)

and W.S. Merwin (2000 translation of the Purgatorio). Interestingly, gamers enjoy Dante-

flavored material perhaps more than readers and moviegoers do. The list of videogames that

rely on Dante includes several of the most popular titles from the last twenty years: Doom;

Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3; Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI; Halo 3; Fallout 3; Rainbow Six:

Vegas. If we then count all the references to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, which is

modeled on Dante himself, the list of American pop culture homages to Dante grows much

larger.2 And of course, the list is practically innumerable if we count all the references to one

of the most famous lines in world literature: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The

widespread interest in Dante extends even to his historical roots in the United States,

particularly to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s highly regarded 1867 translation of the Divine

Comedy, the first by an American. The videogame Dante’s Inferno uses quotes from

2 Of course, Rodin’s sculpture is part of a larger work, The Gates of Hell, which is based on the Inferno.
 3

Longfellow’s translation throughout the game, and Pearl’s The Dante Club is a work of

historical fiction about Longfellow in the process of translating the Comedy, all the while

solving a murder mystery in postwar Boston circa 1865.

Modern cultural interest in Longfellow as a Dante translator—according to Pinsky,

Longfellow wrote the greatest English translation of the Comedy3—points to the importance

of the historical origins of Dante in American culture. Dante clearly matters greatly now, but

the popular enthusiasm for Dante in American culture traces back no further than to the

first half of the nineteenth century, just a couple of decades before Longfellow’s translation.

In 1800, despite centuries of great popularity throughout much of Europe, Dante was

almost a complete unknown in the U.S. At the time, there was only one extant English-

language translation of the Divine Comedy—Henry Boyd’s 1785 translation, published only in

England, which had no cultural impact in the United States. No eighteenth-century

American publisher issued Boyd’s book or any other book by or about Dante. For any

curious English reader, the most accessible way to read Dante before Henry Francis Cary’s

landmark translation of the Comedy in 1814 (titled The Vision of Dante Alighieri) would have

been to learn Italian. But no college courses, no famous authors, and almost nothing in the

popular press promoted him.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, this neglect shifted radically

into intense interest. By 1867, Longfellow, the most popular poet in and from the United

States, produced his famous translation of the Divine Comedy, the first full translation of the

epic by an American. In the decades before the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman

Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe and a host of other

3In an interview, Pinsky says that the “most beautiful translation of the Commedia is by Longfellow, who is a
great master of sound. . . . It’s a good [translation] to read to remind yourself of the beauty of the poem, and I
admire it and respect it very much.” See “Dante and the Problem of Translation,” bigthink.com, 7 April, 2008, <
http://bigthink.com/ideas/1679>.
 4

American authors read the Comedy and incorporated it into their work. Dante, for most

Americans in the antebellum years, became a key international author who had a discernible

effect on the literary development of the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s. Between the

turn of the nineteenth century and the Civil War, then, Dante became an extremely well-

known and respected literary figure in the United States.

Dante’s emergence in the nineteenth-century United States is an exemplary case

study of a world-famous author who, while already widely known and read in other cultures,

quickly ascended in the literary culture of a nation that initially had little interest in him. Yet

there were apparently a number of obstacles that might have delayed or retarded Dante’s

reception in the early U.S. republic. The first was linguistic. Written in a medieval Italian

vernacular, the Divine Comedy would have had few potential readers who had the time or

inclination to learn Dante’s native language, even though a reader with good knowledge of

Latin—and that included virtually all college-educated people of the time—would have a

head start in that venture. In the Anglophone world, the Comedy was primarily presented to

various reading publics through the vehicle of translation, with numerous accompanying

explanatory footnotes and prefaces that could give context and background to the

voluminous classical and medieval references that Dante makes in his poem. But who would

write such difficult translations; who would read them; who would promote them; and why

would they do so?

The second obstacle to Dante’s reception involved a mixture of cultural and religious

otherness. A medieval Italian Catholic, Dante seemingly had little in common with

nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant culture. His Roman Catholicism might even have

provoked hostility in a culture that, in certain times and places, was virulently anti-Catholic.

Furthermore, there were few native Italians in America to promote his work, since Italian
 5

immigration to the United States would not begin en masse until the 1870s. Why, then, would

antebellum Americans, mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestants, begin to read and promote Dante

as one of the greatest authors in world history? How were the linguistic, religious, and

cultural obstacles to reading Dante overcome?

These questions lead us to one of the most important American Dante texts ever

produced, Longfellow’s 1867 translation of the Divine Comedy, which is not just a beloved

translation but also a complex literary text in its own right. Developed over his lifetime but

mostly written during the Civil War years, Longfellow’s translation was published just two

years after the war ended, when both Longfellow and his publisher Ticknor and Fields

believed that the Comedy would be a marketable book shortly after a devastating civil war.

The timing is hardly coincidental. Dante, in fact, was relatively popular during and after the

war. Thomas W. Parsons, a dentist who began translating the Inferno in the 1840s, finally

finished and published his complete translation of that canticle in 1867, but not before

publishing the first seventeen cantos of the Inferno in 1865. Harper and Brothers issued an

edition of John Aitken Carlyle’s translation of the Inferno in 1864, when paper was expensive

and books less likely to be published because of the war, while Vincenzo Botta published his

commentary, Dante as Philosopher, Poet, and Patriot, in 1865. In 1863, the German immigrant

Frederick Leypoldt, seizing on the international acclaim heaped on French artist Gustave

Doré’s illustrations of the Inferno, produced his own portfolio edition of the Doré Inferno

illustrations in Philadelphia. 4 This is just a sampling of the robust Dante activity in the

United States during and after the Civil War, and, while these Dante publications may have

conveniently coincided with the 500th anniversary of Dante’s birth, celebrated in 1865, that

anniversary alone would not have been a sufficient commercial reason, during the war-

4See Dante Album. Inferno. (Philadelphia: F. Leypoldt, 1863). Copies of this book are rare, but the one I
examined is in Houghton library at Harvard University.
 6

ravaged 1860s, for publishers to publish and for readers to purchase and read books by or

about Dante. As I argue in this dissertation, wartime and Reconstruction-era interest in the

Divine Comedy focused on the Comedy’s dramatization of certain sociopolitical themes easily

adaptable to the then-modern world: the social impact of civil war, the meaning and future

course of world history, the proper and improper role of empires in world affairs, and the

convergence of politics and popular religion—all topics especially meaningful, as I’ll argue,

for antebellum as well as postbellum American politics.

Yet despite the enormity of Dante studies, one of the largest and deepest fields in

world literary scholarship, Dante’s reception in the nineteenth-century United States has

received relatively little attention in recent decades. Up until the last decade, scholars focused

on the few canonical American authors who expressed serious interest in him, such as

Herman Melville, but concluded that the United States contributed little of significance to

the field of Dante studies until the major modernist poets in the early twentieth century,

especially Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Although it has been long known that Walt Whitman

and Emily Dickinson read Dante, these two poets have been characterized as having no use

for him in their work. Other important writers and literary groups, such as the Dante Club—

formed in the early 1860s by Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, and

others—and the Dante Society of America (founded in 1881), have been described as, at

best, mere enthusiasts of Dante. The first monograph on Dante’s ascension in the

nineteenth-century United States, Theodore Koch’s Dante in America: A Historical and

Bibliographic Study (1896), praises the U.S.’s embrace of Dante as an important cultural figure

by describing what seven American intellectuals (all men) thought of his work. For Koch, all

of them serve as figureheads of a general “advance in culture and sound literary judgment”
 7

by American readers.5 These seven subjects of Koch’s bibliographic investigation, most

notably Longfellow and Lowell, are revealed to be lovers of Dante who in some way

attempted to transmit that love to American readers in their own essays and creative

writings.

Other scholars have followed in Koch’s wake by attempting to describe who read

Dante, when they did so, and how much they liked him. Angelina La Piana’s Dante’s American

Pilgrimage: A Historical Survey of Dante Studies in the United States, 1800-1944 (1948) offers an

overview of the cultural acceptance of Dante among New England literary elites, describing

the interactions of several American writers with Dante’s work and summarizing the various

views of the Divine Comedy articulated in American literary periodicals by essayists and

translators. According to La Piana, Americans interested in producing a unique national

literature in the United States turned to Dante to “discover new worlds of beauty and new

horizons of thought and art.” These Americans, wanting to shake off the literary influence of

England, expanded their sense of “cultural cosmopolitanism” by turning to the great authors

of other nations.6 Dante also offered Americans an authentic medieval voice, which might

satisfy a desire to gain “knowledge of the true medieval world” (La Piana 14). In a mode of

criticism similar to that of Koch’s and La Piana’s, J. Chelsey Mathews wrote over a dozen

articles over the course of four decades that detailed famous American authors’ encounters

with Dante. Mathews found in the published and unpublished works of Poe, Whitman,

Hawthorne, and Melville many overt and buried references and allusions to Dante.7

5Theodore W. Koch, Dante in America: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1896),
8.

6Angelina La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage: A Historical Survey of Dante Studies in the United States, 1800-1944
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1948), 12.
7The list of Mathews’ articles is as follows: “Did Poe Read Dante?” Studies in English 38 (1938), 123-136;
“Bryant’s Knowledge of Dante,” Italica 16 (1939), 115-119; “Walt Whitman’s Reading of Dante,” Studies in
 8

This early scholarship, despite its historical and bibliographic usefulness, looks

narrowly at nineteenth-century American culture through the prism of worldwide Dante

studies. Further, it does not examine the religious and sociopolitical reasons for why

nineteenth-century Americans would have read his work. The real issue, for the kind of new

historicist perspective that this dissertation takes, is not how the early United States impacted

Dante studies but how the sudden interest in reading about Dante’s life and work impacted

and shifted cultural discourses in the early United States. Viewing the issue in this way, a

number of interesting questions arise. How did Dante affect or resonate with cultural

attitudes in the United States? Did the Divine Comedy speak to American political and/or

religious problems? Did it speak to, change, or improve Protestant-Catholic relations? Did

the figure of Dante elevate American concerns for Italy as a political and cultural entity? Did

familiarity with Dante’s work change how Americans thought of “Italy”?

This last question becomes more interesting when we recall that nineteenth-century

Italian revolutionaries struggled for decades to unify the Italian peninsula and create a new

nation, dreams which came true, coincidentally, during the same decade as the American

Civil War brought to a head similar issues of political unity and division in America. Long

recognized in Europe as the great national poet of Italy, Dante represented the language and

voice of a distant people whom many Americans nevertheless respected. Italy was connected

by land and heritage to the Roman Empire, an important historical model and example for

the United States, and it had also produced acknowledged world masterpieces during the

English 39 (1939), 172-179; “Hawthorne’s Knowledge of Dante,” Studies in English 40 (1940), 157-165; “Echoes
of Dante in Longfellow’s Poetry,” Italica 26 (1949), 242-259; “Melville and Dante,” PMLA 64 (1949), 1238;
“Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950): 77-81; “Echoes of Dante in Longfellow’s “Hyperion” and
“Kavanagh,” Italica 28 (1951), 17-18; “Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Dante,” Italica 34 (1957), 127-136;
“Whittier’s Knowledge of Dante,” Italica 34 (1957), 234-238;; “Mr. Longfellow’s Dante Club,” Dante Studies 86
(1958): 23-35; “James Russell Lowell’s Interest in Dante,” Italica 36 (1959), 77-100; “Dantean Influence in the
Poems of T.W. Parsons,” Italica 42 (1965), 135-168; and “Richard Henry Wilde’s Knowledge of Dante,” Italica
45 (1968), 28-46.
 9

Italian Renaissance. Many Americans desired to honor and learn from Italy’s legacy. The

large list of Americans who traveled to Italy in the antebellum period, due to their interest in

Italy’s historic sites and cultural achievements, includes a roster of inner-circle canonical

authors (according to present-day criticism): Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville,

Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Francis Parkman,

Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a national poet, Dante offered nineteenth-century American

writers a model of a representative author who apparently encapsulated the core substance

of his nation in an inventive literary work of world-historical importance, a work which in

turn honored and elevated the cultural status of his nation. In other words, he was precisely

the kind of model that many American authors of the young republic (e.g., Whitman) were

seeking to emulate.

A few recent studies have altered the critical conversation on Dante in early

American culture by focusing on some of the cultural reasons for Dante’s ascendancy in

American society. K.P. Van Anglen’s “Before Longfellow: Dante and the Polarization of

New England” (2001) argues that Dante was useful for early nineteenth-century New

England cultural elites who embraced a “clerical model of literary authority.” Such elites,

according to Van Anglen, acted as “consensualist preachers” of Dante, a great but difficult

poet for lay readers, and they attempted to “garner the affectionate and voluntary

submission of their fellow citizens by enabling [these citizens] to progress religiously,

culturally, politically, and morally to the point where they would realize the wisdom of

obeying their superiors in virtue, knowledge and breeding.”8 As a poet of social morality,

Dante was an ideal model. He provided a voice that warned against the moral and cultural

degeneracy of empires, which the United States would become one day under the translatio

8 K.P. Van Anglen, “Before Longfellow: Dante and the Polarization of New England,” Dante Studies 119
(2001), 158.
 10

imperii, or the theory of the course of empires, which predicted the continuing westward

movement of world empire. For nineteenth-century American elites, the transfer of the

imperial seat to the United States may have seemed inevitable—as the empire would, under

the theory, inevitably migrate from Great Britain to the U.S.—but it also meant that the

United States would one day experience a serious moral degeneracy and collapse, which

always occurs in the latter stages of empire (as Thomas Cole illustrated in his famous series

of paintings, The Course of Empire). Dante, as a powerful and trusted historical voice, spoke to

the collapse of the Roman empire and the degeneracy of medieval Italy which resulted from

that collapse.

While Van Anglen’s analysis focuses primarily on antebellum New England

Unitarians, Kathleen Verduin’s “Dante’s Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England

Calvinism” (2005) asks why New England Calvinists in the nineteenth century displayed

enthusiasm for the Roman Catholic Dante. Verduin contends that Calvinists and lapsed

Calvinists—including Mary Moody Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s aunt) and Herman Melville—

ignored the doctrinal problems with Dante’s Catholicism that should have irked them and

instead focused on theological common ground, such as the issues of human depravity and

eternal damnation for sin. As key issues for Jonathan Edwards, who loomed over New

England Calvinists’ readings of Dante, these points of doctrine were so potent in Dante’s

work that, as Verduin shows, “Dante’s elevation to literary prominence in the nineteenth-

century New England emerged in tandem with the totemic projection of Edwards.”9

Yet neither Van Anglen nor Verduin are fully convincing in their description of an

“American Dante,” given their focus on New England’s cultural and religious issues, which

excludes the rest of the country. Another of Verduin’s essays, “Dante in America: The First

9 Kathleen Verduin, “Dante’s Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England Calvinism,” Dante Studies 123
(2005): 133, 138.
 11

Hundred Years” (1996), is more comprehensive in its characterization of the ascendancy of

Dante in several regions of the United States, since it takes into account the fact that

nineteenth-century English translations of Dante—distributed nationwide—were historically

contingent, material texts that shaped and were shaped by cultural and market forces. For

Verduin, Dante’s poetry “could hardly have circulated apart from the exigencies of the

literary marketplace and the network of production, promotion, and reception that

consolidated and perpetuated value.”10 Briefly examining the major English translations—by

Cary, Longfellow, and John Aitken Carlyle—Verduin shows that social status and literary

prominence were important in disseminating Dante to American readers. Ralph Waldo

Emerson, for example, pushed hard for the publication of Carlyle’s translation (1849), while

Longfellow was part of a New England “literary nucleus,” including publisher James T.

Fields, that facilitated and largely enabled his efforts to translate and publish Dante (35).

Verduin’s essay also hints at the fact that this literary network of translation and

book production was not just regional or national, but transatlantic in scope. To bring Dante

to American readers, translators and publishers had to connect themselves to a broad social

network that involved England and Italy. The careers of three major nineteenth-century

translators of Dante into English are illustrative of this very point. Henry Francis Cary

studied Italian literature at Oxford University before publishing a translation of the Divine

Comedy, retitled The Vision of Dante Alighieri, in 1814. Cary’s Vision did not become popular

and well-regarded until Samuel Taylor Coleridge promoted it in 1818, after which it became

the dominant English translation of the Comedy, in Great Britain and the United States, for

the next half-century. Many Americans, including Melville and Dickinson, used this

10Kathleen Verduin, “Dante in America: The First Hundred Years,” Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text
and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lanes Stiles (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996), 17.
 12

Englishman’s translation. Meanwhile, John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle,

learned Italian and studied Dante “under the guidance of the most noted literary Dilettanti”

while living in Rome for years.11 He produced a prose translation of the Inferno that was

promoted by Emerson and published in the United States in 1849, the translation that

Whitman admired and used. As for Longfellow, his international friendships and

connections are well-known; he toured Europe, including Italy, for three years during the

late 1820s and learned as many European languages as he could. Not only did he translate

the entire Comedy in the 1860s, but he created the figure of the “Sicilian” in Tales of a Wayside

Inn (1863), modeled after his Harvard colleague, the Sicilian revolutionary Luigi Monti. For

all three of these men—Cary, Carlyle, and Longfellow—“Italy” was a powerful cultural idea,

so powerful that it pushed them all to undertake the difficult work of translating Dante’s

writing and then trying to position their particular translation as the standard translation for

the English-speaking world.

For Americans, Italy was not just culturally fascinating but politically fascinating as

well. During most of the nineteenth century, many Americans romanticized the labor pangs

and eventual birth of the new nation of Italy as a fight for republican ideals and national

unification. Some, like Margaret Fuller, even went so far as to participate directly with Italian

revolutionaries. One of the only studies analyzing the cultural and literary connections

between Italy and nineteenth-century America is Dennis Berthold’s American Risorgimento:

Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (2009). Berthold uses Herman Melville as a case

study in the United States’ fascination and interaction with Italian culture and politics,

employing Melville’s use of Dante in his novels as a particularly revealing example. Berthold

argues that Melville exemplifies Americans’ nineteenth-century cultural interest in Italy,

11 Dante’s Divine Comedy, trans. John Aitken Carlyle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849), vii.
 13

whose political revolution (the Risorgimento) and national development paralleled that of

the United States’ own development. Because of these parallels, “Italy” became a “cultural

construction” in the U.S. that comprised a “constellation of texts, artifacts, and ideologies

gathered and mediated by an aggressive acquisitive intellectual culture,” an intellectual

culture that transformed this constellation of texts into an “ostensibly new, inchoate,

dynamic national identity.”12 Loosely affiliated with the “Young America” movement,

Melville employed themes, motifs, and references to Italian culture throughout his works,

which for Berthold demonstrates the close cultural connections between nineteenth-century

Italy and the U.S. and the extent to which the merging of aesthetics and ideology was a

transnational phenomenon.

By the early nineteenth century, Dante was considered to be the major figure of

Italian literature and one of the major figures of the idea of “Italy.” Berthold argues, in his

chapter on Mardi, that Dante was an ideal cultural mediator between the Risorgimento

movement and American authors like Melville. As a political independent who was on both

and yet neither side of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict (in medieval Florence), and as a

Roman Catholic who criticized the Roman Catholic church, Dante—for many nineteenth-

century progressives—stood for national unity and a tolerant approach to Protestant-

Catholic relations. Thus, as Berthold points out, “[for] American and English enthusiasts,

reading Dante became synonymous with supporting the Risorgimento” (77). It was Cary’s

Vision that guided Melville to a political reading of Dante, a fact evident in Mardi. The Vision

contains extensive scholarly notes that place Dante’s work in its historical, and especially its

political, context. The connections for Berthold therefore become transnational and

transcultural: a thirteenth-century Italian poet (Dante), translated by an early nineteenth-

Dennis Berthold, American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Columbus, Ohio: The
12

Ohio State University Press, 2009), 4.

 14

century Englishman (Cary), read and reconceived by a mid-nineteenth-century American

(Melville), who associated the English translation of a medieval poet with contemporary

Italian politics. Dante, then, as the example of Melville demonstrates, became a figurehead

for Italian culture and its dissemination and appropriation in the antebellum United States.

For many nineteenth-century Americans, before and after the Civil War, the

sociopolitical content of the Divine Comedy made Dante a worthwhile read. Chapter I of this

dissertation argues that, for many antebellum and wartime Americans of varying ideological

positions, Dante was a political figure of increasing relevance. Surprisingly, the politics of the

Comedy—and not primarily its theology—intrigued most American readers. Dante, in one

view, could represent the revolutionary struggles of nineteenth-century Italians fighting for

national unification, struggles that from the 1840s onward many Americans paid close

attention to, because they resembled the ideological tensions quickly tightening in American

culture. Dante also provided flexibility in terms of political ideology and discourse. As a

combatant in partisan struggles in medieval Tuscany, one who shifted between political

alliances during his lifetime, Dante could represent the cause for States’ Rights just as easily

as he could represent the need for increased federal powers and national unification. In other

words, Dante could be read as a southern Democrat, a northern Whig, or somewhere in

between. This interpretative flexibility allowed for multiple and conflicting political readings

of Dante’s poetry in the United States. Many Southerners employed Dante and the Comedy in

the fight for southern causes and, in the 1860s, Confederate nationalism. New Englanders,

meanwhile, tended to view Dante as a liberal nationalist who argued for peace through

unification, or as one who supported their own ideology. While the Civil War raged, readers

on both sides of the conflict could interpret the Comedy as supporting their own political
 15

views, which was a major reason why Dante became, at that moment of crisis, a relevant

figure for readers throughout the United States.

The primary way that nineteenth-century Americans experienced Dante was through

English-language translations of the Divine Comedy. Cary’s Vision was the dominant

translation through the 1860s, but, as Chapter II shows, its dominance eventually generated

a number of competing English translations that were published in both England and the

United States, resulting in an increasing number of ways for readers to experience Dante.

Each translation—and practically every new edition of each translation—was materially and

aesthetically different from the others, and the proliferation of paratextual apparatuses

shaped the translations themselves. Publishers included images, illustrations, summaries,

footnotes, endnotes, literary essays, biographies, and even the original Italian text in the

various versions of the English-language Divine Comedy. All of these paratexts commented on

and interpreted the Comedy for readers, who were thought to need extensive guidance

through the difficulties of a long, complex medieval Italian poem. New translations often

featured new, unique paratexts, an acknowledgment by translators and publishers that

market competition required differentiation: each of these books was sold not just as a new

translation but as a whole new approach to reading Dante. The result of this competition

was an eventual saturation of the marketplace with many unique English versions of the

Inferno and the entire Comedy, as well as the material representation of different Dantes for

different levels of interest, from the serious student to the casual lover of English Romantic

poetry. The proliferation of translations during the nineteenth century created diverse,

multiple readings and applications of Dante's life and work, and allowed for the rapid

assimilation of Dante into the many geographically and ideologically diverse literary cultures

of the United States.

 16

Using two major poets—Longfellow and Whitman—as examples, Chapters III and

IV show how Dante and the Divine Comedy were read during and applied to the Civil War,

especially to Civil War-era poetry. As I mentioned above, Longfellow turned to Dante

during the Civil War. A lifelong Dante enthusiast, Longfellow used his translation to both

memorialize and transcend the war, and to promote social and political re-unification in the

first years of Reconstruction. For Longfellow, Dante dealt directly and poignantly with the

issues of civil war: social schisms, political divisions, death and devastation, and

eschatological hope. As an ex-soldier and exile who condemned his homeland for petty

disputes and called for an overarching political institution to unite and bring peace to the

Italian peninsula, Dante was, both personally and poetically, a relevant figure for Longfellow

to place in the public spotlight. Chapter III argues that Longfellow’s translation of the

Comedy should be considered, along with Whitman's Drum-Taps and Melville’s Battle-Pieces, as

one of the major poetic achievements of the American Civil War. Longfellow’s translation is

peppered with references to the war, and the six-hundred pages of endnotes and literary

essays included in editions of his translation comment on and frame the poem as one about

civil war, individual transcendence of wars, and the hope for sociopolitical peace and

unification in the early Reconstruction period.

By contrast to Longfellow, Whitman’s encounter with Dante during the early 1860s

is somewhat unexpected. As the self-proclaimed poet-prophet of democracy who celebrated

America and its liberal values, especially individualism, Whitman has always seemed to his

critics as very much the opposite of the medieval poet who sang the praises of Scholastic

theology during his cosmic journey. Yet Whitman likened his encounter with the realities of

the Civil War to Dante’s depiction of hell in the Inferno. The war not only darkened

Whitman’s antebellum dreams of American comradeship and sociopolitical unity, but it

 17

revealed to Whitman horrors that he would never forget. As Chapter IV argues, Whitman’s

reading of the Inferno colored and helped structure his response to his experiences during the

Civil War as a witness and nurse in war camps and hospitals. Some of the poetry that

emerged from those experiences—realistic battlefield poems that appeared in Drum-Taps and

Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865) and which were incorporated into all subsequent editions of Leaves

of Grass—relied in crucial ways on Dante’s own poetic imagination. Deeply influenced by

Dante, Whitman, from the 1860s onward, used the Inferno as a frame of reference to describe

the realities, horrors, and memories of the Civil War.

Whitman’s incorporation of the Inferno into Drum-Taps and Longfellow’s choice to

translate the Divine Comedy as his major poetic Civil War opus is a powerful argument for

viewing the Comedy as a Civil War epic, perhaps the Civil War epic. Helping Longfellow

perfect his translation were some of the most well-known and powerful names in American

letters: his “Dante Club” included James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., James

T. Fields, and William Dean Howells. This group exemplifies the fact that it was the Comedy,

and not Paradise Lost, as Daniel Aaron has argued, that provided the classical epic framework

for many American writers during and after the Civil War. In his seminal study of the Civil

War in American literature, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, Aaron

observes that the Civil War produced a “paucity of epics and ‘masterpieces,’” and that John

Milton had written the “first draft” of the war’s great epic poem.13 Milton, Aaron says, was

the “ideal War-laureate,” as the poet of Satan’s rebellion, the great war in heaven, and the

ultimate human loss of paradise on Earth (Aaron 343-348). Yet, as this dissertation argues,

Dante’s Divine Comedy was every bit as culturally relevant as Paradise Lost and was perhaps

more relevant than any other classical text during the Civil War. Dante’s cosmological

13Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973; reprinted Tuscaloosa, Alabama: U
of Alabama P, 2003), xiii and xix.
 18

journey from the divided regions of hell, laced with images of civil war and strife, to the

united celestial rose of the saints in heaven, offered a pertinent existential and sociopolitical

narrative to many Americans. The narrative arc of the poem itself, which ends with a

blissful, mysterious image of God, provided Longfellow and his contemporaries with faith

and hope (e.g., Paradiso XXIV-XXV) in the spiritual growth of both individual Americans

and of the nation itself, and a trust in the kind of federal, imperial unity modeled by Dante’s

depiction of the kingdom of heaven and fought for by the Union army.

Fittingly, Aaron introduces his chapter on American writers during the war with

John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “A Word for the Hour,” first published in January 1861. 14

Though Aaron does not mention it, this poem—which argues that the northern states

should neither engage in a “fratricidal fight” nor compromise with the seceded southern

states—directly references Dante’s Inferno to bolster its argument:

They break the lines of Union: shall we light

The fires of hell to weld anew the chain
On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
Draw we not even now a freer breath,
As from our shoulders falls a load of death
Loathsome as that the Tuscan’s victim bore
When keen with life to a dead horror bound?
Why take we up the accursed thing again?
Pity, forgive, but urge them back no more
Who, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s rag
With its vile reptile-blazon.15

Whittier warns against the northern states’ attempt to “light the fires of hell” by forcing the

seceded states back into the Union. These seceded states are a “load of death” analogous to

“the Tuscan’s victim,” a synecdoche for the general state of the damned in Dante’s Inferno

14The title of Whittier’s poem was adapted for the most recent scholarly anthology on Civil War poetry. See
“Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry, eds. Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller
(Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2005).

15 The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876), 261-262.
 19

(Mathews, “Whittier’s Knowledge” 235). As Whittier knew, the bottom of Dante’s hell

contains the worst sinners of all, traitors to their nations and traitors to the ultimate federal

authority, God himself. Prior to the war, then, Whittier concluded that trying to be in league

with such traitors was a fool’s errand, a re-descent into hell where the nation would be

doomed to remain. But as the war progressed, the Inferno shifted, for Whittier, Longfellow,

Whitman and others, into a vivid description of Civil War battlefields and the general

condition of the fragmented nation. As we will see in the chapters that follow, the Divine

Comedy became the American Civil War text because it stood so powerfully behind so many

of the Civil War texts that American writers produced.

 20

CHAPTER I

THE CONSTITUTIONAL ALIGHIERI:

DANTE AND AMERICAN POLITICS, 1818-1865

It began with a vision. Specifically, with Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision. The

widespread emergence of Dante as an important, world-class figure in American culture

occurred between 1818 and the Civil War, thanks in large part to an English translator born

on Gibraltar. For Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy, which was titled The Vision; or the

Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, was the dominant vehicle in the antebellum

period for the propagation of Dante’s magnum opus.16 Herman Melville read it, then used it in

almost all of his fiction. Ralph Waldo Emerson read it, and (as Chapter II describes in detail)

disliked it so much that he lobbied Harper and Brothers during the 1847 financial panic to

publish a different English translation of the Divine Comedy. For a time, Cary had no major

competitors; in the 1830s and 1840s other Americans, namely Thomas William Parsons and

Richard Henry Wilde, tried unsuccessfully to translate the Comedy, but no English translation

unseated Cary’s Vision until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s in 1867.17 By then, Dante

Alighieri was a well-known name in American literary circles and even in the country’s rural

parts. A Methodist minister in Lima, New York, in 1863, for example, casually alluded in a

Sunday sermon to Dante’s Inferno by using its punishments as an analogy for the future

16Cary’s Vision went through three editions between 1814 and 1844, and dozens of variations on those editions
were printed by various publishers in Great Britain and the United States. See Chapter II for more details on
English and American versions of these editions. Cary’s first edition of The Vision, printed in 1814, went largely
unnoticed until Samuel Taylor Coleridge promoted it in 1818. Once Coleridge praised Cary, a thousand copies
of the Vision were immediately sold, literary magazines repeatedly praised Cary, and readers demanded a new
edition, which appeared in 1819. See Werner P. Friederich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350-1850 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 231.
17Wilde’s interest in Dante is described below. Parsons in 1843 released a translation of the first ten cantos of
the Inferno in 1843, yet took twenty-five years to release a full translation of the Inferno (in 1867). See Thomas
William Parsons, The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno by Dante Alighieri (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1843).
 21

damnations facing Confederate “traitors,” an allusion he expected his rural, western New

York audience to recognize.18

What is immediately striking about Dante in the American republic, as this example

suggests, is that he became particularly valuable and popular during the Civil War. Two

American writers (Parsons and Longfellow) worked on translations of the Comedy during the

war, publishing those translations shortly thereafter. There was also, in comparison to

previous decades, an exponential increase in the United States in books on Dante written by

Americans in the 1860s. Yet Dante’s popularity did not simply spring up overnight in 1861.

The close relationship between Dante and the American Civil War actually was the flowering

of several decades’ worth of American political interpretations of Dante’s life and works,

interpretations that centered on some of the war’s major issues—namely, states’ rights and

national unification. Thanks in part to Cary’s Vision, antebellum and wartime Americans

tended to view Dante mainly in the context of their own national politics.

But why did Americans of the early republic read Dante, via Cary’s Vision and other

translations, and in what ways did they use him and his work? For one, Dante’s biography

itself was a compelling case of complex political entanglements—Americans often discussed

how he had been on both sides of a conflict that pitted local self-rule against a kind of

national unity, a seemingly remote medieval issue that intrigued antebellum Americans, who

adapted it and applied it to their own political views and problems. Dante’s political

biography was often a key feature in American magazine articles that engaged in literary

criticism of his works. And the Divine Comedy—an autobiographical epic poem that is in part

a political polemic—was frequently interpreted as supporting different political causes in the

North and in the South. As this chapter argues, Dante’s increasing cultural importance in the

18
“The Battle is Not Your’s, But God’s,” Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal (September 16, 1863), 1.
 22

United States before and during the Civil War resulted from the close associations that

Americans perceived between Dante’s life and works and America’s own contemporary

politics, especially the major national issues of constitutional nullification, states’ rights, and

the extent of the federal government’s legislative powers.

The story of Dante’s emergence in American culture is a complex entanglement of

American national politics, Italian nationalism, English Whig interests, international

relationships between translators and publishers, and the modern sociopolitical ideologies

with which the medieval Tuscan Bard became associated. In many ways, Cary’s Vision itself

demonstrates the complexity of these entanglements. The Vision did not just offer readers a

modern translation of the Divine Comedy, but it highlighted the political turmoil of Dante’s

life and interpreted that life in terms of nineteenth-century political struggles. As several

critics have argued, Cary’s translation turns Dante into a quasi-Whig, a supporter of

nationalist movements (especially of those in Italy), and an “apostle of liberty.”19 The Vision

opens with an important, lengthy essay, entitled “Life of Dante,” that promotes what has

been called the “neo-Ghibelline” interpretation of Dante (Crisafulli 284).20 It is this particular

essay that antebellum American commentators referred to again and again when discussing

the details of Dante’s biography. In it, Cary labels Dante as a kind of Romantic hero;

according to Eduardo Crisafulli, Cary “exploit[s] the dramatic potential” of the most

19See, for example, Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester, England: Manchester University
Press, 1998), 17-25; and Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante: Cary’s Translation of the Divine Comedy (Market
Harborough, England: Troubador Publishing, 2003); hereafter Crisafulli. Michael Caesar, as well, discusses the
ways in which Dante became, for Italian and English critics, a political poet in the early nineteenth century. See
Caesar, ed., Dante: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1989), 52-68.

20Charles Till Davis’ essay, “Dante and Italian Nationalism,” shows the ways in which Italian nationalists
defended this “neo-Ghibelline” interpretation, in which Dante was envisioned as a prophet for the Italian
nation-state. See Davis, “Dante and Italian Nationalism,” A Dante Symposium in Commemoration of the 700 th
Anniversary of the Poet’s Birth (1265-1965), ed. William de Sua and Gino Rizzo (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1965), 199-213.
 23

important event in Dante’s life, his exile from his native city of Florence, and so Cary’s

description of Dante’s exile helped create a “fully-fledged cult of Dante’s biography” (128).

To understand how antebellum Americans used Dante and interpreted the Divine

Comedy, we need first to understand the basics of Dante’s biography, the basics so often

included in nineteenth-century articles and essays about Dante, to show why Americans

might have so intrigued by Dante and by the particulars of thirteenth-century Florentine

political entanglements. In Cary’s “Life of Dante,” Dante is classified as a poet, a scholar, a

warrior, and a lover—all titles he earned in his youth. As a soldier, he fought on the Guelph

side against the Ghibellines in the battle of Campaldino, in which he was “exposed to

imminent danger.”21 In Florence, Dante faced a city divided, for the Guelphs and

Ghibellines—two rival factions related by familial and social ties—had long been fighting for

control of the city. In Dante’s day, the Guelphs were in power but had split into two

factions: the Bianchi (White Guelphs) and Neri (Black Guelphs). The Neri sided with the

“Guelphs or adherents of the papal power,” represented by Pope Boniface VIII, in support

of a politically autonomous, independent Florence. The Bianchi supported the “Ghibellines

or the authority of the [Holy Roman] Emperor,” the Ghibellines wanting the Holy Roman

Empire to unify most of the Italian peninsula under an overarching political institution,

which would integrate Florence into the empire (Cary xiii-xiv). Importantly, Dante was born

a Guelph, fought against the Ghibellines, but in adulthood (pre-exile) was a White Guelph

(Bianco). These complex divisions and alliances amongst Guelphs and Ghibellines show

that Florence (and indeed the whole region of Tuscany) was a divided state of near-constant

21See Dante Alighieri, The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Francis Cary
(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), x. Hereafter Cary. The “Life of Dante” essay was first printed in Cary’s 1805
edition of the Inferno. It was included in all three subsequent editions of The Vision and was not revised. It was,
then, a key part of the entire text from the very beginning of its publication. I use the 1847 Bohn edition that
Herman Melville used (see Chapter II) for the simple reason that I own a copy. The essay is the same in the
several copies that I have examined from different publishers.
 24

civil strife, if not, at various times, war. Of Florence, Cary says that the city was once the site

of an attempted conference between Guelphs and Ghibellines, but “it was not long before

[the two groups] passed, by the usual gradations, from contumely to violence,” and “even

brothers of the same family were divided” (xiii). As a politically active adult, Dante was on

the Florentine city council when the council banished leaders of both the Neri and the

Bianchi from the city. When in 1301 Dante traveled to Rome as a delegate to the Pope (a

“pacific mission” to restore “amity” to the citizens of Florence, according to Cary), the Neri

retook Florence with foreign support, “confiscated [Dante’s] possessions, which had

previously been given up to pillage,” and banished Dante from Florence for life (xv).

Dante remained a political exile for the rest of his life. During his exile, Dante, as

Cary says, switched parties. He “decidedly relinquished the party of the Guelphs, which had

been espoused by his ancestors, and under whose banners he had served in the earlier parts

of his life on the plains of Campaldino; and attached himself to the cause of their opponents,

the Ghibellines” (xix). In this description, Cary figures Dante as something of a nineteenth-

century liberal, a man willing to renounce kith and kin for the sake of a political cause or

principle. Dante was a defender of “civil and religious liberty,” a “zealot and fearless

advocate” for them, and he was just as zealous about the theological doctrine of the freedom

of the will (xxxvi). As Crisafulli argues, Cary describes Dante as having “unmistakable

Protestant leanings.” Dante is, in The Vision, anti-clerical and nationalistic. He champions

individual freedom and the political unity of Italy, and he denounces the Roman Catholic

Church’s involvement in all state affairs. To be sure, Cary’s relation of Dante’s biography

was controversial, and many nineteenth-century commentators argued against Cary’s

Whiggish portrait of Dante. Others, including many Southerners in the United States, argued

that Dante was a local patriot, one who in the Divine Comedy remained loyal to the Guelph
 25

cause and warned against political usurpations and tyrannies.22 Yet nearly everyone made

similar assumptions when interpreting Dante’s life: that he was a relevant poet for modern

times who talked powerfully about the course of nations and empires, the meaning of

history, and the problems of political factions—issues that applied directly to nineteenth-

century political debates in England, Italy, and the United States.

So Dante’s life was one of political entanglements; specifically, Dante was on both

sides of a civil conflict that pitted those who wanted political independence of their city with

those who wanted unity with a greater governmental body. These groups were so hotly

divided that they warred, fought for control of cities and regions, and exiled each other, as

was the case with Dante (one who exiled others and who was himself an exile). The themes

of national unification, civil war, and political exile are all a major part of the Divine Comedy.

Cary’s “Life of Dante” is a major example of the way that nineteenth-century interpreters

highlighted the political stakes for reading and interpreting the Comedy. Cary himself

characterizes Dante as something of a prophet who spoke to nineteenth-century European

and American issues of revolution and nationalism. For nineteenth-century Americans,

embroiled in deep Constitutional problems of federalism and states’ rights, of civil divisions

over slavery and western expansion, Dante and medieval Florence served as useful historical

examples of present-day problems. Dante’s rise in the antebellum United States correlates

with overtly political, American interpretations of the Comedy that centered on issues of

political union and political independence. As we shall see, both the Comedy and Dante’s

22 Crisafuelli points out that, as opposed to nineteenth-century “neo-Ghibelline” interpretations of the Comedy,
there were pro-Catholic “neo-Guelph” interpretations as well (see Crisafuelli 269). These “neo-Guelph”
interpretations were especially popular in Italy among counter-revolutionaries. I am not arguing here that
Southern Americans were necessarily “neo-Guelph”, or pro-Catholic. As I point out below, Southerners
actually forged a somewhat unique interpretation of the Comedy relevant to their interests. Also, it should be
noted that in the long history of criticism of the Comedy, interpretations about Dante’s political stance in the
Comedy have varied widely. Credible, detailed readings have shown him to be pro-Ghibelline or pro-Guelph,
while others show him trying to criticize and transcend both viewpoints (a view I subscribe to).
 26

biography were flexible; they seemed to speak to and support ideologies in both North and

South, and Dante became a figure for all parties in the debates over what federalism is and

should be in the United States.

The Coincidence of Italian Unification and American Division

In the United States, Dante became known as the representative poet of Italy, which

made him by default a commentator on the many revolutions in nineteenth-century Italy and

of Italian nationalism in general. This role as a commentator on and, for many, a champion

of the Risorgimento was crucial for Dante’s immersion into American culture. Many

nineteenth-century Americans eagerly observed, through newspapers and magazines, and

rooted for the attempts by various Italian revolutionaries to nationalize the Italian peninsula

and create the nation of Italy, a new secular state that promised freedom from the influence

of foreign powers and the Roman Catholic Church. Yet at just the moment revolutionary

struggles to unify Italy were taking place, America was encountering problems with the

meaning of federalism, which was tied to slavery and Western expansion. As the United

States appeared to be fracturing—and did fracture with the secession of most southern

states in 1861—the separate regions of Italy were uniting. The American Civil War, in fact,

began shortly after Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army subdued the southern regions of Italy and

Victor Emmanuel II was crowned as king of the new Kingdom of Italy in March of 1861, a

major event that symbolized the success of the Risorgimento and created the Italian nation-

state. The coinciding political struggles in the U.S. and Italy, from the 1820s to the 1860s,

made contemporary Italy a relevant sociopolitical lesson for the United States, as the

northern states struggled to maintain the unity Italy had just achieved. About this lesson

Dante had much to say, and so he became a kind of mediator between his American
 27

admirers and their understanding of the relationship between Italian nationalism and the

U.S. politics of sectionalism.

The history of the Italian nationalist movement (Risorgimento) and of Americans’

various views of it are critical to understanding how Dante could be considered such a

mediator. For decades the Risorgimento fomented, beginning with the end of the

Napoleonic wars and the return of control of present-day northern Italian lands to the

Bourbons and Austrians. Italy in the 1840s was subdivided into numerous provinces and

regions—each distinguished by unique economies, coinage, social customs, and dialect23—

but, in 1848, nationalist uprisings sprang up in Lombardy, Sicily, Tuscany, and other places.

The Revolution of 1848 briefly succeeded when Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army arrived that year

in Rome and a new Roman Republic was created. But the republic quickly fell apart when

the French re-conquered Rome in 1849 and the Austrians successfully invaded northern

Italy.

The failure of the Revolution of 1848-1849 was critically important to the success of

the Italian unification effort of 1859-1861. As Lucy Riall argues, “an enduring consequence

of the 1848-49 revolutions was the development of a potent nationalist mythology around

the events of these years.”24 This “mythology” was particularly potent in the Anglophonic

world. Garibaldi and many other revolutionaries fled the Italian peninsula, arriving either in

England or the Americas and earning much praise in the British and U.S. presses. Some even

took teaching jobs at major American and Canadian universities. 25 Giuseppe Mazzini, leader

Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3.
23

Hereafter Smith.

24Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation-State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
139. Hereafter Riall Risorgimento.
25Examples are abundant. To name a few, Vincenzo Botta is discussed below, while Felix Foresti, who spent
nearly twenty years in jail for his “Carbonarism,” was a Professor of Italian at the City University of New York
 28

of the Young Italy movement, created a “broad radical network” in England which was

“able to persuade influential British liberals of the justice and inevitability of the Italian

cause” (Riall, Risorgimento 18). Mazzini, later recognized in Italy as the father of Italian

nationalism, had a “romantic sense of Italy’s past greatness,” believing that Italian unification

was providentially ordained (16).

The politics of Italian unification from 1848 onward was complex and could easily

confuse American observers reading about it in their own press, which tended to

oversimplify the situation. The Revolution of 1848 was a liberal-democratic movement,

manifested briefly in the 1849 creation of a Roman republic and the overthrow of foreign

monarchical rule, but its failure adversely affected the aspirations of radical Italian

democrats. After 1848, Mazzini’s own radicalism lost much potency in Italy and with

expatriate Italians. While the goals of unification abided, the political shape of that

unification changed. Thus, when Garibaldi’s army succeeded in subduing Sicily and southern

Italy in 1861, defeating the Bourbons, it was Victor Emmanuel’s monarchy— and not a

republic or democracy per se—that unified Italy. This victory allowed for the creation of the

Kingdom of Italy. As Riall shows, the monarchy quickly faced a crisis of legitimacy and

turned to repressive, authoritarian measures in order to quell dissent; this fact emphasizes

the point that “united Italy was the creation of kings [and] not of the people” (146).

Garibaldi himself, while claiming to be a republican, was actually a dutiful servant to the

monarchy; according to Dennis Mack Smith, “Garibaldi was all for a dictatorship. . . . He

genuinely believed in what he called liberty, and yet thought that freedom could and should

be forced on people for their own good” (Smith 15-16).

from the early 1840s to 1858. Also, Luigi Monti, a Sicilian revolutionary exiled in 1850 who was an instructor
at Harvard University from 1854 to 1859. Importantly, he formed a friendship with Longfellow, who used him
as a model for the character of the Sicilian in Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). See Chapter III.
 29

While the creation of the Italian nation-state was hardly a triumph of nineteenth-

century liberal ideals, then, for most Americans (especially Protestants) the unification of

Italy displayed the triumph of nationalism and proclaimed the inevitable spread of secular

republican government worldwide. The American press—except for its Roman Catholic

segment—generally celebrated Garibaldi’s triumph in 1861 and the birth of a new Italian

nation.26 The details of the new kingdom’s political structure and its repressive acts generally

were not noticed in the United States press (which by then was obviously focusing instead

on the American Civil War); simply the fact of unification itself garnered the huzzahs of

American observers as a victory for progressive change. A sovereign, independent Italy,

finally free of foreign and papal influence, seemed for American commentators to

demonstrate the potency of an ardent, republican movement for national union. A unified

Italy also signified the grand glories of the peninsula’s past; it was a reminder of the ancient

Roman republic, and it realized the highly romanticized, Anglophonic vision of the cultural

unity of the great Italians of centuries past and present.

Americans also had important ideological, intellectual, and sociopolitical

connections with the Risorgimento. According to Enrico Dal Lago, these connections were

not wholly accidental, since the northern region of the United States had extensive social and

cultural similarities with Italian “liberal-nationalists,” just as the American South shared traits

with the southern regions of the Italian peninsula. These deep similarities allowed many

politically active Americans in the antebellum United States to associate their immediate

concerns with those of the Italian peninsula. The close parallels between the American

26 Howard Marraro’s study gives a good overview of the general American view of the Italian revolution. He
claims that “Americans were whole-heartedly in sympathy with Italy” during the revolution, a hyperbolic
statement that does not take into account the views of American Roman Catholics. Still, most of the American
press generally championed the possibility of a unified Italy free of foreign influence. See Marraro, American
Opinion of the Unification of Italy, 1846-1861 (New York, AMS Press, 1969).
 30

South and the Italian South (Mezzogiorno), from the early nineteenth century until the

1860s, are particularly fascinating. Dal Lago argues that both regions were “overwhelmingly

agricultural regions located at the periphery of the world economy,” and as such they were

dominated by “large landed estates.”27 Both also embraced a “patriarchal-paternalistic

worldview” that buttressed a hierarchical social order, which nevertheless accepted certain

“capitalistic and liberal values” (Dal Lago, Agrarian 100). This led to extensive political

struggles between these regions and their respective central governments; both the southern

United States and the Mezzogiorno viewed their national governments as overly oppressive,

which reaffirmed their desire to “retain or assert [their] rights to local autonomy” (180). In

fact this fiercely independent spirit, based mainly on economic concerns, led to secessionist

movements in each region. Each historical case ended differently, however. For the

Mezzogiorno, the landed elite sided with the Italian nationalist movement against the

(French) Bourbon monarchy, since the monarchy was perceived as the oppressor. The

Mezzogiorno became part of the new Italian nation-state in 1861. For the southern U.S.,

secession from the U.S. federal government led to the creation of a new nation-state, the

Confederate States of America. Yet in spite of the different paths taken by the regions, their

motives, as Del Lago claims, were the same. In both places, he writes,

the elites supported the process of nation-building with the precise understanding
that the new national political entities [the Kingdom of Italy and the Confederate
States of America] would interfere with their control of local affairs only to offer
protection against either internal or external threats. In both cases, the southern elite
considered the new nation a legitimate political formation only insofar as it fulfilled
the crucial promises of respect of regional autonomy and protection of regional
interests. (342)

As well, both regions almost immediately failed to realize the protections offered by the new

nations; for the seceded states in America, the Confederate government enacted harsh

27Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2005) 35. Hereafter Dal Lago, Agrarian.
 31

economic and political measures to aid the war effort, while the Mezzogiorno suffered from

the radical “programs of uniformity of government institutions,” a kind of social engineering

that threatened the traditional class structure of the region, implemented by the new

Kingdom of Italy. It is a remarkable coincidence that both regions suffered through civil

wars from 1861 and 1865 (347-348).

Would-be reformers in both countries, American abolitionists in the U.S. and liberal-

nationalists in Italy, had close ideological associations as well. Whereas American

abolitionists attempted to inspire social change through vigorous “moral suasion,” based on

a liberal philosophy embedded with modern notions of human rights and the idea of

sociopolitical progress, Italian liberals had a similar kind of “moral commitment” to radically

reforming the Mezzogiorno, a reform effort based on democratic nationalism.28 Both groups

also believed that the oppressed members of the slave or worker classes in the respective

Souths were generally gentle and docile, since neither had shown much effort in instigating

insurrections against their southern masters or employers. Moreover, the more radical

members of the groups in both countries resorted to violent revolutionary tactics in their

respective Souths; John Brown’s raids form the famous American case, but Italian radicals

similarly recommended and agitated for guerrilla warfare in the Mezzogiorno and

accomplished it in the 1860s (Dal Lago, Radicalism 207). Thus both American abolitionists

and Italian liberals thought of themselves as ‘liberators,’ waging a moral and political war

against southern aristocrats in their respective nations, which “contributed ... to the creation

of a perception of permanent difference between the northern and southern parts of the two

countries” (210). Russell’s Magazine in 1858, an important antebellum southern publication,

28Enrico Dal Lago, “Radicalism and Nationalism: Northern ‘Liberators’ and Southern Labourers in the USA
and in Italy: 1830-1860,” The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History, eds. Enrico
Dal Lago and Rick Halpern (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 203. Hereafter Dal Lago, Radicalism.
 32

astutely recognized the tight comparison between the two groups: “As soon as they [Italian

nationalists] will gain their own freedom, they will offer their aid for the establishing of

freedom in America. Italian liberals and American abolitionists form but one army, fighting

under the same banner in the same cause.”29

The similarities between different factions in the United States and Italy helped forge

affinities that many Americans held for various Italian causes. In this climate, Dante was

entirely useful. While he was labeled a world-class poet who spoke universal truths about

human nature, accessible in English via Cary’s Vision, yet he was also particularly an Italian

poet, one revered in Italy who wrote in his people’s vernacular and who discussed and was

passionate about social and political problems in Italy. Importantly, his Comedy was flexible.

It was both ancient and modern, at once showcasing the barbarities of the medieval world

and yet speaking to the aesthetic sophistications of the modern. It was fiercely loyal to

Florence and Tuscany, yet it demanded that these places make sociopolitical changes. It was

Roman Catholic, and yet it condemned certain Roman Catholic doctrines (such as the sale of

indulgences) and aspects of the clerisy. Depending on its readers’ perspectives, it was Guelph

or Ghibelline, Scholastic or proto-Protestant, individualistic or nationalistic. Thanks to this

apparent flexibility, different nineteenth-century groups with particular ideological agendas

seized on the politics of the Divine Comedy and of Dante’s life, and interpreted them in terms

of contemporary American and Italian politics. What emerged in the antebellum United

States, then, were different Dantes, each based on the political contexts and views of North

and South.

29 Quoted in Dal Lago, 197.

 33

Dante in the South: The Divine Comedy for Nullification and States’ Rights

The critical reception history of Dante’s emergence in United States has until now

ignored how regions beyond New England read and understood Dante. Yet many southern

readers and intellectuals had a deep interest in him in the early nineteenth century, taking

part in efforts to translate his works and disseminate knowledge of him in southern

magazines and literary journals. This Dante of the American South took on a somewhat

different character than what Kathleen Verduin calls the “American Dante,” or the

particularly constructed Dante of New England intellectuals whose characterization of him

became universalized as “American.” 30 Southerners were apt to read Dante in terms of their

political and cultural antagonisms with the North, especially in relation to the perceived

tyrannies of the centralized authority of the United States federal government. For them,

Dante represented a devoutly moral poet dedicated to producing a uniquely “native” epic

that honored his birthplace, while properly castigating the abuses of tyrannical governments

that threatened his homeland. The southern interpretations of Dante were particularly

idiosyncratic. They were not quite the same as “neo-Guelph” interpretations of the Comedy,

the kind of interpretations that traditionalists and counter-revolutionaries in Italy held, in

which Dante was believed to firmly support Roman Catholic orthodoxy against secular

modernity (Crisafulli 269). But southern interpretations did focus on traditionalism and

localism, à la neo-Guelph readings, and in particular supported the South’s right to relative

autonomy and freedom from oppressive tariffs under the U.S. Constitution. In short, many

Southerners enlisted Dante in their fight for nullification, against the expansion and increase

of tariffs, and for the manners and mores of southern aristocrats.

30Kathleen Verduin, “Dante in America: The First Hundred Years,” Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text
and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996), 17.
 34

One of the early southern books to co-opt Dante for explicitly political purposes is

the anonymously-penned Memoirs of a Nullifier, published in Charleston, South Carolina, in

1832.31 Memoirs of a Nullifier is an overt political satire about the South Carolina Nullification

Crisis of 1832, claimed to be written by “a Native of the South.”32 In the book, the

narrator—a naive, gullible southern aristocrat—makes a Faustian bargain with the devil after

losing nearly a hundred thousand dollars to Yankee scam artists. This narrator undertakes a

series of comic baroque journeys that satirize a number of contemporary political topics. In

the end, when the Devil comes to take the narrator’s soul, the Devil has to interrupt his

consummation of the bargain to abruptly leave for a meeting of “Unionists” in Charleston.

This buys time for the narrator, who finds a conjuror and summons up the incarnate spirit

of Liberty (figured as a female goddess). When the Devil finally returns to deal with the

narrator, he sees the spirit Liberty. “What’s that?” asks the Devil. “That,” says the narrator

“is NULLIFICATION.”33The devil is thwarted, the narrator is saved, and here the book

ends with the lesson that South Carolina’s 1832 Ordinance of Nullification—which voided

the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832—was a just and wise act.

Politically charged as it is, Memoirs of a Nullifier also critiques what it perceives as New

England cultural hegemony over all of America’s arts and sciences. In Chapter 8, the

31Internet copies of Memoirs of a Nullifier have an author name attributed to them, one “Algernon Sidney
Johnston.” However, I have not been able to verify Johnston’s authorship. Nineteenth-century trade
publications and book announcements in periodicals list the author of Memoirs as “anonymous.” In the decades
following its publication, who the book’s author was was nothing more than a rumor. An 1837 review in North
American Review says that “respecting the authorship of ‘Memoirs of a Nullifier’ . . . we have no knowledge or
ground for suspicion. We have never heard it ascribed to anyone but an aged gentleman, who, we are sure
from internal evidence, did not write it. The author also professes to be a ‘native of the South,’ which the
individual referred to is not.” The reviewer states his confidence in the fact that the author is a Southerner,
given its publication in South Carolina and its dedication to South Carolina governor James Hamilton, Jr. See
“Misconceptions of the New England Character,” North American Review 44 (1837), 242-245.

32Significantly, Memoirs was reprinted in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. See Memoirs of a Nullifier (New York:
James A. Noyes, 1860). This edition includes a “historical sketch of nullification in 1832-33.”

33 Memoirs of a Nullifier (Columbia, South Carolina: The Telescope Office, 1832), 110. Hereafter Memoirs.
 35

narrator visits Washington, D.C. and witnesses a Senate speech by Daniel Webster, then

Senator from Massachusetts. A native of New Hampshire, a supporter of tariffs, an

opponent of nullification, and a “universalizer,” Webster in Memoirs is the supreme example

of a bombastic Yankee. Webster’s long-winded speech defends a new bill, which will force

all American schoolchildren to use only Noah Webster’s (Daniel Webster’s grandfather’s)

New England spelling book. This bill is meant to counter “those opposers of every thing

new and useful, the people of the Southern States, and particularly of South Carolina, [who]

may be by degrees overpowered in the resistance which I doubt not they will ungenerously

endeavour to make to [the bill]” (Memoirs 83). Webster’s primary defense of the bill is the

argument that it will enlighten those “continual dead weights,” the southern states, which

keep New England from “swiftly overleap[ing] the centuries that interpose between her and

the fulness of her future glory" (79). Webster’s millenialist dream will obviously become a

reality because New England manufacturers produce “scholars” capable of extraordinary

work in any art and science, including medicine, theology, marketing, and languages. In

short, every Yankee is learned, while every Southerner is not. Here the joke conflates

business with academics, suggesting that New England manufacturers and New England

colleges perpetuate the same Yankee desire to dominate everything everywhere.

Memoirs fires back at its intended opponents with not only explicit satire of them, but

with a wide array of references to and uses of classical literary works. An impressive amount

of intertextuality in Memoirs counters the fictional Webster’s contention that the southern

states are backwards; if the book itself displays the wide learning of its southern author while

containing a speech about the intellectual backwardness about the author’s region, this only

adds to the joke on the ignorant speechmaker. Memoirs employs narrative devices from

Homer, Virgil, Goethe, and Dante, while satirizing the English Romantics and the German
 36

Sturm and Drang movement. In fact, Dante’s Divine Comedy is chief among the works that

Memoirs of a Nullifier employs in service of its criticism of federal politics, and by doing so it

enlists Dante on the side of nullification and state’s rights.

The Divine Comedy plays a key role in Memoirs’ narrator’s transformation from a

gullible Southerner to a servant of Liberty, including its crafty use of “nullification” in a bad

supernatural bargain. This use of the Divine Comedy is most telling in Chapter 4 of Memoirs, in

which the narrator takes an odd journey through hell. His guide is not Virgil, however, but

the demon Kalouf, who assists the narrator as part of the Devil’s bargain. Kalouf is to be

married to his demon bride Hokeegolfa, and the narrator is to be their wedding guest. The

pair enters hell via a cave in Kentucky, a location which sarcastically references Kentucky

Senator Henry Clay’s attempts to broker compromise between North and South during the

1832 Nullification Crisis. Immediately upon entering hell, the narrator encounters the “ghost

of a Yankee pedlar [sic],” who attempts to sell the narrator some of his false wares (36-38).

The peddler, Kalouf, and the narrator travel to Styx where Charon ferries dead souls across

the river. At this point Charon acts as hell’s “custom house officer,” leveling such a massive

tariff on all the peddler’s goods that the peddler is forced to abandoned them—a joke that

obviously inverts the Yankee peddler’s usual position, one in which he benefits from high

tariffs.34 After the loss of the peddler’s goods, the narrator comments that “I doubt not but

that the separation of him and his pedling cart was infinitely more painful than that which

had previously occurred between his soul and his body” (39). Later, when the peddler is

judged and sentenced to his proper place in hell, the demon judge says that he is “really

34For more on the historical antagonism between New England businessmen and southern consumers, as
dramatized in Memoirs, see Joseph T. Rainer, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and
the Market Revolution,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997), 27-44.
 37

getting entirely out of patience with New-England, for it gives me more trouble than all the

rest of the world put together” (43).

While the novel includes few moments of detailed description, it does pause in this

section to offer Dantesque reports of hell’s topography, including abysses, burning lakes,

spewing volcanoes, and harsh whirlwinds. The narrator for a moment even explicitly

considers Dante’s own journey to hell, telling the reader that he is not going into “the terrific

interior of hell” but will only travel to its borderlands (45). Even there, the demons are

roasting and eating sinners, a torment akin to the traitors to God and government who are

being eaten by Lucifer in Inferno XXXIV. This particular punishment is an important

allusion, because the consumed sinners in Memoirs consist of New England political figures, a

hint that they themselves are a kind of traitor. Memoirs describes their punishments à la

Dante’s sinners; forever condemned to hell, nothing can “put an end to their sensation and

existence” (48). Those being eaten only see their suffering increase, and once eaten their

bodies re-form only to be eaten again, much like the punishment of the schismatics in Inferno

XXVIII.

But whereas Dante includes contemporary political figures in the Inferno to make

serious political and theological points, Memoirs puts living American political figures in hell

to make fun of them. The horror of the hell’s punishments in Memoirs quickly turns into

levity. The narrator sees one of the sinners, a “member of Congress from Rhode Island,”35

who complains about the rate at which he is roasted: “He was incessantly scolding the cooks,

either for turning the spit too fast, or too slow, or for letting it remain still. Nothing could

please him” (49). Next, just as the demon bride and groom are to wed, hell is invaded by an

army of men, their leader riding a large cow and dressed “in a shining suit of new

35This is the now-unknown Rhode Island representative Tristam Burges, called “Tristam Burgess” in the
Preface to Memoirs of a Nullifier.
 38

broadcloth.” This invasion force consists entirely of Yankees, who desire to take over hell, to

instill the principles of “Political Economy,” and to enact the same high tariff laws in hell

that they did in the United States. A great battle nearly ensues between the devils and the

invading Yankee army, but before that can occur, the roasting Rhode Island Senator begins

to make a speech, which defuses the conflict by making everyone run for his life: “At the

awful sounds of his voice, the whole multitude . . . scattered in universal dismay” (54). Here

the narrator runs back out of hell, exiting not like the courageous Dante, who went all the

way through hell and crawled down and up Satan himself, but fleeing the upper regions of

hell because of the speech of a New England politician.

Two chapters later, Memoirs continues its heavy use of Dante by employing a rare

device for nineteenth-century American fiction: it imitates brief parts of Dante’s Paradiso.

The narrator’s dead lover supposedly inhabits a star, and because the narrator cannot live

without her he desires to travel into the heavens. The narrator then convinces his demon

guide to help him do so; while the demon cannot travel into the heavens—like Virgil, he can

travel through hell but not heaven—he does aid the narrator by transforming him into an

“ethereal spirit” (68). With the help of gunpowder, the narrator rockets into the heavens

towards the star of his lover. But this technologically advanced method of star travel—

which contrasts with Dante’s method of being perfectly propelled heavenwards by God’s

love and providence—fails terribly. The narrator misses the star “by fifteen inches” due to

mathematical miscalculation (70). He continues moving through space until he encounters a

giant, who throws him back to Earth. (The joke here is that the culmination of the narrator’s

journey does not end by his encountering God, as Dante’s did, but by landing in

Connecticut.) The failure of the narrator’s heavenly journey points out Memoirs’ distrust of

technological innovation in travel methods. Like Hank Morgan in Mark Twain’s A

 39

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a Yankee who time-travels back to medieval England

and tries to improve King Arthur’s realm with advanced technology, the narrator of Memoirs

miserably fails to achieve the end he desires, even through clever use of the scientific

method.

Memoirs’ direct use of the Inferno and the Paradiso points to its concerns with Dante

criticism in general in the United States. If New England desires to extend its hegemony

over all areas of life, as Memoirs declares, then it would impose particular Yankee

interpretations on all literary works, making those interpretations universal. In fact this

boast is made in the fictional Daniel Webster's speech in Memoirs of a Nullifier. Webster states

that his New England brethren are able to imitate and use all languages excellently, especially

those languages taught at the university level: Spanish, French, Anglo-Saxon, German, and

Italian. Webster’s claim about Italian is as grand as any claim he makes about the other

languages, for New England scholars have actually “restored the true Tuscano-Roman

speech, which had latterly begun to degenerate” (81). This is an explicit reference to Dante

criticism since “Tuscano-Roman” refers to the Florentine vernacular in which Dante wrote.

The “restoration” of Dante’s Italian refers not to a translation project, which did not exist at

the time in the United States, but to the extensive commentary given to Dante by New

England literary journals since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and probably also to

the Dante classes taught at Harvard by George Ticknor.36 The joke is that New Englanders

know Italian better than modern Italians do, having reversed the “decline” of their language

for them, but Webster’s words also demonstrate Memoirs’ concerns with the widespread

dissemination of a New England interpretation of Dante.

36See Theodore Koch, Dante in America: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1896)
17. Hereafter Koch. In fact Memoirs was quite prescient about the “restoration” of Dante’s Italian, since Ticknor,
according to Koch, was writing a commentary on the Inferno in the late summer of 1832, right when Memoirs
was published. See Koch 18.
 40

Memoirs of a Nullifier, in form and content, is in one sense a counterattack against the

North’s attempt to co-opt Dante as their own. It is one of the first attempts at a kind of

southern interpretation of Dante. This interpretation is explicitly political, tied to

contemporary concerns with nullification and states' rights. Memoirs, using the narrative

devices of the Divine Comedy, criticizes New England businesses, questions technological

expansion, and places its enemies (New England politicians) in hell. By putting its narrator

through a series of supernatural journeys in which he encounters lying and thieving Yankees

everywhere, Memoirs creates a comical, Dantesque narrator in a book that is staunchly pro-

nullification and against perceived New England political and cultural hegemony.

Another Southerner who worked extensively on Dante was Richard Henry Wilde,

himself a Congressman from Georgia for several terms and professor of law at the

University of Louisiana. Wilde came close to being the first American citizen to stake out a

major claim in Dante criticism via an important publication. His Life and Times of Dante, an

extensive account of the poet’s life with snippets of translations of the Divine Comedy, was

never published, but advance publicity about the book allowed it to garner significant notice

in the press.37 Wilde began studying Italian during his Congressional days in the late 1820s,

and interestingly enough, according to J. Chelsey Mathews, he was well acquainted with

Dante by the summer of 1830. It seems that Wilde embraced Dante while he was thinking

about and dealing politically with the Nullification Crisis. 38

Wilde—like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller—was one of the numerous

Americans interested enough in Italian literature and culture to travel extensively on the

37See the Southern and Western Magazine and Review, August 1845 (2), 144; and “Literary Bulletin,” The United
States Magazine, and Democratic Review, March 1845 (16), 309. The manuscripts for Wilde’s work on Dante are in
the Library of Congress.

38 J. Chelsey Mathews, “Richard Henry Wilde’s Knowledge of Dante,” Italica (45:1), 35.
 41

Italian peninsula. He spent at least five years there, mainly in Florence, gathering research for

his Life and Times of Dante, of which he only finished half, though even that is 800 quarto

sheets long (Koch 21). There he gained a comprehensive knowledge of medieval and

modern Italian, resulting in a number of translations of Italian poems that were published in

American literary journals. Wilde also made an important artistic discovery of an original

fresco of Dante by Giotto di Bondone, a contemporary of Dante who earns high praise in

Purgatorio XI. This discovery, according to Washington Irving, became a tremendous

“sensation . . . not merely in Florence, but throughout Italy by the discovery of a veritable

portrait of Dante in the prime of his days.”39 Yet the Giotto fresco was controversial because

an Englishman, Seymour Stocker Kirkup, took credit for the discovery after Wilde’s death in

1847.40 The question of which man discovered the fresco was a topic of debate in American

literary journals, which defended Wilde out of national pride. 41

Wilde’s Dante projects were not as vitriolic and sarcastic as Memoirs, but at times they

contained an implicit partisan spirit and used Dante as a way of propagating certain southern

political interests. In 1837, Wilde wrote the sonnet “To Carlo Botta on Reading His History

of Italy,” first printed in Magnolia; or Southern Monthly in 1841. In the sonnet, Wilde

characterizes thirteenth-century Italy as a more glorious era, when men loved “freedom” and

had a “hatred of force and fraud,” while possessing artistic excellence and virtue. Here

Ausonia (the personified Italian peninsula), who possesses “ancient glory”—implying that

39 Geoffrey Crayon, The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, Oct 1841 (18:4), 319-323.

40When Hawthorne visited Florence in 1858, he met Kirkup, who continued the lie that he, Kirkup, had
discovered the fresco. Not knowing any better, Hawthorne believed him. Hawthorne also records that Kirkup
“held frequent communications” with Dante “through a medium.” The supposed spirit described its
appearance, which is just like the figure in the Giotto fresco. See Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks,
ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1980), 392.

See for example “Richard Henry Wilde and Dante,” The International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science, and
41

Art (July 1, 1850), 2.

 42

present-day Italy has lost whatever glory it had—desires to return back to the “days worthy

of the land where Dante sung.” Wilde’s impression of Italy links political values with artistic

merit: the “Tuscan sages” possessed Truth and “style’s best virtue,” which “scorn[ed] both

the Demagogue’s and Tyrant’s wages.” 42 (This phrase “Tyrant’s wages” is loaded with

political import, since it contains both the idea of tyrannical political attacks and of harsh

payments that the tyrant demands, including tariffs.) The representative of this Tuscan

excellence is Dante, whom Ausonia honors as the exemplar native poet of Tuscany and, by

extension, of Italy. To Wilde, Dante was a poet who proclaimed political freedom, deriding

all tyrannies and thereby honoring his fellow countrymen.

Wilde’s version of Italian history is much different than that of his New England

counterparts, who viewed medieval Italy as the cultural nadir of the last thousand years of

Italian civilization. According to K.P. Van Anglen, Dante to New Englanders was

necessarily a primitive poet writing in times far more barbaric than the nineteenth century,

mainly because Italian civilization climaxed during the Roman Empire and declined

precipitously thereafter, only to re-emerge during the Italian Renaissance in the sixteenth

century. This is the theory of the translatio imperii (further discussed below). New England

interpreters of Dante viewed Italy through this particular philosophy of history, believing

that the Italian Renaissance created a literal rebirth of Italian civilization and culture, which

was far more glorious in the seventeenth century than in the thirteenth.43 For the Southerner

Wilde, however, Dante’s Tuscany was the apex of Italian civilization, which ever since had

degenerated to its more tyrannical, present-day conditions. Dante himself represented a

42“Sonnet Sent to Carlo Botta on Reading His History of Italy,” Magnolia; or Southern Monthly (February, 1841),
95.
43K.P. Van Anglen, “Before Longfellow: Dante and the Polarization of New England,” Dante Studies 119
(2001), 160-164.
 43

moral kind of poetic virtue. Wilde links this virtue with political activism, specifically with

the attempt to defend one’s homeland against tyranny.

Other Southerners announced their concern for a lack of poetic virtue (or

“nativeness”) while using Dante as a chief example of a poet who displayed this quality and

used it for political purposes. The Virginian poet Philip Pendleton Cooke wrote a long

review of Cary’s Vision, published in The Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review in

1846, in which Cooke offered an extensive revision to a passage from Cary’s Vision,

projecting a native southern perspective onto Dante’s Divine Comedy.44 In the review, Cooke

offers a high literary critique of both the original text of the Comedy and Cary’s translation.

While an excellent translator, Cary, for Cooke, is necessarily a “subordinate” to the original;

he cannot exercise his own true poetical expressions because “every free thought that

springs from his mind is a rebel.”45 Even though Cary is deserving of the universal praise he

has received as Dante’s translator, Cooke says, he is not to be viewed as an English poet: “We

are not to look for noble English poetry in the translation of Cary, whose loyalty to his original

checks him at every step, quelling his own native fires, and exacting an abeyance of his

poetic will” (Southern 2).

What Cooke briefly attempts to do in the review, then, is to make Cary’s translation

more contemporary and, indeed, southern. He begins by characterizing Dante as a poet

deeply concerned with the intersection of moral and political issues. Cooke frames Dante

with his immediate predecessor poets—the Troubadours and other poets of courtly love in

England and France. These poets were, to Cooke, moral degenerates. At the time when

44For more on Cooke as a literary critic, and for additional information on Cooke’s view of Dante’s aesthetics,
see Edd Winfield Parks, Antebellum Southern Literary Critics (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1962),
136-157. Parks also provides some useful information on other Southern critics and their admiration of Dante,
including Wilde, Simms, Hugh Swinton Legaré, and Henry Timrod.
45Philip Pendleton Cooke, “Dante,” The Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review 12 (September 1846),
545-552.
 44

Dante began to write, poets were “dispensing their follies, and society not only receive[d]

them but add[ed] to them.” Dante is the “poet who, in the midst of darkness or frivolities of

letters, overbears all hostile influences, enters into new fields, and produces immortal

poems” (4). His Divine Comedy came from great wisdom and experience, which was based on

a harsh exile from Florence. Dante was a great patriot from Florence who constantly tried to

restore his city’s honor and reputation, by defending it in battle and by trying, later in life, to

defeat its usurpers. Cooke ignores the Comedy’s Roman Catholicism and chooses to play up

its short- and long-term social benefits to Dante’s homeland. Legends about where the

Comedy was composed and where Dante wandered led to the creation of shrines in Italy

where Dante’s countrymen could always “worship” his “genius.” These places are “Meccas

of the mind to the Italian,” a description that hints at the reviewer’s desire for the emergence

of a Dante of the American South.46 Upon Dante’s death, his fellow Florentines demanded

his body, and scores of Italians came to honor him; soon many cities (even Pisa, which

Dante once took part in an invasion of) copied Florence’s tribute so that “his name was

upon the lips of a hundred [Italian] cities” (5). Dante therefore was a uniquely moral poet

whose superior qualities blessed his native land, rendering him in turn the native poet of

Italy, an honor that his fellow countrymen all continue to recognize and benefit from.

Cooke then attempts to embellish the political content of the Comedy by revising and

adding to a passage from Cary’s Vision.47 The result is, in a sense, a southernized revision of

Cary’s translation—a revision that aligns Dante with southern political worries about federal

46Such a writer who could represent the South on the national and world stage was highly desirable, and in fact
the production of such an author was one of the goals of many antebellum literary journals in the South. See
Richard J. Calhoun, “Literary Magazines and the Old South,” The History of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D.
Rubin, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 157-163.
47In the review, Cooke’s title for his alteration of Cary is “The Famine Tower.” He would change this in 1847
to “The Story of Ugolino,” which he made a stand-alone poem in his book of poetry, Froissart Ballards. See
Cooke, Froissart Ballads, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847).
 45

tyranny and New England immorality. Cooke reworks Cary’s rendering of a well-known

passage from Inferno XXXIII, in which Dante and Virgil find Count Ugolino gnawing on the

skull of Archbishop Ruggieri. This passage is notable because it features Dante’s apostrophe

to Pisa, in which he castigates the city for its treachery and cruelty toward its fellow

countrymen. Cooke was also drawn towards Dante’s moral condemnation of Pisa, which he

amplifies in the revision of the passage. Table A1 compares a section of Cary’s translation of

Inferno XXXIII to Cooke’s revision of the translation. Clearly, Cooke romanticized Cary’s

rendering of Dante’s apostrophe, adding words and phrases like “sweetest,” “burning,” and

“Thou vile! Thou murder-fronted!”

Cooke’s heightened rhetoric sensationalizes the passage, intensifying Dante’s moral

and political castigation of Pisa. Indeed, the political content of the passage, involving

tyranny, treason, and assassination, is quite important. Cooke probably studied Cary’s

extensive footnote on the Ugolino passage, which describes the historical Ugolino as a

political conspirator against his own family and as a victim of a political double-cross. As

Cary relates, the medieval Tuscan city of Pisa was divided into three factions—the Judge

Nino Visconti of the Guelph party, Count Ugolino of another Guelph party, and

Archbishop Ruggieri of the Ghibellines. Ugolino conspired with Ruggieri to betray Nino

(supposedly Ugolino’s grandson) and his fellow Guelphs. Nino was exiled and so Ugolino

was “elevated to the supreme power [of Pisa] with every demonstration of triumph and

honor” (Cary 213). But Ugolino was soon after betrayed by the Archbishop, who instigated a

Pisan revolt that sent Ugolino and his family to prison. The Ugolinos were locked in a tower

above the river Arno, the key to the tower was thrown in the Arno, and all of the Ugolinos

starved there. In Inferno XXXII, Dante and Virgil encounter Ugolino and the Archbishop in

the frozen lake of Cocytus. In this circle are traitors to their country. Ugolino is forever
 46

gnawing at the Archbishop’s brain, a reminder of his death by famine but also a symbol of

the cannibalistic nature of internal political betrayals.

As in Memoirs of a Nullifier, there is, in Cooke’s revision of the Ugolino passage,

significant commentary on the nature of political compromisers with would-be tyrants. The

three-party struggle in the passage is akin to the several federal compromises on slavery,

beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In those compromises, important public

figures such as Henry Clay acted as go-betweens that catalyzed the ultimate agreements

between North and South. Clay of course was from a border slave state, Kentucky, the

location of the entrance to hell, according to Memoirs of a Nullifier. The role of compromiser,

to a hard-line Southerner, could be tantamount to the role of betrayer. The Guelph-

Ghibelline conflict featured in Inferno XXXIII, and thus in Cooke’s revision, is comparable to

political divisions in the antebellum U.S. Ugolino has betrayed the cause of his own Guelphs;

like Clay, he sides with those who would take away the relative autonomy of his homeland

and hand it over to usurpers. For this he is frozen in ice at the bottom of hell.

Yet Dante does show a bit of sympathy for Ugolino, who gnaws on the skull of

Ruggieri, which is a measure of ghastly revenge for Ugolino. Ugolino is also allowed a

soliloquy in the Inferno, which relates the tragic story of the starvation of his children and

their deaths. Dante’s greater scorn is reserved, as we’ve seen, for the city of Pisa, which

allowed such a horrific tragedy to occur. The city is ultimately won by the tyrannical

Ghibellines, led by Ruggieri, and so it is receives the most condemnation in Inferno XXXIII.

Dante desires a just judgment on all of Pisa’s citizens for the nasty, unnecessary deaths of

Ugolino and his children. But Cooke clearly goes much farther than Dante (and Cary). He

expands the harshness of Dante’s judgment to exclamatory death-wishes on Ghibelline-ruled

Pisa; instead of the souls of the Pisans “perishing” in the river Arno, as Cary’s translation
 47

simply has it, Cooke adds to the passage that the Pisans must “payest to the last bloody mite

/ Even pang for pang, thy debt of cruelties!” The invented epithets that Cooke piles on Pisa

charge the passage with melodrama. These exclamations are not simply meant for thirteenth-

century Pisa, but for the kinds of murderous usurpers willing to give away political

autonomy at any period in history, including Cooke’s volatile American antebellum present.

As in this example, many Southerners generally viewed the Ghibellines as a

tyrannical and imperialistic party, which wrongly trumpeted an oppressive federalism over

local or regional rights, but this view created an interpretive problem, since several majors

critics like Cary described Dante as a Ghibelline sympathizer in his exilic years. An article in

the 1842 Southern Quarterly Review explains how this ideological dilemma could be resolved for

Southerners who wanted to argue that Dante was more Florentine patriot than Ghibelline.48

In a review of Mary Shelley’s Lives of Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, the anonymous

reviewer characterizes Dante as a reluctant Ghibelline ally. According to this reviewer, Dante

was a supreme native poet who was the “first to lead the way in that brilliant galaxy, that

made Italy a second time the seat of the arts, of poetry and refinement” (Southern Quarterly

528). Dante was a superior scholar, not only adept in the “learning of the day,” but able to

debate the dons at the universities in Paris and Oxford. 49 Here the writer pokes at New

England intellectuals, engaging in criticism similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s jabs at the

Transcendentalists. Dante is a model scholar because he is a gentleman and an Aristotelian

realist; he was not “one of those who, because ‘they feel the god within them’—because they

48“Review of Lives of Eminent Scientific and Literary Men of Italy,” The Southern Quarterly Review 1 (April 1842), 527-
553.

49Typically in reviews such as this one of Dante’s life, certain biographical aspects are emphasized while others
are ignored. Here Dante’s scholarship is the focus, while the reviewer leaves out any attempt to demonstrate
Dante’s family’s noble heritage or Dante’s battlefield experience. Because Dante could be a warrior, nobleman,
lover, or scholar, critics could emphasize one or more of these traits to fit their purpose and audience
expectations.
 48

devote their minds to intellectual culture,—consider themselves privileged to neglect all the

graces of manner, all gentlemanly refinement” (529). The writer’s charge is that his presumed

Transcendentalist opponents are not “chivalrous”: simply because they can read Greek and

“pen a stanza,” they are so prideful that they “violate all the conventional forms of society.”

Again, the southern Dante is a model poet who exhibits southern moral virtues, unlike his

New England counterparts.

Because Dante was so gentlemanly, he treated his native land with the honor she was

owed. The writer attempts to demonstrate that Dante had no choice but to side with the

Ghibellines. This is unfortunate, he says, because the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict was akin to

a “civil war” in which “each state was not only arrayed against state, but people of the same

state, the same province, the same city, and even of the same family, [were] frequently

arrayed against each other in violent and implacable hostility” (530). Dante’s native Florence

had exiled him mainly because of the Papacy’s greed. At the time of Dante’s exile, the Pope

wanted the lands of Tuscany and Lombardy, which led to Florence’s loss of independence

and Dante’s unfortunate allegiance with the party of tyranny:

At the time of Dante’s birth, the Guelfs, or papal party, had obtained the
ascendancy in Florence, and the Poet adhered to this party till his banishment, when
the interference of the Pope, with the independence of the city, and the hostility of
the citizens against himself and his friends, compelled him to take part with the
imperialists.
The Florentines have had to endure the obloquy of all the learned world, for
their treatment of their first great poet; but we see, Dante had linked himself with a
party which, by its impolicy and tyranny, had become odious to the people, and he
suffered, in consequence, from the violence of the popular clamor. (530).

The reviewer cautiously confirms the idea that Dante, late in life, was a Ghibelline, an idea

qualified by the fact that, though the Ghibellines were tyrannical, Dante had no other choice

but to side with them. For this reviewer, Dante’s native land erred politically by siding with

the Papacy, rejecting the ultimate artistic greatness of the poet himself. Dante is the real soul
 49

of Florence, but the Florentines could never realize this while embracing religious errors.

Still, Dante’s explicit native love and moral virtue were enough to reprove Florence, and so

shortly after his death Florence and all of Tuscany embraced their homegrown, world-

famous poet. For many southern readers of Dante, then, Dante desired Florence’s

independence and political sovereignty, and so he imbued his whole poetic corpus with a

specifically Florentine quality that defined the uniqueness of his native city and attempted to

preserve that uniqueness through its critique of the Guelphs. It was only because Dante so

loved Florence, and because Florence erred so badly in exiling him, that he became a

Ghibelline. While this critic’s historical characterization of Dante and Florence is highly

suspect, it demonstrates the lengths to which some Southerners went in an attempt to keep

Dante from being characterized as a sympathizer with New England federalism. For these

Southerners, Dante’s loyalty was with the Guelphs, even if he seemed to be against them,

while the Guelphs best approximated the antebellum cause for states’ rights. Thus could

Dante be enlisted in southern political causes.

Dante for the Union: New England Views of the Divine Comedy

Dante was barely known in antebellum New England at the beginning of the

nineteenth century, but he was widely praised fifty years later. The earliest known partial

American translation of the Divine Comedy was published in the New York Magazine, or Literary

Repository in 1791 by William Dunlap, six years after Henry Boyd, an Englishman, published

the first full English translation of the same work. Coincidentally, the translated passage is

from Inferno XXXIII, in which Ugolino gives his tragic speech, clearly a passage that

intrigued antebellum Americans. However, Dunlap’s interest in the passage is different than

Cooke’s (as described above). Dunlap’s prose introduction to his translated passage reflects
 50

post-Constitutional fears of democratic factions and uprisings. 50 Archbishop Ruggieri,

Dunlap says, “betray[ed] his secret machinations against the state” by sparking the “fury of

the populace” against Ugolino.51 This demagogue-led, democratic revolt forced Ugolino and

his children into his tower, and the selected passage is Ugolino’s monologue about the

horrors of his short time in the tower when he watched his children starve. Dunlap’s

carefully selected translation and his interpretation of the passage warn against further

democratic revolution, the effects of which can be found in Ugolino’s horrifying death and

afterlife.

As in this example, Dante’s ascendancy in Protestant New England was based on his

commentators’ ability to dynamically interpret his life and works in terms of American

political contexts. While Dante, for the New England literary elite, was often described as

the model moral poet, he really represented the national greatness of Italy, the poet who

could defend and pronounce his nation’s greatness always and everywhere. In short, Dante

was moral because he embodied the national. Van Anglen argues that New England critics

and authors viewed Dante in terms of the translatio imperii. These critics saw Italy in the

thirteenth century as a country, in terms of the cycle of empire, on the wane. Dante wrote

during Italy’s cultural and political nadir, but he sparked a moral and artistic revolution that

led to the great artists and works of the Italian Renaissance. For New Englanders, who

believed that the American empire was on the rise—the seat of world empire soon to

50Robert Lawson-Peebles’ study, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned
Upside Down, argues that American politicians and literati in the 1790s worried about popular insurrections and
thus gravitated towards authoritarianism. See Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary
America: The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

51W.D., “A Passage from DANTE’S INFERNO thrown in English heroic verse,” New York Magazine, or
Literary Repository (May 1791), 297-298. Angelina La Piana demonstrates that “W.D.” is William Dunlap, the
“most versatile busybody in the intellectual and artistic life of New York in that period.” See La Piana, Dante’s
American Pilgrimage: A Historical Survey of Dante Studies in the United States, 1800-1944 (New Haven, Connecticut,
Yale University Press, 1948), 24
 51

transfer westward from Great Britain to the United States—the lessons of ancient and

medieval Italy and the theory of the course of empire contained significant warnings for

America’s future. According to Van Anglen, the “pessimistic reading of the course of empire

. . . lay behind the Unitarian view of Dante’s historical significance” (Van Anglen 161).

For culturally-minded New Englanders, Dante was a superb model for what Van

Anglen calls the “Arminian structure of feeling.” New England critics and authors held to

the “clerical model of literary authority,” which both condescended to the reading public

while encouraging that public to voluntarily imitate the virtues possessed by the

condescending critics and authors. As Van Anglen argues, literary critics were something like

preachers, “using their pens didactically to garner the affectionate and voluntary submission

of their fellow citizens by enabling [them] to progress religiously, culturally, politically, and

morally to the point where they would realize the wisdom of obeying their superiors in

virtue, knowledge, and breeding” (158). Authors and lecturers such as George Washington

Greene, Jared Sparks, William Tudor, George Ticknor, Caleb Cushing, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, and William H. Prescott classified Dante as a genius and an immortal who

radically changed Italy by providing a cultural model for its citizens, leading them by reason

and artistry to greater wisdom and knowledge. Dante, then, was made in the image of New

England literary critics.

The antebellum New England Dante was culturally hegemonic. For example, The

New-York Mirror in March 1831 offered a lengthy sketch of Dante’s life in which Dante is par

excellence the poet of the world. “No man ever exercised so great, so honourable, and so

extensive a literary influence as Dante.”52 The writer lists Dante’s possible competitors, but

52 “Italian Literature,” The New-York Mirror: a Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts (March 26, 1831), 300.
 52

Homer, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Milton all have critical faults. What is crucial about Dante

is his abiding Italian influence:

The beauty of his style, the grandeur of his conceptions, the living accuracy of his
pictures, these the Italians admire, repeat and consecrate as the richest legacy of one
generation to another. These are only claims on his respect, but he is entitled to and
receives the further tribute of their gratitude. Their loved and boasted language is his
gift. His strong creative mind brought together its scattered atoms, and they united in
that fabric of beautiful strength and harmonious proportion, of which he is at once
the architect and noblest ornament. From his works, too, they draw the purest and
noblest lessons of patriotism, and learn to cast off sectional jealousies, and glory in
the name of the common country which he loved, forgave, and lamented.

This passage describes little about Dante’s poetry and offers instead a vision of what the

model national poet looks like. Contrasting sharply with Southern interpretations of Dante,

the writer declares that Dante is a great patriotic unifier, one who is forever teaching and

reforming his nation to “cast off sectional jealousies” and instead “glory in the name” of the

nation. The writer continues this thought by comparing Dante to Milton. This comparison

demonstrates that both poets, writing in a time of “fierce dissensions” and “tumultuous

anarchy,” came out of the battle between “prejudice and liberality” by siding with moral

virtue—which for the writer is directly related to egalitarian, progressive ideals.

While the politics of Dante were crucially important to his American reception, his

Roman Catholicism was not wholly ignored. Here the problems of interpretation were more

complex for antebellum New England Protestants. Despite his polemics against the Catholic

Church’s vices and his depiction of bishops and popes as suffering many of hell’s worst

punishments, Dante is obviously and thoroughly a medieval Roman Catholic. Yet

throughout the nineteenth century, many American critics, following English critics, would

call Dante an “anti-papacy” poet or a proto-Protestant (and even a forerunner of Martin

Luther), simply overlooking the Divine Comedy’s acceptance of the Pope as ecclesiastical head

of the Christian church and of Rome’s authoritative position as the one true Christian
 53

church. This oversight was a naïve but widespread response to Dante’s Catholicism, yet

some commentators dealt with it in more creative and intelligent ways. For one, some New

Englanders simply ignored their problems with Dante’s theology and focused on doctrinal

points of commonality. Verduin has shown that New England Calvinists and their

sympathizers were quick to acknowledge the theological truths of the Inferno that

corresponded with their own doctrines. Sin leads to the damnation of hell, and all humans

have original sin in Adam, whose fall in the Book of Genesis was total—not resulting in a

flawed humanity but instead a spiritually dead humanity—doctrines with which Dante’s

Inferno seems to agree. For Mary Moody Emerson and Herman Melville, as well as anti-

Calvinists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dante closely

resembled the Calvinism of New England’s Puritan ancestors.53

But Dante’s Catholicism was not entirely an issue of religious doctrine; in fact it was

often linked to Dante’s politics, of which his anti-papal polemics were a crucial part. Anti-

Catholic sentiment in American Dante criticism was generally tied to the Pope’s supposed

attempts to add to the Catholic Church’s “temporal dominion” by interfering in Italian

politics (both past and present). While American Protestant critics might have read into

Italian history their own fears of the rising influence of the Catholic Church in the United

States, they rarely discouraged the reading of explicitly Catholic classics such as Dante’s

Comedy. Instead, in the case of Dante, the Tuscan bard was an excellent go-between for

Protestant politics and Catholic culture. For example, in one issue of The American Review: a

Whig Journal Devoted to Politics and Literature, a long article titled “The Life and Genius of

Dante Alighieri, with an Account of the Divina Commedia” was published in the late

summer of 1848, concurrent with the Italian Revolution of 1848-1849. The article describes

53Kathleen Verduin, “Dante’s Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England Calvinism,” Dante Studies 123
(2005), 133-161.
 54

Dante as a dedicated artist who “entered political life in the service of his native city.” But

the Guelphs ultimately stole Dante’s property and banished him from Tuscany because they

were “led by blind passion” and “assisted by the Pope.”54 Despite this, the article says,

Dante’s ultimate political views are complex and non-partisan. The concluding section of the

article asks about the extent of Dante’s relationship to Protestantism. Was Dante a proto-

Protestant, the article asks? No, it says, he is the “poetical representative” of the medieval

Catholic Church, the doctrines of which are his “fundamental religious views.” In Dante’s

view, the Papacy is a divinely ordained office and the Church’s traditions must be defended

at all costs. Yet, one of Dante’s main concerns was in restraining the earthly power wielded

by the Pope. “Dante will allow to the Popes only the spiritual supremacy of the church,” the

article states, and he “testifies very strongly against the secularization of the [Catholic

Church’s] hierarchy” (141-142). Dante’s chief quality is that he has a “double face,” at once

looking back towards the past and gazing towards the future, so that his invectives against

the Pope’s thirteenth-century injustices prophesy the coming of the Protestant reformation.

The article then gives its nuanced view of Dante’s role in American life:

We are not willing, then, as Protestants, to renounce Dante, and to yield up the
enjoyment of his immortal poem to the Roman Church. We look upon the middle
ages as the fertile soil of the reformation; upon Catholicism as an indispensable
prerequisite and preparation of Protestantism. Dante’s age, the particular form of his
thinking, feeling, poetry, and life, has passed away, and can never again be revived.
But we gaze back upon it, with an interest similar to that with which we look upon
our youth, which, although past forever, belongs still to the marrow of life, to the
sum of our existence, and in so far has an everlasting meaning. (143)

This confusing final sentence—which conflates individual experience with five hundred

years of Western history—at once distances itself from the Divine Comedy while declaring it

an all-time world classic. But the confusion is part of the nuance. Dante was, politically, an

anti-Catholic Catholic, and he would obviously be a supporter of the Risorgimento’s goal of

54 P.S., “The Life and Genius of Dante Alighieri,” The American Review 2 (August 1848), 126.
 55

a secular Italian state. His life and the Divine Comedy were useful links between an Italian

culture soaked in Roman Catholicism, which many Americans desired to praise for its

literary and artistic contributions to the world, and American criticism of the Roman

Catholic Church’s politics and history.

For New England Protestants, the importance of the politics of Italy dramatically

increased with the Italian Revolution of 1848 and the Risorgimento’s attempt to unify the

peninsula. Dante, as the great poet of Italy, was inextricably linked to the Risorgimento

movement. In the U.S., first-, second-, and third-hand accounts of the developments of the

revolution circulated in the press with great interest. Direct reports from American

correspondents such as Margaret Fuller (then Margaret Fuller Ossoli) joined reprints from

British newspaper and magazines, most of which backed the revolution’s efforts to unify

Italy.55 This intense media interest in Italy eventually centered on the most famous Italian in

the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Garibaldi, as a figure in the story of Dante’s increasingly widespread reception in the

nineteenth-century United States, played a useful role. As a soldier, exile, and patriot in

service to the cause of unification (titles given to Dante as well), Garibaldi embodied certain

republican values while representing the idea of a united Italy. The parallels that Americans

could find between both Garibaldi and American ideals and Garibaldi and Dante were

extensive. As was often reiterated in the American press, Garibaldi was born on July 4, 1807,

a day that obviously foretold his dedication to republican revolutions. His mother desired

him to be a priest, but he wanted to be a sailor and adventurer. Committed to Italian unity

and in rebellion against foreign, monarchical strangleholds of different regions of the Italian

peninsula, Garibaldi joined the “Young Italy” movement and spent much of his adult

55 See Marraro, American Opinion of the Unification of Italy, 1846-1861.

 56

lifetime trying to defeat foreign rule of and in his native land. Always the underdog,

Garibaldi nevertheless had great battlefield success, eventually succeeding in uniting Italy in

1861. In short, Garibaldi was the supreme man of action in the mid-nineteenth century,

acting out and realizing liberal-national ideals of individual freedom, state sovereignty, and

national unification. Periodicals read into his life story the past revolutionary glories of the

U.S. and the progressive ideas promised by the American Revolution. The Independent in 1850

used him as a fine example of how to resist and overturn the Fugitive Slave Act of that same

year.56 To other papers he was a figure like Cincinnatus and Washington, simultaneously a

noble patriot in the cause of defending his country and a humble figure who refused

publicity and even pay.57 Garibaldi was so revered as a heroic general and unifier that

Abraham Lincoln offered him a “Major-General’s commission” in the Union Army during

the summer of 1861. Garibaldi refused, because of ill health and because of the North’s

reluctance to completely abolish slavery everywhere in the United States.58 Though the figure

of Garibaldi was almost wholly a media creation that Garibaldi himself helped craft,59 he

was, as Denis Mack Smith states, for a time the “most widely known figure in the whole

world” (Smith 1). And he, to many Americans, represented Italian national unification.

Dante’s life had superficial similarities to Garibaldi’s, which led to assumed

connections between the two. Both were, at some point in their lives, soldiers who fought

56 “How to Resist the Fugitive Slave Law,” The Independent (October 31, 1850), 178.

57See for example “The Career of Garibaldi,” Gleeson’s Pictorial Drawing—Room Companion (May 27, 1854), 334;
and “Garibaldi the Patriot Soldier,” Flag of Our Union, (July 9, 1859), 221.
58Secretary of State William Seward instructed U.S Foreign Minister H.S. Sanford on July 27, 1861 to tell
Garibaldi that “this government believes his services in its present contest for the unity and liberty of the
American People, would be exceedingly useful, and . . . that this government believes he will, if possible, accept
this call because it is too certain that the fall of the American Union, if indeed it were possible, would be a
disastrous blow to the cause of Human Freedom equally here, in Europe, and throughout the world.” Denis
Mack Smith, ed., Garibaldi (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 69-70. Hereafter Smith.
59Lucy Riall has brilliantly analyzed the nineteenth-century “cult of Garibaldi” in Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero
(New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007).
 57

for freedom and independence. Both were political exiles who wrote autobiographically

about their respective exiles; Garibaldi’s brief stay in New York City in 1850-1851 helped

craft his image in the U.S. of a humble patriot in a voluntarily impoverished state of exile,

suffering nobly for the cause of unity.60 And both men supposedly spent a great part of their

lives defending the cause of Italian unification.

For this cause, Dante was figured as a prophet. An article in The Albion in 1861,

reprinted from a British magazine, claims that Dante prophesized the coming of Garibaldi.

This article asserts that the Divine Comedy predicts the figure of the “Liberator” of Italy,

which Dante greatly longed for. This “Liberator” possesses humble virtues, hates “all

worldly calculations,” and possesses the “capacity for commanding” armies that defy the

greatest odds, a description which fits the American image of Garibaldi perfectly.61 In 1862,

the Christian Examiner made a similar point: “With prophetic foresight, [Dante] was the first

to announce that doctrine which has sunk so deep in the hearts of Italians, the doctrine of

the unity of Italy. . . . [T]he clouds which have so long darkened the sky, once resplendent

with the gorgeous sunrise of the Renaissance, are fast breaking away. Garibaldi fulfills the

dream of Dante.”62 Thus Dante was read as a dreamer of nineteenth-century revolutions for

the cause of nationalism. He supposedly predicted Garibaldi and the Risorgimento

movement, which coincided remarkably well with American political issues of national

unification. This Risorgimento-U.S. nexus made Dante a poet of political and national unity,

a goal realized in Italy in 1861 and one desperately fought for by the northern United States

60Riall argues this in Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, 106-115. See, for example, “Sketches, General Garibaldi,”
Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal (September 11, 1850), 148, which offers an overview of a journalist’s interview
with Garibaldi during his stay in the U.S.
61 “Garibaldi Foretold by Dante,” The Albion, a Journal of News, Politics, and Literature (June 22, 1861), 292.

62 “History and Biography,” Christian Examiner 73:3 (November 1862), 463.

 58

in that same year. Dante then could speak to the heart of the problem of the American Civil

War.

Dante in the Civil War: Guelphs versus Ghibellines, North versus South

During the Civil War, Dante’s prominence in the United States continued to grow.

Several of the political problems in Dante’s life and works gained added significance in an

intramural war that famously pitted brothers against brothers and fathers against sons—

Florence’s civil strife, the Guelph-Ghibelline feud which divided states, cities, and families,

Dante’s political exile, and the Inferno’s torments. As Chapters III and IV show, major writers

like Whitman and Longfellow turned to Dante to understand their own Civil War

experiences, which led to many of Whitman’s soldier poems in Drum-Taps and Longfellow’s

highly-regarded translation of the Divine Comedy. Further, several notable books were

published on Dante during or immediately after the war. Parsons was motivated enough in

the 1860s to finally finish his translation of the Inferno, begun in 1847, by 1866. Charles

Norton Eliot finished two books: a pamphlet of his study of Dante portraiture, On the

Original Portraits of Dante (1863), and a translation of the Vita Nuova (1867). After French

artist Gustave Dore completed his illustrations of the Divine Comedy in the late 1850s, his

work immediately circulated in the U.S., but it was Dore’s illustrations of the Inferno in

particular that were especially popular during the war.63 In fact, Americans published six

times the number of Dante books during the 1860s than were published in all previous

decades combined. The Civil War, then, gave a massive boost to Dante’s popularity in the

United States.

63 Philadelphia bookstore owner Frederick Leypoldt published a standalone book of Dore’s Inferno illustrations
in 1863. A review of Leypoldt’s book in the 1863 Saturday Evening Post praises the ghastliness of the
illustrations. Dore’s illustrations “suggest no possibilities of heaven” and “give more fully the idea of infinite
depths of descent.” See “Gustave Dore’s Dante,” Saturday Evening Post (January 7, 1863), 3.
 59

Interpretations of Dante during the war were even more obviously partisan than they

were in previous decades, explicitly mentioning the “slave party” or the “invaders,” though

book reviewers and Dante critics in American literary journals generally maintained an air of

literary erudition. The Divine Comedy was even on the minds of soldiers on the battlefield. In

the late winter of 1862, The Southern Literary Messenger published a review, written by W.

Gordon McCabe, of several French books on Dante. 64 McCabe was no idle scholar at the

time; he was a 21-year old artillery captain in the Army of Northern Virginia who fought for

the Confederacy throughout the entire war.65 McCabe either carried around or had

immediate access to at least five Dante commentaries while he wrote his review from

“Howitzer Camp” in Warwick County, Virginia. In his review, McCabe uses Dante to

promote Confederate nationalism.

McCabe’s review distinguishes Dante as a noble poet-warrior who stood above the

factional conflicts of his day. As a young soldier, Dante fought “gallantly” at Campaldino. A

footnote to this statement conjectures that Dante himself might have been the deciding

factor in the battle (McCabe 138). McCabe also plays up Dante’s noble heritage and

compares aristocratic nobility favorably to the democratic rabble of the general populace.

He asserts that the Florentines had a democratic revolution in 1293 that split the city into

two factions and discredited all nobles, or those “who counted a knight among their

ancestors from holding office.” Dante, a scion of a knight, became one of those who lost

their political authority in Florence. And yet Dante wanted to serve his fellow citizens, so he

became an apothecary because it was “a condition exacted of the gentry by the then

democratic tendencies of the republic.” McCabe’s description of Florence distinguishes

64 W. Gordon McCabe, “Dante,” Southern Literary Messenger (Feb/March 1862), 136-148. Hereafter McCabe.
65Armistead Gordon, “William Gordon McCabe, A Brief Memoir,” The Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography 28:2 (April 1920), 198-199.
 60

Dante from the Florentine hoi polloi: “Party spirit was now raging at Florence; family ties

were forgotten, and brothers confronted each other in these terrible times” (139). Yet Dante,

as an elected official, demonstrated gentlemanly deference when he attempted to assuage this

raging party spirit by banishing the leaders of both the Guelphs and Ghibellines from

Florence. Unfortunately Dante was tricked into exile and was warned that he would be

burned alive if he ever returned to his native land (i.e., “the bounds of the republic”).

McCabe then offers a paean and a lament for his political-literary hero:

Thus Dante Alighieri, the greatest citizen of Florence, became an exile; the proud,
earnest man, wandering through Italy, dependent (God pity him!) upon the bounties
of his former enemies . . . At one time animated by the hope of driving out the
usurper, at another heartsick and a-weary . . . When the brave Henry VII., died at
Buonconvento, the last hope of the bold exile perished; he knew that he never
should tread the streets of his beloved Florence again. (140)

The great enemies for McCabe are the democratic masses, who become the “usurper” that

wrongly banishes the great, noble-born poet.

McCabe’s Dante is, in one major way, unlike the Dante that antebellum Southerners

described as one who greatly preferred local, sovereign rule. By 1862, Italy’s unification was

complete and the Confederate States of America constituted a new nation-state, immediately

engaged in war and therefore needing economic and ideological mobilization on a national

scale. McCabe’s Dante is one who echoes this need. He is a nationalistic poet, one who after

being wrongly exiled for life from the democratic republic of Florence—he was “purified by

a great trial” in his political exile— transcends all partisan conflict (148). In describing this,

McCabe quotes extensively from an 1852 issue of The Foreign Quarterly Review (published in

London), which characterizes Dante in religious-nationalist terms:

Now Dante was neither a Catholic nor a Guelph, nor a Ghibelline; he was a
CHRISTIAN and an ITALIAN. * * * * * It must be said, that this idea of national
greatness is the leading thought in all Dante did or wrote. Never man loved his
country with a more exalted or fervent love; never had man such projects of
 61

magnificent and exalted destinies for her. All who consider Dante as a Guelph or a
Ghibelline, grovel at the base of the monument which he desired to raise to Italy.

McCabe’s comment on this quotation repeats the same message: “Remember that: Dante

was a CHRISTIAN and an ITALIAN: that is the key by which to understand the sayings and

doings of this man” (144). McCabe even suggests that the writer in the Foreign Quarterly

Review missed an apt comparison between Dante and Garibaldi. Yet McCabe’s version of a

nationalistic Dante actually encourages a kind of conservative revolution. Dante would show

us how to restore our beloved republican land, even though he himself failed to do so. To

restore republican freedom and to understand Dante, we must be like a medieval Italian,

“believ[ing] the influence of the stars, and still hav[ing] a reverence for the old mythological divinities”

(144). These old divinities would help us rectify the exilic trials that we are currently

undergoing, both by restoring the ideals of the old republic and by unifying the new

Confederate nation. McCabe’s reading of Dante’s life demonstrates the tensions in

Confederate nationalism, between the federal sovereignty of the Confederate government

and its political aim of re-establishing local, independent rule. For McCabe, Dante’s life and

works demonstrate how to balance this tension.

For Northerners during the Civil War, Dante was a partisan figure on the side of the

Union. This is the major point of Vincenzo Botta’s Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet

(1865), which is perhaps the most interesting of the pre-Longfellow-translation books on

Dante published in the United States. Botta himself almost perfectly represents the matrix of

issues that connected Dante and U.S. and Italian culture. He was a native Piedmontese and

became a professor of philosophy and mathematics at the University of Turin sometime

prior to the Revolution of 1848. 66 In 1849, he was elected to the Parliament of Sardinia-

Piedmont. While little else is known about him, it is nearly certain that he voluntarily exiled

66 “The Obituary Record—Vincenzo Botta,” The New York Times (October 6, 1894), 4.
 62

himself for his radical politics by 1850. 67 By 1853, he was living in New York City—

permanently, as it turned out—and acquired a professorship at New York University

teaching Italian literature and language. Botta was thus one of a great number of exiled

Italian intellectuals, nationalists who worked for Italian unification, a cause for which they

had great influence in Britain and the United States. These intellectuals, as Dal Lago points

out, were “Italian refugees who ended up as university professors in the USA and Canada

[and] were instrumental in forming a pro-Italian and anti-Bourbon and anti-Austrian opinion

among upper-class North American students who were bound to become high civil servants

and diplomats” (Dal Lago, Radicalism 198).

Botta’s American life through the Civil War was dedicated to these educational aims.

In 1862, Putnam published Botta’s lecture-turned-book, A Discourse on the Life, Character, and

Policy of Count Cavour, a quasi-autobiographical account of the life of Camillo Benso, or the

Count of Cavour. Botta almost certainly knew Cavour personally, since Cavour was the

Prime Minister of Sardinia-Piedmont while Botta was serving in parliament there. Cavour,

for Botta, was the ideal pragmatic revolutionary. Far less radical and also far more successful

than Mazzini, Cavour was a “practical man by nature” who “was moulded on a

comprehensive knowledge of the forces which patriotism could command, and on the just

appreciation of the necessity of the time.”68 This means that Cavour is one of the great

heroes of the Risorgimento, a leader who combines ideals and actions to achieve the goal of

Italian unification. Cavour actually fulfills the vision of Dante, for Dante was the first Italian

67 An article in The Independent claims that Botta was sent to the U.S. by the Sardinian government, yet the
article’s title is “Italian Exiles” and it hints that Botta’s politics were so extreme that he had to “throw up his
professorship” and embrace “the institutions of America.” See “Italian Exiles,” The Independent (October 26,
1854), 1.
68Vincenzo Botta, A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Policy of Count Cavour (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1862),
17. Hereafter Botta, Cavour.
 63

to envision the blessings of Italian unification. The conclusion of Botta’s book on Cavour

actually waxes eloquent on Dante’s high belief in nationalism:

More than five centuries ago, when Dante beheld the splendor of Italian civilization
obscured by civil war and foreign oppression, his beautiful country divided into petty
sovereignties, distracted by mutual jealousies, the fair provinces of the south
convulsed by the intrigues of the heirs of Charles of Anjou, . . . and the fury of
discord everywhere raging, he poured forth, in sublime strains which have echoed
through the ages, his warning to the nations against the calamities of disunion. In
vain he strove to unite those discordant elements into harmony and nationality; and
to this cause devoted his genius, his love, his religion, his life, and consecrated his
labors as poet and soldier, as magistrate and statesman. . . . But rejoice, O illustrious
shade [Italy]! The sacred fire of patriotism which burns in thy immortal song, has at
last kindled the hearts of thy countrymen. Thy lofty aspirations, borne on the wings
of thy divine poetry, like invisible hosts, have led thy country on to liberty and union;
thy noble dream is at last fulfilled. (Botta, Cavour 93-94)

Botta uses the history of Italy as a means of speaking about the then-raging American Civil

War. Dante is a potent historical example of a unionist who suffered through “the fury of

discord everywhere raging.” Botta characterizes thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy as a

country torn by civil war, split into factions, with a corrupted southern region and numerous

cities ruled by a tyrannical “master” class. This prompted Dante to utter his poetic messages

to the world about the “calamities of disunion.” For Botta, Cavour took Dante’s message to

heart and became the champion of a unified Italy. This story had relevant lessons for the

United States, which a reviewer of Botta’s book in 1863 recognized: “Such a character

[Cavour] is seldom found in the annals of statesmanship and patriotism,—which too often

teem with the evidences of selfishness, cruelty, and corruption. As an illustrious

representative of the great principles of free government, we of America willingly place his

name in envied proximity to that of our own beloved Washington.”69

Botta’s Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet (1865)—his second Civil War-era book

that connects Italian history and the American Civil War—continues his exploration of

69“A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Policy of Count Cavour,” North American Review 96 (January 1863),
72
 64

Dante as the world’s first democratic nationalist. This book defies genre expectations, since

it is part biography, part literary commentary, part political tract, and part translation. From

the perspective of the history of Dante translations, Botta’s book is a radical revision and

reissuing of Cary’s Vision. Nearly three-quarters of the book simply summarizes and reprints

in English the Divine Comedy. It quotes extensively from Cary’s Vision and interjects Botta’s

prose summaries between the lengthy quotations (see Figure B1). Further, its structure is

similar to Cary’s: it begins with an extended biography of Dante, describing his life and

historical context, which prepares the reader for the Divine Comedy as a poem, which takes up

the final 300-or-so pages. Published by Charles Scribner, Botta’s Dante book is in form and

appearance a publishing effort that at once competes with the Cary translations—offering an

authoritative, native Italian as Dante’s commentator—and tries to capitalize on latent market

demand for Dante’s poetry (which Longfellow ultimately succeeded in doing two years after

Botta’s Dante).

Botta’s book is also an Italian-Americanization of Cary’s Vision, updating it and

placing it in a Civil War context. While sizeable sections of the book discuss Dante’s moral

philosophy, his Scholasticism, and his relationship to Beatrice, the Table of Contents

advertises the book as a political discussion of Dante and helps accent the word Patriot in the

book’s title. The section titles include “His Patriotism,” “His Political System,” “Dante as

the Chief Magistrate of the Florentine Republic,” “Dante Condemned to Exile,” and “The

Emperor Henry VII.” These titles further politicize other topics; under “The Papacy,” for

instance, is the description “Dante Opposes the Papacy as a Political Power.” 70

Vincenzo Botta, Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1865), vii-viii.
70

Hereafter Botta, Dante.

 65

Botta also politicizes Dante’s biography. He characterizes medieval Italy in terms of

the translatio imperii, as previous New England readers of Dante did: the thirteenth century

was

. . . [the] period of transition between ancient and modern times in which Europe
was emerging from the chaos that succeeded the fall of the Roman Empire. . . . It
was an age of barbarism, superstition, anarchy, and tyranny; but it was also an age in
which refinement and free thought began to appear, together with a longing for
liberty, order, and social unity. (Botta, Dante 2)

Dante, for Botta, was the first to realize this modern dream; he was the “first interpreter” of

the idea of national unity (12). Yet he had to combat the two great political obstacles to

national unity: “State sovereignty, on which the municipal governments rested isolated and

divided,” and the Roman Catholic Church (5). Botta then compares the archaic, oppressive

institution of the Catholic Church to the aristocratic institutions in the antebellum, southern

U.S. The Church in Dante’s day was “antagonistic” to national unity because such unity

would “put an end to [the Church’s] supremacy.”

Hence, it has ever been the policy of the popes to foment local prejudices and
ambitions, to promote discord among the republics, to discourage all progress, to ally
themselves with the more ignorant and superstitious classes, and to invite foreign
intervention as the only means through which they could consolidate and preserve
their power. These two sources of discord [state sovereignty and the Church], which
have distracted Italy for so many centuries, and prevented her organization, find their
parallel to-day in these United States, whose national existence is threatened by the
same pernicious doctrine of State Rights, and by the Slave-Power, which, in its
assertion of the dominion of man over man, and in the social results which it
produces, is so akin to the papal institutions. (5-6)

Botta here strongly combines anti-Catholicism with the purpose for war against the

Confederacy, by claiming that the “papal institutions” are akin to slavery in the southern

states. If thirteenth-century Italy so closely resembles nineteenth-century America, then

Dante speaks directly to present-day political problems.

For Botta, Dante’s patriotism is pro-Union. His biographical development exhibits

his affinities with the Union cause. A native Guelph, Dante tended to side with his own
 66

party, which at that time was for local rule and the papacy. On the other hand, the

Ghibellines favored a “stronger government” and were the “exponents of national rights,”

devoted to the cause of Italian unification (9-10). As Dante grew in learning, he renounced

his Guelph affiliations and became “the first Italian,” holding fast to the “idea of national

unity, which . . . he never ceased to consider as the corner-stone of the future greatness of

Italy.” But he did not confine his vision to Italy’s unity. Rather, he saw that the idea of

national unity would bless the entire world: “he conceived a plan of general organization,

which, while it would place his country in an exalted position, would also secure the

permanent peace of the world, and result in the general progress of mankind” (54). Botta

counters traditional interpretations of Dante’s political treatise De Monarchia by asserting that

Dante’s ideal political institution was in fact not a monarchy: Dante actually believed in the

“concentration of social power into an individual or collective authority, which should

exercise the common sovereignty for the good of the people.” Dante’s political objective,

then, was “essentially liberal and democratic” (58).

Here Botta’s reading of Dante’s politics strongly clashes with McCabe’s. While

McCabe envisioned a noble-born Dante who rose above the democratic masses to exalt his

country and countrymen, Botta characterizes Dante as one who completely discredits his

nobility and promotes the creation of democratic nation-states; Dante asserts that there is

“no true nobility but that of genius and virtue” and offers power to “the people,” who must

become the true interpreters of law (59). Botta’s Dante is, then, the first democratic

nationalist. Finally, Botta introduces his long summary of the Divine Comedy by characterizing

the poem as explicitly pro-Union. In it, Dante castigates the backwards, oppressive

institution of his day—the Roman Catholic Church—and “sing[s] the apotheosis of a united

Italy” (68). Clearly, if the medieval Catholic Church is akin to the Confederacy, then the
 67

Divine Comedy is anti-Confederate and promotes the idea of a unified American state.

Underscoring this point, Botta emphasizes that the bottom of the Inferno, where the worst

punishments occur, is reserved for treasonous traitors to God and government.

Botta’s Dante predicts and vindicates nineteenth-century liberal-nationalist

movements, which attempted to achieve state unification and claimed to offer political

freedom to oppressed peoples. Botta misreads Dante as a nineteenth-century liberal who

would judge all of humanity according to its ability to allow and exercise “individual

freedom.” The Divine Comedy, according to Botta, assigns humans to hell and heaven based

upon their use of the gift of personal freedom (128). The afterlife is necessarily egalitarian.

Botta’s Dante, then, is extremely relevant to nineteenth-century European and American

politics and speaks directly to the Union’s war effort. Dante is, politically, an American who

supports the Union Army. Published just two years before Longfellow’s translation, Botta’s

Dante prepares the way for Longfellow’s Dante, who is in part a somber post-war

memorializer and reconstructionist (see Chapter III). As one reviewer of Botta’s book said

in November 1865, just after the war’s end, “a new interest is awakened in the life and

writings of the great Florentine poet.”71

Yet not all Americans enlisted Dante on the side of the Union or the side of the

Confederacy. Dante also could transcend the divide. The best example is found in the

supplemental essay to Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. In this essay,

written in 1866 as a conclusion to his book of poetry, Melville calls for amelioration between

North and South; he asks the North to understand why the South might desire to honor its

soldiers (living and dead), and to act charitably, not vengefully, in its post-war legislation and

71“Literary Notices,” The Monthly Religious Magazine (November 1865), 319. For other reviews of Botta’s book
on Dante, see “The Character of Dante,” Christian Examiner 80 (July 1866), 37; and “Dante as Philosopher, Patriot,
and Poet,” The Universalist Quarterly and General Review 3 (January 1866), 98-101.
 68

treatment of the South. For Melville, the negative example of an ongoing feud that

perpetuated civil war is that of medieval Florence. In the essay’s last two paragraphs, Melville

asks rhetorically if his readers want the U.S. to turn into Dante’s Florence:

For that heroic band—those children of the furnace who, in regions like Texas and
Tennessee, maintained their fidelity through terrible trials—we of the North felt for
them, and profoundly honor them. Yet passionate sympathy, with resentments so
close as to be almost domestic in their bitterness, would hardly in the present
juncture tend to discreet legislation. Were the Unionists and the Secessionists but as
Guelphs and Ghibellines? If not, then far be it from a great nation now to act in the
spirit that animated a triumphant town-faction in the Middle Ages. But crowding
thoughts must at last be checked; and, in times like the present, one who desires to
be impartially just in the expression of his views, moves as among sword-points
presented on every side.72

Melville’s response attempts to transcend the notion that either Guelphs or Ghibellines are

ideologically superior, arguing instead that this historical example is an important warning

because the Guelph-Ghibelline feud was never satisfactorily resolved. The feud, as Melville

well knew, fuels much of the political tension dramatized in the Inferno. In Inferno X, for

example, the two leaders of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions share a tomb inside the walls

of the City of Dis, yet neither man acknowledges the presence of the other.73 As for the “one

who desires to be impartially just,” a position that Melville stakes out for himself in the

essay, his model is clearly Dante, whom Melville read as a poet who transcended factional

disputes. The final paragraph of the “Supplement” ends with Dante in view: “Let us pray

that the historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our

Herman Melville, “Supplement,” Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume XI (Evanston:
72

Northwestern University Press, 2009), 187-188.

73 These two men are Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, discussed further in Chapter III. Interestingly,
corresponding with many of the themes in this chapter, the only translation of the Comedy in the United States
remained stuck at Inferno X from 1843 to 1867. This is because Thomas William Parsons published a
translation of the first ten cantos of the Inferno in 1843, and only until 1867 was the rest of the translation of the
Comedy published by an American. The factional conflict symbolized in Inferno X, the last canto in Parsons’
1843 translation, oddly corresponds to the political state of the nation between Parsons’ translation and the end
of the Civil War. It is as if the point where Parsons stopped translating in 1843 were to represent the state of
the nation for the next twenty-four years.
 69

whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those

expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.” For Melville, Dante was

such a bard, the political poet whose voice was, by the end of the war, every bit as important

as it had been, for the North and the South, during the war and in the tense years preceding

it.
 70

CHAPTER II

DANTE AS A BOOK: MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE DIVINE COMEDY

By 1866, when Herman Melville compared the northern and southern United States

to Guelphs and Ghibellines in Battle-Pieces, he had read the Divine Comedy enough times to

find the comparison potent. Almost two decades earlier, in 1848, Melville encountered the

Comedy for the first time. On June 22 of that year, he purchased a copy of Henry Francis

Cary’s The Vision of Dante Alighieri from John Wiley’s bookstore on Nassau Street in New

York City.74 This text, now owned privately by William Reese, shows many decades’ worth

of intensive interaction between Melville and his book. There are three dates in the book:

July 1, 1848, 1858, and September 22, 1860, the last of these made on or near the “Pacific

Ocean.” Melville certainly read The Vision more than three times, though; the marginalia in

most of the Paradiso displays shaky handwriting that was possibly written during old age. 75

We know that as soon as Melville purchased Dante, he began revising his late drafts for

Mardi, which was finished in January 1849.76 Almost every major piece of fiction he wrote

thereafter references or extensively uses the Divine Comedy.77

As was the case with many nineteenth-century readers, Melville personalized his copy

of the Comedy. His name is inscribed on the very first page, he inserted a long quote from
74Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Melville’s Reading (Charleston, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1988),
171.

Some of the marginalia appears to be from different hands, indicating perhaps that multiple readers read and
75

marked in Melville’s book.

76See Lea Newman’s thorough analysis of Mardi’s use of the Divine Comedy in her essay “Melville’s Copy of
Dante: Evidence of New Connections between the Commedia and Mardi,” Studies in the American Renaissance
(1993), 305-348.
77 Dennis Berthold, American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2009).
 71

Walter Savage Landor on the final page of Cary’s prefatory “Life of Dante” essay, and he

recorded a quote from the eleventh book of the Odyssey above the beginning of the Inferno’s

first canto. His marginalia includes underlining and check marks, not just amongst the lines

of the text, but in the footnotes and prefatory matter as well. All of his markings suggest that

he studied the Comedy thoroughly, using Cary’s footnotes as an authoritative commentary. He

even compared translations: one marginal note, in Inferno III, refers to John Aitken Carlyle’s

1849 prose translation of the Inferno and compares Cary’s rendering of a line to Carlyle’s.

Melville’s use of his own book—detailed marginalia written in and by the poem and

its paratexts—suggests that many nineteenth-century readers of the Divine Comedy

encountered and read far more than the poem itself. For the Comedy as a book always

contained a diverse set of paratexts meant to aid readers and to supplement the poem.78

Because of the apparent difficulties of grasping the Comedy’s historical references, obscure

symbols, and medieval theology, detailed footnotes or endnotes were included in every

nineteenth-century English translation. As well, most editions had prefatory and/or

supplemental essays, and almost all of them had canto summaries placed immediately before

each canto. In some editions this paratextual material approached or even exceeded the word

count of Dante’s poem. As shown in Chapter I with the example of Cary’s essay on the

“Life of Dante,” paratexts in editions of the Comedy could just as easily interpret the poem as

78Gerard Genette first developed the theory of the “paratexts” as supplementary text that “surrounds” and
“extends” the main text of a novel, “precisely in order to present it . . . [that is,] to make present, to ensure the
text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception,’ and consumption in the form . . . of a book.” Genette’s theory
focuses primarily on French and British novels meant for native-language readers, so that a paratext is a
“vestibule” or “zone” between text and non-text that authors strategically use to influence and persuade their
audiences about the main text. Examples of paratexts for Genette includes the author’s name, intertitles,
dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, and postfaces. Genette further claims that readers are not obligated to read
paratexts. Helpful as Genette is, his theory ignores paratexts in a translated work, like the Comedy, in which
explanatory notes and summaries help shape reader interpretations and explicitly offer the meanings of words,
symbols, themes, and whole passages to readers. Subsequent critics—Eduardo Crisafulli in his work on Cary’s
Vision, for example—have extended Genette’s theory of paratexts and used the idea of the paratext as I am
using it in this chapter. See Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-16.
 72

supplement it, and translated editions were the most readily available sources of the best

modern scholarly material on Dante for both casual and serious English-language readers.

Like other translated books, the Divine Comedy opened up special possibilities for

publishers that most books written originally in English did not have. Since the Comedy

presumably needed to be explained to and contextualized for readers, publishers employed a

great variety of paratexts to perform this work. This variety of paratextual possibilities

allowed numerous options for page layouts and book designs. Would translators and

publishers place notes at the bottom of each page, at the end of each canto, or at the end of

the entire poem? Would the original Italian poem be included or left out? Would canto

summaries—if there were any—appear on the same page as the canto being summarized, or

would summaries be placed on their own pages? There were dozens of such questions to be

answered, and every publisher made unique choices, which led to an array of different Divine

Comedy translations. Even publishers before the early 1840s, who had only Cary’s Vision

available to them as a strong marketing option, could print a vastly different book version of

The Vision than their competitors, even though those competitors were essentially publishing

the same text (i.e., Cary’s translation). While the translations could be the same, no two

editions of the Divine Comedy were ever materially and aesthetically the same.

The material and paratextual possibilities available offered incentives to publishers to

produce their own edition of the Divine Comedy, in an attempt to compete with existing

editions. This competitive spirit led to a good number of Comedy editions in the British and

U.S. marketplace by the late 1840s. Keenly aware of other competing editions of the Inferno

and of the Comedy, translators and publishers created new book designs that differed radically

from their competitors. Translators, as this chapter demonstrates, were always aware of the

work of their peers. They sought to differentiate their own work by changing page layouts
 73

and book structures, even when they copied other translators’ footnotes and failed to offer

any sort of stylistically original translation of the Comedy. The result of such competition was

that the seemingly endless possibilities in book design indirectly helped disseminate and

create interest in Dante and his epic poem, aiding the cultural emergence of Dante in the

early United States.

Henry Francis Cary and His Competitors

Cary’s Vision was the dominant English translation of the Comedy from 1819 to 1867.

It was the translation that all successive nineteenth-century English-language translators had

to be conscious of, to show respect to, and to respond to. Yet its appearance as a material

book changed significantly throughout those decades, in part a reaction to the books that it

competed with. Cary first wrote a translation of the Inferno in 1805, then a complete

translation of the Comedy in 1814, and then revised that translation twice, in 1819 and 1844.

The standard page layout for the last two editions (1819 and 1844) placed the text of the

poem at the top of each page, with Cary’s footnotes underneath the text. This was not,

however, the layout of Cary’s 1805-1806 Inferno. This early, standalone Inferno featured the

original Italian text, with the English translation on a facing page (see Figure B2). Notes to

the text were placed at the end of each canto. The resultant sparse look of the text, which

seems to breathe freely without the clutter of footnotes, would disappear from major

English translations of the Comedy until Longfellow’s 1867 edition.

For his 1814 edition of the Comedy, Cary anglicized the text by changing the title of

“Inferno” to “Hell” and by consciously excluding the original Italian text.79 This latter move

was made partly to save space—his 1814 Vision was issued as three duodecimo volumes and

79See Cary, The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, Vol. I (London: Taylor and Hessey,
1814). Note that this is a three-volume edition.
 74

would have required six had the Italian text been included—but it was also done in reaction

to recent publications in England of Dante’s poem in the original Italian. As Cary says in his

preface, “Since [1805 and 1806], two impressions of the whole of the Divina Commedia in

Italian, have made their appearance in this country [England]. It is not necessary that I

should add a third: and I am induced to hope that the Poem, even in the present version of

it, may not be without interest for the mere English reader” (Cary v).80 Cary’s reaction to

existing books in the marketplace shows his attempt to differentiate his book from all

others—the same kind of reaction that fellow translators would eventually have towards

Cary’s book. This is also true in the important, radical change in the title for his 1814 edition:

no longer the Divine Comedy, as it was commonly called then, but The Vision, or the Hell,

Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, a fitting title for British Romantic poets who fixated

on the vision, imagination, and genius of master poets. 81 Cary even acknowledges the

contemporary relevance of the new title, noting that it is “more conformable to the genius of

our language than that of ‘The Divine Comedy’” (vi).

Cary’s Vision was even more radically reshaped in 1819, one year after Samuel Taylor

Coleridge promoted it in a lecture on Dante.82 It was in the 1819 Vision that, for the first

time, Cary’s endnotes became footnotes, and Cary greatly expanded the number of

footnotes, this time including the opinions of Italian commentators and quotes from well-

respected English poetical works, such as Paradise Lost. Such footnotes became standard in

80 This translator’s preface from the 1814 Vision appeared in all subsequent printings and editions.
81 John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge owned the 1814 Vision and used it in their poetry.
82
Werner P. Friederich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, 1350-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1950), 231. Cary acknowledged his debt to Coleridge in the 1819 edition, a note that appears in all subsequent
printings, which reads “Amongst the few into whose hands [the 1814 Vision] fell . . . Mr. Coleridge became
one; and I have both a pride and a pleasure in acknowledging, that it has been chiefly owing to the prompt and
strenuous exertions of that Gentleman in recommending the book to public notice.” See the “Preface” in Cary,
The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819).
 75

all printings of Cary’s Vision thereafter, turning Cary into a well-known commentator on

Dante. His status as commentator was also greatly aided by the inclusion of his scholarly

essay “Life of Dante,” which had not appeared in the 1814 edition. One further additional

paratext was made a standard in all English-language editions of the Comedy after the 1819

Vision: before each canto, Cary included an “Argument,” essentially a brief narrative

summary of the canto. These “arguments” interpret as well as summarize (see Figure B3).

In the argument preceding Inferno I, for example, Cary calls Dante a “writer,” a far more

generic term than the more accurate “poet” or “pilgrim.” Cary also highlights the fact that

Virgil “promises to show [Dante] the punishments of Hell,” which is a sensational and

reductionist summary of Dante’s pilgrimage through hell, as well as a statement that ignores

Beatrice’s directive to Virgil to lead Dante through both hell and purgatory. In spite of the

paratextual additions to the 1819 edition, there apparently weren’t enough additions to aid

casual or ignorant readers. One reviewer in The North Atlantic Review complained that, while

Cary does help display the “beauties” of Dante’s Italian verse, he included only a “very short

preface and a few notes” and neglected to relate the “merits of the Purgatory and Paradise”

to readers, omissions that make Dante in the 1819 Vision “inadequately represented.”83

Despite this reviewer’s opinion, the 1819 Vision was so commercially and critically

successful that, for decades, Dante was inextricably connected with Cary, both in Great

Britain and in the United States. Critics and reviewers often referred to The Vision as “Cary’s

Dante,” a phrase that, in the 1830s, began appearing on book covers and spines (see Figure

B4). The first American printing of the entire Divine Comedy in 1822 was actually a two-

volume edition that appeared in the series The Works of the British Poets, with Lives of the

83“La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal 8:23 (1819),
325-326.
 76

Authors.84 Except for its typefaces, this printing has the same layout as the 1819 Vision. Yet

the indirect suggestion of the title page (see Figure B4)—which subjugates Dante’s name to

the prowess of “BRITISH POETS”—is that the Divine Comedy is somehow a British work by

a British poet. This subtle anglicization of Dante in the 1820s and 1830s gave the Comedy

perhaps more cultural legitimacy than it would otherwise have had if it had been marketed as

an Italian text.85 Significantly, the Dante edition of The Works of the British Poets had some

cultural impact in the United States: Ralph Waldo Emerson bought a copy in 1825 and

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow likely purchased his around the same time.86

However, by the 1840s, when Dante had come to be widely regarded as one of the

greatest poets in world history, his Italian heritage was accepted and he was marketed as a

great national poet. The first American translation of any part of the Comedy published in

book form was Thomas William Parsons’ 1843 The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno. Parsons and

his publisher William Ticknor differentiated this book as much as possible from Cary’s

Vision (see Figure B5). It contains only a handful of footnotes in tiny type, while the

endnotes that follow the last canto—and there are only four pages of these, with no

translator comments on Inferno II and IV-IX—comprise Parsons’ relatively sparse and

unobtrusive commentary. Parsons added an essay that follows the notes, “A Word More

With the Reader,” in which he argues for the excellence of Dante among all great poets, in

Dante Alighieri, The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Francis Cary, in The
84

Works of British Poets, with Lives of the Authors, Volumes VI and VII (Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford, 1822).
85This is exactly the point made by Charles Eliot Norton in an 1866 review of Dante translations: “Mr. Cary
had more culture and attainment than originality; and he did not so much translate Dante, which at the time
[1814] would have required a certain native boldness, as Anglicize his poem by giving it a Miltonic form and
fashion. The strangeness of Dante to the English mind was thus smoothed away. His tone and accent were
made familiar, and he was accepted with that sort of half sympathy which is accorded to a foreigner who has
taken out his papers of naturalization.” See Eliot, “The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri,” The North American
Review 102 (April 1866), 516.
86Kathleen Verduin, “Dante in America: The First Hundred Years,” “Dante in America: The First Hundred
Years,” Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lanes Stiles
(Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996): 21. Hereafter Verduin.
 77

spite of his opinion that Dante would not necessarily have been in favor of the Reformation.

Also, unlike Cary, Parsons included almost no prefatory material, except for an image of

Dante and Parsons’ lyric poem “On a Bust of Dante.” The strategy of this brief preface is to

focus the reader on the fact that Dante’s physiognomy, and not (as in Cary’s Vision) his

biography, most obviously displays his poetic greatness. “Before his name the nations bow,”

Parsons declares at the end of his poem, “His words are parcel of mankind / Deep in whose

hearts, as on his brow / The marks have sunk of Dante’s mind.”87 For Parsons, Dante’s

face—depicted in his book’s prefatory image—offers the best means to readers of acquiring

the poetic meaning of the Inferno. Along with a general lack of commentary, Parsons gives his

readers no hints as to what happens after Inferno X, the canto with which his book ends. Not

until twenty-two years later would Parsons rectify this problem. In 1865, he published

Seventeen Cantos of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, followed two years later by his translation of the

entire Inferno.88

Cary’s third edition of The Vision, completed in 1844, is one of the more important

books in terms of influence on American literature, even though it has not been recognized

as such. Appearing with relatively good timing, a few years before the Revolution of 1848-

1849 sparked interest in Italian literature and culture, this edition of The Vision can lay claim

to helping generate what F.O. Matthiessen called the “American Renaissance” of the early

1850s. While British printings of this edition were shipped to and sold in the U.S., Daniel

Appleton’s New York publishing firm issued an 1845 duodecimo volume, the first American

printing of the Comedy that garnered loud huzzahs from the press. The first sentence of a

87Dante Alighieri, The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. Thomas W. Parsons (Boston: William
D. Ticknor, 1843), 6.

88See Seventeen Cantos of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. Thomas W. Parsons (Boston: John Wilson and Son,
1865); and The First Canticle, Inferno, of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Thomas William Parsons
(New York: G.P. Putnam and Son, 1867). Another publisher—De Vries, Ibarra, and Company—issued an
edition of this latter book in 1867 as well.
 78

North American Review review of Appleton’s book announces, “we rejoice to see an American

edition of Cary’s Dante, which, in its general execution, leaves little to be desired by the

lovers of the poet.”89 A notice in the Southern Literary Messenger says that, while Cary’s verse is

“in very many parts dull prose,” the Appleton edition nonetheless offers literary readers an

“excellent opportunity” to learn about Dante and his great work, and the book itself is

“brought out in a very neat style.”90 Edgar Allan Poe’s comments in the Broadway Journal were

some of the most flattering and focused readers’ attentions on the Appleton edition as a

material object:

This is one of the most truly beautiful volumes ever issued even from the press of
the Appletons. It is a duodecimo of nearly 600 pages, exquisitely printed on very fine
paper, embellished with a dozen carefully engraved plates from [John] Flaxman’s
inimitable designs, and the whole tastefully and durably bound. . . . The Messrs.
Appletons in giving us this edition, have rendered a very important service to the
literature of the country.91

Such fanfare helped the book sell, and consumers with literary interest made the 1845

Appleton edition a commercial success, prompting Appleton to issue three subsequent

editions prior to the Civil War—in 1850, 1853, and 1858. It is this 1845 edition that Edward

Dickinson purchased and kept in his home, where his daughter Emily read it.92

89 “The Vision,” The North American Review 52 (April 1846), 323-351.

90 “Notices of New Works,” Southern Literary Messenger 11 (November 1845), 703.

91
See Poe, “Critical Notices,” The Boradway Journal 2:16 (October 25), 248.

92The Dickinson family copy, now at Harvard’s Houghton library, contains no marginalia. However Emily
Dickinson surely read Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her poem #371 refers to Dante while describing the sensations
of holding and reading an “antique book”:

A precious – mouldering pleasure – ‘tis –

To meet an Antique Book –
In just the Dress his Century wore –
A privilege – I think –

His venerable Hand to take –

And warming in our own –
A passage back – or two – to make –
To Times when he – was young –
 79

By 1845, Cary’s translation had already flourished for twenty-six years as the

indisputably best English-language translation of the Divine Comedy. Though Cary was only

the second translator of the Comedy into English—easily supplanting Henry Boyd’s highly

inaccurate 1785 translation, rendered in heroic couplets and suffused with neoclassical

sensibilities—his work faced competition from new translators in the 1830s and 1840s. Still,

publishers continued to reissue his book rather than reprint the translations of, among

others, Ichabod Wright (1833) and John Dayman (1843), both of whom used Dante’s terza

rima scheme but were quickly forgotten. The key text of the 1845 Appleton, the epic poem

as translated by Cary, was itself nothing new. As Poe’s comments demonstrate, the

Appletons helped make it seem new by dressing up Cary’s Dante—including many of John

Flaxman’s sketches of scenes in the Comedy and issuing the book in both common cloth and

in a gold-stamped leather binding (Verduin 21). The front cover of the leather-bound edition

features Flaxman’s striking introductory image, with Dante in a contemplative pose,

emerging from the clouds, between an angel and a demon (see Figure B6). It also includes,

as a frontispiece, a contemporary portrait of Dante by Giotto, which was discovered in 1840.

These additions helped the Appletons differentiate their version of Cary’s Vision from those

issued by other publishers, especially British publishers whose imported books were featured

[…]

What interested Scholars – most –

What Competitions ran –
When Plato – was a Certainty –
And Sophocles – a Man –

When Sappho – was a living Girl –

And Beatrice wore
The Gown that Dante – deified –
Facts Centuries before […]

See Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1960), 176.
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in trade periodicals and in bookstores, like the one in which Melville in 1848 purchased his

Bohn edition, published in London.

Yet there are hints of backlash against Cary’s Vision in the Southern Literary Messenger’s

negative remarks (referring to Cary’s “dull prose”) and in Poe’s proclamation that the

Appleton edition is a sterling American, and not British, production. This backlash in the

mid-1840s against Cary’s translation took several forms. Part of the criticism leveled against

Cary was the notion, promoted by New England Transcendentalists, that reading translated

works was far inferior to imbibing the actual original words of an artistic genius like Dante.

Margaret Fuller’s review of the 1845 Appleton, for example, claims that “no great Poet can

be well translated” and that Cary’s translation “can never be [used] to diffuse a knowledge of

Dante.” Fuller also disparaged the idea that readers need to study the historical contexts of

the Divine Comedy to understand its meaning, a subtle attack against Cary’s “Life of Dante”

essay and against his footnotes. Fuller complains that the Divine Comedy, a work that probably

no more than a hundred people on Earth actually understood, has been “turned into a

school book for little girls who have just left their hoops and dolls, and boys whose highest

ambition it is to ride a horse that will run away, and brave the tutor in a college frolic.”

Instead, she implores readers to stop trying to learn Italian and to understand Dante’s

historical contexts, and instead to attempt to acquire in nature and in society the heart-felt

passions that fueled Dante’s genius: “O, painstaking friends! Shut your books, clear your

minds from artificial nonsense, and feel that only by spirit can spirit be discerned. . . . It is

not by studying out the petty strifes or external relations of his time, that you can become

acquainted with the thought of Dante.”93 The implied recommendation in her essay is that, if

93Margaret Fuller Ossoli, “Italy.—Cary’s Dante,” Life Without and Life Within, ed. A.B. Fuller (Boston, 1860).
The essay was originally published in 1845.
 81

one is to read Dante at all, then reading him in the original—as Fuller herself did—is the

preferred way to truly comprehend his profundities.

Taking Fuller’s criticism a step further, Ralph Waldo Emerson actively tried to

replace Cary’s Vision altogether. A quasi-Dante enthusiast, especially for the Vita Nuova,94

which he himself translated into English, Emerson had read Dante’s work since the 1820s (it

was Fuller, in the 1830s, who had convinced Emerson to read the Vita Nuova). But by 1848,

Emerson had developed a strong dislike for Cary’s translation, which was ample motivation

to help his friend and Dante translator, Dr. John Aitken Carlyle. As a close friend of Thomas

Carlyle, Emerson had numerous opportunities to correspond with and personally acquaint

himself with Thomas’ brother, John Aitken. This Dr. John Carlyle, who had since 1831

spent years in Italy studying Italian literature,95 had by early 1848 produced a prose

translation of the Inferno. Emerson spent many months—from the fall of 1848 to the spring

of 1849—attempting to get Carlyle’s translation printed by an American publisher. In August

1848, Emerson first asked Ticknor and Fields to publish Carlyle’s translation, hoping that

the Boston publishers would issue it quickly so that Emerson could print a notice of

forthcoming publication in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review. But the financial aftermath of

the Panic of 1847 led Ticknor and Fields to turn Emerson down; the “bad times” kept them

from publishing what they would have gladly accepted only a year earlier.96 In spite of this

94 Matthew Pearl’s 1999 essay, “’Colossal Cipher’: Emerson as America’s Lost Dantean,” rescues Emerson’s
relationship with Dante, which had been largely ignored up to that point. In the essay, Pearl argues that the
Vita Nuova as a text strongly represented many of Emerson’s transcendentalist ideals; it “provides Emerson
with the singular compound of an autobiographical, first-person ‘confession’ that promotes universality.” See
Pearl, “’Colossal Cipher’: Emerson as America’s Lost Dantean,” Dante Studies 117 (1999), 171-193.

95Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno, trans. John Aitken Carlyle (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1849), iv-v. Hereafter Carlyle.
96The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), Volume
IV, 103. Hereafter Letters.
 82

rejection, Emerson published his notice about the Carlyle translation in the Massachusetts

Quarterly anyway, thus notifying the public about the translation nine months too early.97

Emerson then tried to convince Harper and Brothers, based in New York City, to

publish Carlyle’s translation, using his brother William as a proxy. In a letter to William,

Emerson tells his brother what his sales pitch should be to the Harpers and directs him to

first negotiate for compensation for Carlyle, but, if that fails, to then negotiate to simply

print the book with no financial obligations to the translator:

These are the facts. Here is a good book faithfully rendered by Dr John Carlyle who
has lived near seven years in Italy & probably knows more about Dante than
anybody living. Dante is read every year, more & more, in this country, & in England.
This is the book which students want, & which general readers want, this, & not
Cary. Now will you print it, Gentlemen, & give the translator a commission on your
sales, for his work? – If not; will your print it, & if it succeeds, give him something by
& by? If not; will you print it well, & give nothing? (Letters 105)98

Harper and Brothers rejected this plea, prompting Emerson to feel “shame” that he could

“send no better account of the good faith of our American Booksellers” to the Carlyles

(112). Yet Emerson did not give up. By December 1848, Harper and Brothers reconsidered

and agreed to publish the book, but then appeared to renege on this promise in March 1849.

Emerson was irate about this series of events. “Is lying so sweet?” Emerson cynically asked

his brother William about Harper and Brothers, adding that they “behave so badly” (134).

To John Carlyle, Emerson wrote that he had no pleasure in attempting to persuade

American publishers to print his work, since “it had fallen on such evil times that a book so

valuable was to be held so cheap” (124).

97“New Translation of Dante,” The Massachusetts Quarterly Review 4 (September 1848), 527. Hereafter New
Translation.

98 Part of this quotation, wherein Emerson says that “Dante is read every year, more & more, in this country,” has
been cited to prove that Dante’s influence in the U.S. was indeed growing quickly in the 1840s. While this
statement is true, it is important to remember that Emerson here is clearly not attempting to make a statement
of fact per se, but is instead using this point to get Harper and Brothers to publish a book.
 83

Yet Harper and Brothers did finally print Carlyle’s translation of the Inferno in June

1849, issuing the most ambitious competitor to Cary’s Vision to date. Both Carlyle and

Emerson publicly played down the fact that the Carlyle Inferno was such a major competitor,

even though they did hint otherwise. As Emerson told his brother William privately, the

American public (supposedly) wanted a new translation and “not Cary.” Yet in his notice

about Carlyle’s translation, Emerson claims that he is “not ungrateful to Cary,” who deserves

praise for The Vision’s “spirit, conciseness, and accuracy.” But recent, terrible English

translations of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles—so Emerson says—necessitate the

publication of the most accurate of modern prose translations for the great classical writers.

Only with a careful prose translation, in which each extra word is italicized to mark the fact

that the translator added it, can the “real curiosity of the student be satisfied” (“New

Translation”). Knowing full well that Cary’s Vision had long been praised for its relative

accuracy, Emerson’s argument is flimsy at best, especially since a “spirited” and “concise”

translation of the Divine Comedy ultimately has nothing to do with bad translations of Pindar

and Sophocles. The weakness of his argument and his insistence to William Emerson that

the public does not want Cary indicate that Emerson’s actual goal was to displace Cary’s

Vision in the marketplace.

Like Emerson, Carlyle was wishy-washy in his public statements about Cary. In the

prefaces to his translation, Carlyle claims that his own work is “quite different” from all

other English translations of Dante, and so it “enters into no competition with them”

(Carlyle iv). For Carlyle, Cary’s is a “most excellent translation of its kind: perhaps there is

none better than our language” (xxviii). This statement appears to offer high praise, yet the

phrase “of its kind” peculiarly qualifies Carlyle’s remark. In fact, the very first paragraph of

Carlyle’s opening preface is a subtle attack on Cary’s Vision:

 84

The object of the following Prose Translation is to give the real meaning of Dante as
literally and briefly as possible. No single particle has been wittingly left
unrepresented in it, for which any equivalent could be discovered. . . . English
readers, it is hoped, will here find a closer, and therefore, with all its defects, a
warmer version than any that has hitherto been published for them (iii).

Carlyle’s claim is that his is the most accurate translation to date, and therefore a “warmer

version” than all others. His preface stresses the unique authenticity of his translation and its

fidelity to Dante’s original manuscripts and to the traditions of Dante interpretations. His

inclusion of the original “Italian text” further enhances this authenticity. Carlyle emphasizes

that his footnotes are authentic as well; they are “original, or are taken directly, and in no

case without accurate reference, from the best Italian commentators and historians” (iii).

Despite this claim to the originality of the footnotes, Carlyle employed dozens of footnotes

from Cary’s Vision in his own translation, copying these footnotes directly from Cary.99

In its appearance and in many of its paratexts, Carlyle’s Inferno is radically different

from Cary’s Vision. The first obvious difference is that Carlyle’s is a prose translation,

perhaps one reason why Emerson was so enthusiastic about it. As Emerson knew, Cary’s

grandiose, blank-verse rendering of the Divine Comedy fit squarely into the classical tradition

of epic poetry, particularly of English epic poetry. Cary’s verse was widely praised then for

its “Miltonic” qualities, and, in its latinate diction and even its subject matter, The Vision was

obviously comparable to Paradise Lost. By composing a prose translation, Carlyle offered

Dante in a modern vernacular, as well as in a novelistic mode, which released the poem from

the tradition of English epics and the legacy of Milton. Also, Carlyle’s Inferno included

Dante’s poem in its original Italian, just below the English translation. This was the first time

99To give a few examples, Carlyle’s footnote in Inferno I quotes the same four lines from Samson Agonistes that
Cary quotes in The Vision (18). In a footnote to Inferno IV, Carlyle refers to Democritus as the one who
“attributed the origin of things to the fortuitous concourse of embryon atoms” (52), while Cary’s footnote says
that Democritus “maintained the world to have been formed by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.” I have
found at least two dozen more examples where the footnotes in Carlyle’s Inferno closely rephrase Cary’s
footnotes and/or offer quotes from the same texts. All of this troubles Carlyle’s claim that his footnotes are
original in some way.
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since Cary’s 1805 Inferno that an English-language translation included the Italian text. This

inclusion allowed a reader with even an elementary knowledge of Italian to, as Carlyle put it,

“enjoy the deep rhythmic force and beauty” of Dante’s poetry (iii). But it also made it

possible for general readers to attempt to learn Italian, or to believe they were learning

Italian, or to simply glimpse first-hand the native genius behind the English translation. As a

result of the inclusion of the Italian, the page layout in Carlyle’s Inferno is quite crowded.

Each page has footnotes, divided into two columns, and occasionally these notes occupy

more space than the original poem and the translation. The line numbers for the poem are in

a larger font than the poem itself, which helps create a busy look (see Figure B7). To

alleviate this clutter, the “Arguments” or canto summaries were placed on separate pages

preceding immediately the cantos that they summarized.

Carlyle’s prefaces are far different from Cary’s as well. While Cary’s strategy to

introduce the Divine Comedy was through Dante’s biography, Carlyle’s was through textual

history. Carlyle included an eleven-page essay on “Manuscripts and Editions,” which offers a

print history of the Comedy. Immediately following this essay is another essay, titled

“Comments and Translations,” in which Carlyle discusses well-known commentators and

translators from the time of Dante’s death to 1848. Finally, Carlyle offers the reader a brief

overview of the scope of the Inferno in the third and final prefatory essay, “The Inferno of

Dante.” The implied argument of these essays is that the Comedy is an ever-changing

historical document. Carlyle even addresses modern critics who have “spoken lightly and

unwisely” about Dante, imploring them to “study him better.” In an indignant tone, Carlyle

claims that Dante empathetically understood the universal difference between good and evil,

and that his moral righteousness applies to a modern world that is steeped in revolutionary

bloodshed caused by utopian progressives (vi-vii).

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The Carlyle Inferno was a reasonable success for Harper and Brothers. With a muslin

binding, the book sold for $1.00 and appeared just when interest in Giuseppe Garibaldi and

the Italian Revolution of 1848-1849 was peaking.100 Harper and Brothers issued subsequent

printings in 1851, 1855, 1864, and 1870. This meant that, in the late 1840s and through the

1850s, Harper and Brothers’ three editions of Carlyle’s Inferno competed actively with the

Appletons’ four editions of Cary’s Vision in the U.S. American readers therefore had several

choices of Dante translations from the mid-1840s onward, and while Melville and Dickinson

both had copies of The Vision (albeit different books from different publishers), Walt

Whitman chose to read and admired Carlyle’s Inferno. As Chapter IV shows, Whitman

probably read all English-language translations at some time in his life, but he was most

influenced (so he claimed) by Carlyle, including the paratexts in the Carlyle edition.

Longfellow Enters the Competition

The first translation of the entire Divine Comedy by an American was made by Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow, who was nationally and internationally the most famous writer to

attempt such a translation. First published in 1867, this translation was nearly forty years in

the making. Longfellow began his life-long interest in Dante during his first trip to Italy in

1828, when he learned Italian. He became a professor at Harvard University in 1836 and,

following George Ticknor, taught the Comedy there. Over the decades, Longfellow keenly

watched the release of new Dante translations, keeping a newspaper file of reviews of those

translations. For example, he clipped articles in 1863 from the then-brand new British

periodical The Reader,101 which listed and reviewed many older English-language translations

100 “Advertisement,” The Literary World (July 28, 1849), 73.

101 The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science and Art 1 (1863), 161-162 and 208-209.
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of the Comedy.102 Longfellow’s lectures at Harvard show that, while he did quote Cary’s Vision

to his students, he strongly encouraged them to read Dante in the original Italian. As

Longfellow say in one lecture,

All great poets, too, must be read in their native tongue. It is almost mockery, – and
mockery to translate them. How true is this of Cary’s translation of Dante. For the
most part it is faithful to the original; and yet gives no better idea of Dante, than
some portraits do of the person they represent, and yet are so faithful – so horribly
like! To understand Dante, then, it is absolutely necessary to understand the Italian
language.103

For Longfellow, Cary’s translation was, paradoxically, too close and yet too far removed

from the original. While Longfellow seems here to push against a translation-less approach

to reading foreign texts, he himself began translating the Purgatorio in 1843. He followed this

work up in 1862-1863, when he revised his Purgatorio translation and completed the Paradiso

and Inferno.

Longfellow’s objective in translating the Divine Comedy was to create a faithful,

“literal,” and yet artistic rendering of Dante’s epic poem—that is, to communicate the

“diction of Dante” accurately, as the Christian Examiner put it.104 By 1867, however, nearly

every translation theory had been tried and tested on the Comedy. Besides Cary and Carlyle,

John Dayman and “Mrs. Ramsay” had both published terza rima translations by 1865.

Frederick Pollock’s 1854 blank verse translation claimed to be “strictly literal in the

rendering of Italian into English” and to “retain the order and identity of the lines.”105

William Michael Rossetti’s 1865 blank-verse Inferno claimed that its chief goal could be

102 Volume 108, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Papers (MS Am 1340), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

103 Volume 106, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Papers (MS Am 1340), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
104 “Miscellaneous,” Christian Examiner 83 (Sept. 1867), 262.

105 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Frederick Pollock (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854), vii.
 88

summed up in one word, “Literality.”106 These are only a few examples of translators who

insisted that their version was as literal as it could be (Carlyle is another). And if they

garnered praise from reviewers or the public, it was for their fidelity to the original, for

having a high degree of “literality.” To describe a Dante translation as loose or free in the

nineteenth-century was rarely a compliment.

The difficulties for Longfellow in creating a uniquely original translation of the

Comedy were great. While his timing for translating the Comedy is intriguing—it was composed

during the Civil War and released shortly thereafter, so the connections between this

historical context and the Divine Comedy itself are potent, as described in Chapter III—his

timing was also somewhat unfortunate for someone who wanted to offer a translation that

would be received as stylistically creative and original. Before Longfellow’s edition was

published, there were already eight full-length English-language translations of the Divine

Comedy and fifteen translations of the Inferno, seven of which appeared after 1854. In 1867,

Longfellow’s translation competed with editions of Cary, Dayman, Parsons, Rossetti, and

James Ford, all released no earlier than 1865. Longfellow did enjoy two advantages external

to the text itself: first, 1865 was celebrated internationally as the 500-year anniversary of

Dante’s birth, and, second, his was an internationally recognized name. Yet, as a translator

devoted to making a relatively “literal” translation, could he really improve on what had

already been done in recent years? The text of his translation, it would seem, could not be

that much different from the several other, literal English-language translations published

since 1849.

And, in fact, if we compare Longfellow’s translation to Carlyle’s and Rossetti’s, we

discover that there are some striking similarities. In an analysis of the words and phrases

106The Divine Comedy of Dante Allighieri [sic], trans. William Michael Rossetti (London and Cambridge: Macmillan
and Co., 1865), i.
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used in Inferno I, Longfellow’s translation is 38% similar to Carlyle’s and, remarkably, 49%

similar to Rossetti’s.107 These similarities were not all that unusual for “literal” translations,

however. Rossetti’s Inferno I, for example, is 39% similar to Carlyle’s. Yet none of these

translations is more than 23% similar to Cary’s, a fact that, if nothing else, highlights the

changes in the English language in a fifty-year period (1814-1865). For the other cantos of

the Inferno, the percentages are similar. Longfellow’s Inferno XVI is 35% similar to Carlyle’s,

and Inferno XXXIII is 44% similar, with several passages that are nearly the same, word for

word. The significance of these similarities is that it takes a highly critical eye to discern the

differences in diction and phrasing between translations, differences that would probably not

be too obvious or aesthetically interesting to most readers. Table A2 shows examples of

what the similarities and differences in syntax, diction, and punctuation are between these

three texts.

Given that Longfellow consulted the Dante Club, revised his text based on its

recommendations, and then revised the text again on the printer’s proof sheets, his process

of translation insured that he did not deliberately copy from any other translator. But it is

possible that Longfellow referred to Carlyle’s translation while writing his own, borrowing

words and phrases and thus leaving vestiges of this initial consultation in his published

translation. At an astonishing pace, Longfellow translated one canto a day of the Inferno in

March and April 1863, a pace that probably needed some aid in order to result so quickly in

107
I calculated these percentages by counting the total words in each canto, then divided that number by the
number of words that were almost similar or the same in the translation I was comparing the particular canto
to. For example, the phrase “he, who, with distressful breath” in Longfellow’s Inferno I is five words. There are
four words in Longfellow’s phrase that are same as Rossetti’s rendering of that phrase, which is “he is who with
panting breath.” In this example, according to my method, Longfellow’s phrase is 80% similar to Rossetti’s,
while Rossetti’s is 66% similar to Longfellow’s. I did not, however, count prepositions or articles (e.g., ‘a’, ‘the’)
by themselves, but only when they appeared in the same phrases. So if both translations used “the desert
slope,” for example, then all three words counted toward the total of similar words. But if one translation used
“the desert slope” and the other use “the open hill,” then none of the words counted towards the total, for
either translation. When there was doubt, I did not count similar words towards the total of similar words.
Thus the percentages skew low, if they skew at all.
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a coherent translation. If nothing else, the similarities between Dante translations in the

1860s demonstrate why translators and publishers had to focus on making their physical

books look different from earlier translations; the material book, the aesthetic layout of text

on the page, and the paratexts all had to be easily distinguishable from other translations of

Dante’s poetry. Otherwise, it would be too obvious that, for example, a Rossetti translation

was very close—perhaps too close—to a Longfellow translation.

The evidence that bolsters the argument that Longfellow, looking for help from past

translations, consulted Carlyle’s translation is in his endnotes. In a close comparison of

Longfellow’s endnotes to Carlyle’s footnotes, it is clear that Longfellow simply copied some

of Carlyle’s footnotes. Longfellow also borrowed dozens of footnotes from Cary as well,

while acknowledging Cary just three times in all three volumes of his 1867 translation of the

Divine Comedy. Table A3 compares a select few of Longfellow’s endnotes to Carlyle’s and

Cary’s footnotes. This sampling exemplifies Longfellow’s borrowings and paraphrasings

from other translators, which are quite extensive throughout his endnotes. Longfellow

almost certainly consulted Cary’s, Carlyle’s, and Ichabod Wright’s translations to examine

their footnotes and to see exactly what clarifications they provided to readers. In some cases,

Longfellow directly copied parts of notes from other translations (e.g., the first example in

Table A3) and closely paraphrased others.

Curiously, Longfellow’s editorial strategy was to exclude, rather than include, the

names of fellow translators from his endnotes. Carlyle is never mentioned in his endnotes,

while one of only three references to Cary is negative. 108 The only other translator that

108This occurs in the Purgatorio volume, on page 376, where Longfellow says, “I am concerned to see that Mr.
Cary, to whom Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly
unworthy of his abilities.” Longfellow’s complaint is that Cary had called some of Dante’s descriptions
“grotesque.” See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. II, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1867).
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Longfellow refers to is Ichabod Wright, four times total. Yet Longfellow is otherwise careful

to attribute his other sources to their authors, especially mentioning the names of

commentators and scholars. During the proofing stage, Longfellow even deleted the names

of fellow translators from his book. Figures B8 and B9 show the deletions of both Carlyle’s

and Cary’s names from the endnotes. The first of these images demonstrates that

Longfellow inconsistently applied his editorial standards to his fellow Dante translators.

While at every opportunity he cites Dante commentators—Boccaccio, Frate Alberico, or

John Ruskin, for example—he almost never cites Cary’s name as a commentator. In Figure

B8, Longfellow has clearly borrowed from Cary a comparison between the opening of Inferno

II and a passage from Chaucer’s Assemble of Foules. Originally Longfellow attributed the

comparison to Cary, but he deleted this attribution in the proofing stage while leaving in the

comparison of the passage to Chaucer’s poem. As a result, his translation masks its reliance

on the texts and notes of previous English-language translators. Whatever the motivation for

these deletions was, the exclusion of other translators helps make Longfellow’s edition seem

new and unique, qualities that were critical and commercial necessities by 1867.

While the deletion of the names of his fellow translators helped Longfellow

differentiate his text from theirs, his primary way to make his translation appear new was in

the layout and organization of the book itself. Longfellow’s prefaces radically depart from all

previous Divine Comedy translations. His contains a highly detailed, thirteen-page-long Table

of Contents, which includes a brief summary of each canto (see Figure B10).109 Further,

Longfellow introduces his translation of the Comedy via his own poetry. This was a fitting

move for a relatively well-known celebrity poet, as well as a move unique to Dante

109This same style for the Table of Contents was used in the British translations of Charles B. Cayley (1851)
and Frederick Pollock (1854). Neither book was ever printed by an American publisher. See Dante’s Divine
Comedy: The Vision of Hell, trans. C.B. Cayley (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851); and The
Divine Comedy, trans. Frederick Pollock (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854).
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translations—for, as we have seen, Cary introduced Dante via biography, Carlyle through

textual history, and Parsons through descriptions of Dante’s body. Each volume of

Longfellow’s Comedy contains two sonnets from Longfellow’s six-sonnet sequence about

translating the Comedy, which was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. These

sonnets highlight the relationship of translator and original author; in the first sonnet, for

example, Longfellow calls himself a “laborer” who enters a cathedral, which is symbolic of

the Comedy itself. The laborer rests in the cathedral and stands amazed at its architecture,

representing Longfellow’s self-effacing position as the lesser poet in comparison to the great

Dante. This posture is even announced on the title page of all three volumes, where

Longfellow placed a couplet from Edmund Spenser: “I follow here the footing of thy feete /

That with thy meaning on I may the rather meete.” While the “I” here represents

Longfellow and the “thee” Dante, thus offering a gesture of humility, this couplet and the

poetry in the prefaces nonetheless highlights the importance of the translator’s role in

making the older poet new and relevant. Longfellow’s tacit acknowledgement in the prefaces

is that his translation is not a literal re-presentation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but that instead

the heart of the text is really the abstract relationship between author and translator.

Longfellow the translator—so the prefaces indicate—is a key component of every page. This

particular edition of the Divine Comedy, then, is a Longfellow production, highlighting the

translator itself far more than any of the previous translations did.

Printed in 1867 by both Ticknor and Fields in Boston and George Routledge in

London, Longfellow’s Divine Comedy was issued in three volumes and advertised as having

“morocco cloth, beveled boards, [and a] gilt top,” at the price (in America) of $5.00 per
 93

volume.110 Such an expensive issuing allowed for luxuries on the page. Breaking from Cary

and Carlyle, Longfellow kept the aesthetic of each page plain and sparse. There are no

footnotes in his translation; instead, his notes are located at the end of each volume. The line

numbers are in a much smaller font size than the text—unlike Carlyle—and spacing between

lines is one-and-a-half lines. Thus white space flows aplenty between and around the lines,

which gives the poem an air of grandeur and significance.111 Longfellow’s endnotes are

arranged differently than the main text. In two columns and in a smaller font size, the notes

are cast as something distinct and different from the text of the poem (see Figure B11),

functional in nature rather than aesthetic. Longfellow’s separation of the notes from the

poem is consistent with his stance as translator in the prefatory sonnets, where Dante ranks

ahead of Longfellow and thus is first in order. Yet Longfellow’s presence is certainly felt in

the length of the endnotes, which take up nearly 400 pages in total. In his volume of the

Inferno, the poem itself is 216 pages long, whereas the endnotes are 120 pages long.

Longfellow’s inclusion of “Illustrations” makes the commentaries on Dante’s

poem—endnotes plus illustrations—longer than the poem itself. These illustrations are not

images, but various essays and letters that might help illuminate the meaning of Dante’s life

and work for readers. There are thirty-four such illustrations, ranging from “Dante’s Letter

to a Friend,” to an “Anglo-Saxon Description of Paradise,” to Leigh Hunt’s essay “The

Italian Pilgrim’s Progress,” to Voltaire’s entry on Dante in Dictionnaire Philosophique. This

eclectic mix highlights the seemingly universal connections to Dante in European culture. In

the Paradiso volume, all but one of the illustrations are presented in their original, European

110See, for example, “Valuable New Book published by Ticknor and Fields,” The Yearbook of the Unitarian
Congregational Churches for 1867 (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1867), 73.

Unlike Cary’s and Carlyle’s, many English translations contained endnotes instead of footnotes. But
111

Longfellow’s page layout is similar only to Cayley’s uninfluential translation.

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romance language, which is consistent with Longfellow’s representation of Dante in his

endnotes as an international cosmopolitan. Longfellow’s implicit message to readers is that

Dante’s poetry is a means to international learning, a way to become a literary cosmopolite,

like Longfellow himself, who, after learning and teaching multiple foreign languages, filtered

those languages into his popular verse.112

Longfellow’s translation was and, perhaps surprisingly, continues to be a tremendous

success. After Ticknor and Fields issued four printings of the 1867 edition, Fields, Osgood,

and Company (formerly Ticknor and Fields) released another three-volume set in 1870, as

well as a one-volume edition in 1871. Readers now had a new standard English-language

translation of the Divine Comedy, replaceing Cary’s Vision, which gradually diminished in

literary stature during the second half of the nineteenth century. While Cary’s Vision has now

been almost completely forgotten, Longfellow’s Divine Comedy has never been out of print.

It is as nearly ubiquitous today as other American “classics” from the mid-nineteenth

century, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Scarlet Letter. Numerous editions appear on the

“search results” page of online booksellers, and customers can easily encounter it on a quick

stroll through a modern bookstore (sometimes it’s near the front of the store on the “Must

Have Classics” rack). Recently, Electronic Arts and Del Rey books issued a companion book

for the videogame, Dante’s Inferno, which features Longfellow’s name on the front cover (see

Figure B12). Yet, as we’ve seen, the nearly 150-year success of Longfellow’s translation

owes much to its now-forgotten former competitors, the translations of Cary, Carlyle,

112This point concurs with Christoph Irmscher’s thesis in his chapter on Longfellow’s Divine Comedy translation
in Longfellow Redux. For Irmscher, it was critical to Longfellow that he present the Comedy, which is a
multilingual text, as “English-plus” and not “English-only.” Longfellow’s translation necessarily acts as a
gateway for readers to learn multiple languages, which would enable them to become cosmopolitans. See
Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (University of Illinois Press, 2006).
 95

Dayman, and Parsons. It was the lone survivor from the competitive marketplace of Dante

translations of the mid-nineteenth century.

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CHAPTER III

THE UNION’S DANTE: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW’S

1867 TRANSLATION OF THE DIVINE COMEDY

“For what else did we rush into civil war? What else did our white banners
seek? To what other end were our swords and lances reddened, unless that
those who had mutilated the civil laws in foolhardy enjoyment should submit
their necks to the yoke of righteous legislation, and be compelled to maintain
the peace of the country?”

-- Dante, “Letter to Niccolò da Prato”113

In 1867, one of the first major American literary events of the post-war era took

place when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a new English translation of the great

epic poem of the great national poet of Italy. After working for five years on his translation

of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Longfellow produced not simply an English translation

for the casual reader, but an erudite scholarly edition containing over six hundred pages of

endnotes and literary essays.114 Upon its release, Longfellow’s Divine Comedy received instant

international acclaim. The work was, as the North American Review put it, “an homage paid by

the new and modern world to the old . . . coming from the American poet whose fame has

spread widest over Europe,” and it would “make the Divine Comedy better known to

readers in America and England than any translation that has preceded it.”115 As was typical

Dante Alighieri, A Translation of Dante’s Eleven Letters, trans. Charles Sterrett Latham, ed. George Rice
113

Carpenter (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 3.

114All references to the Divine Comedy in this chapter point to the three-volume edition of the Divine Comedy
translated by Longfellow and published in 1867. I refer to each of the three volumes as Inferno (Volume I),
Purgatorio (Volume II), and Paradiso (Volume III). See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Vol. I-III (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867). Longfellow continued revising the
translation throughout his lifetime, and so different editions published after 1867 will have textual variants,
especially in the endnotes.

115 “The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri,” North American Review 105 (July 1867), 124-148.
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for all of his books, Longfellow’s translation sold very well. It went through four printings in

1867116 and has remained, through the present-day, one of the major English translations of

the Divine Comedy.117

Given that Longfellow produced the bulk of his edition of the Divine Comedy during

the American Civil War and published it immediately thereafter, his translation is certainly a

wartime text. The overlap of the war itself and Longfellow’s translation does not seem

coincidental. Why would Longfellow choose to translate the Divine Comedy during the Civil

War? Were there ways that, for Longfellow and his contemporaries, Dante spoke to the

issues of the American war? Did the war in any way influence Longfellow's translation?

Curiously, such questions have not been addressed by Longfellow critics and biographers,

who have viewed his wartime output as an escape from the war and as a means by which he

dealt with personal tragedy. For Longfellow biographer Newton Arvin, Longfellow

translated the Comedy because it was a “therapeutic task” that consoled him in his deep grief

over the death of his wife of eighteen years, Fanny Longfellow. 118 In July 1861, Fanny died in

a horrific accident after a candle caught her dress on fire and severely burned her.

Longfellow was understandably devastated. Arvin argues that Longfellow turned to Dante—

first to the Paradiso in early 1862, perhaps (so Arvin suggests) because of the glorious

116Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 268. Hereafter Irmscher.
His chapter on Longfellow as a translator, “’It Whirls Me Away’: Longfellow and Translation,” is excellent and
worth reading. For a textual history of Longfellow’s translation, see Irmscher’s chapter “Longfellow as
Translator, Longfellow in Translation” in Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200 (Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
117The number of different editions of Longfellow’s translation currently available on amazon.com are nearly
uncountable. The Modern Library released a new edition in 2003. Another notable edition was released by
Del Rey in 2010 to promote the video game Dante’s Inferno. Both Barnes and Noble and Borders use
Longfellow’s translation in their “Classics” edition of Dante’s Inferno. Amazon’s viewable statistics imply that
the Longfellow editions sell more than any other editions. His translation has never been out of print, which
cannot be said for Robert Pinksy’s Inferno or W.S. Merwin’s Purgatorio, to name to recent translations that were
(upon release) highly celebrated.
118Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 140. Hereafter
Arvin.
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feminine presence of Beatrice in heaven—primarily “as an escape from his grief.”119 Another

critic, Agnieszka Salska, argues that Longfellow’s translation of the Comedy was a “desperate

personal undertaking” that “became for him the way of clinging to sanity.” 120

Indeed, Longfellow scholars have generally agreed that the broader historical context

of the war itself had little if any influence on Longfellow’s wartime work. Longfellow’s most

recent biographer, Charles Calhoun, argues that Longfellow did not translate Dante for

therapeutic reasons but instead did so because of an intense personal interest in Dante,

dating back to Longfellow’s first trip to Italy in 1828, an interest fueled in the early 1860s by

the establishment of a close-knit Dante social club. “What really propelled him” to translate

Dante, Calhoun argues, “was the existence close at hand in Cambridge of a small group of

literati” that aided Longfellow in his project.121 This group deemed themselves “The Dante

Club,” coalescing for Longfellow at the right time in the right place and giving him the social

drive and encouragement to translate Dante. One member of the Club was poet, publisher,

and fellow Dante enthusiast James T. Fields, who in 1861 became editor of the Atlantic

Monthly. Fields’ association with both the Atlantic and a major publishing house, Ticknor and

Fields, provided Longfellow with obvious outlets for his translation of the Divine Comedy.

Yet Calhoun dismisses any possible significance of the convergence of the Civil War with

Longfellow’s translation efforts. Though Longfellow might have been “deeply moved . . . as

a citizen” by the devastating war, “the events of the day,” Calhoun says, “failed to stir his

poetic imagination” (221). Speaking of Longfellow’s eldest son’s entry into the war as a

soldier, Calhoun says that Longfellow had experienced the “alarms and anxieties of 1863,”

119 Nelson F. Adkins, “Longfellow and the Italian Risorgimento,” PMLA 48 (March 1933), 311.

Agnieszka Salska, “From National to Supranational Conception of Literature: the Case of Henry Wadsworth
120

Longfellow,” American Transcendental Quarterly 20 (2006), 611-630.

121 Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 231. Hereafter Calhoun.
 99

and “yet these experiences seemed not to touch his own poetry, at least directly, which is

perhaps the thing that most puzzles a modern student of his life and work” (229).

Calhoun’s qualification that the war did not affect Longfellow’s poetry “directly” is

symptomatic of the dominant critical view, which argues that Longfellow tended to avoid

political commentary and that almost all of his poetry is apolitical, a view that has persisted

since Longfellow’s death. In particular, Longfellow’s wartime production—Tales from a

Wayside Inn (1864) and his translation of the Divine Comedy— have been viewed as deliberate

escapes from important, contemporary sociopolitical issues; by relying so heavily on

Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Dante during the 1860s, Longfellow, so critics argue, retreated in

his poetry into the literature of medieval Europe and the early Renaissance. Salska, for

example, asserts that Longfellow’s work on Dante, including the two sonnets published in

the Atlantic in 1864 about the act of translating the Comedy, had “nothing to do with

American issues of the time, no matter how burning they had become.” Even the lone critic

who has examined Longfellow’s literary relationship to the Civil War devotes just one

paragraph to the subject. Christoph Irmscher, in a chapter on Longfellow as a translator,

says that there were “other reasons for Longfellow’s interest in Dante. He went back to the

Divine Comedy at a time when the country seemed to be falling apart.” In his short paragraph,

Irmscher describes what he means by “falling apart,” indicating that Longfellow’s personal

milestones in his translation work coincided with major Civil War events. Yet Irmscher

quickly drops Longfellow’s involvement and relationship to the war, noting only that the

Comedy was a “highly political text” for Italians (259-260). In Longfellow scholarship, then,

the 1867 translation of the Divine Comedy has had no meaningful relationship to the Civil

War.
 100

Yet, as we have seen in Chapter I, the Divine Comedy was a highly political text for

Americans, a fact that surely did not escape Longfellow. It was, as well, a text that many

New Englanders had interpreted as arguing for national political union and against political

faction and local, autonomous rule, which would inevitably create social unrest and violence.

Longfellow had deep concerns about the war’s major issues, especially slavery, and he

supported the Union’s war effort to re-unify the nation and the attendant endeavor to

emancipate slaves. On November 7, 1860, he wrote in his journal that the election of

Abraham Lincoln was “a great victory; one can hardly overrate its importance. It is the

redemption of the country.”122 The secession of the southern states was to him “rebellion”

and “wretched treason,” and his journals indicate a feverish interest in all the political events

leading up to the war, which broke out months before Fanny Longfellow’s death (Life 2:410,

412). Longfellow’s involvement in the war was not simply ideological, either; he had a

vested personal interest in it. His eldest son, Charles, turned seventeen in 1861 and thereafter

had a burning desire to join the Union Army. He finally did so in March 1863, a decision

which greatly troubled Longfellow, who had constantly lobbied for his son to do anything

but go to war. Later that year, Charles was shot through the chest (the bullet narrowly

missed his heart and lungs), and so Longfellow rushed to a Washington D.C. hospital in

December, nearly at the same time that Walt Whitman traveled to that city to find his

wounded brother (Calhoun 228-229). Longfellow took the opportunity to meet with his

longtime best friend, Charles Sumner, Senator of Massachusetts. The two posed for what

now would be called a photo-op, resulting in a well-known Alexander Gardner photograph

122Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence,
Volume II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 408. Hereafter Life. This work is divided into three volumes, and
so from here on the appropriate numeral will refer to the proper volume number.
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called “The Poetry and Politics of New England,” which suggested the fusion of American

poetry with the Union’s war effort.

Such profound personal and ideological connections to the Civil War help illuminate

Longfellow’s decision to translate in full the Divine Comedy between 1862 and 1864, a text

which, as this chapter argues, he translated because it spoke pertinently to many of the major

issues of American Civil War: sociopolitical division, fragmentation of the nation, tragic

personal encounters with death, the transformation of the self and its transcendence of

worldly matters, and the hope of political re-unification. The contemporary relevance of

each of these issues, in fact, is made explicit in the translation’s paratextual apparatuses,

which include Longfellow’s six sonnets on Dante, hundreds of pages of explanatory

endnotes, and several literary essays about the Comedy. First published in 1867, Longfellow’s

translation of the Comedy operates not just as a pertinent text about the war, but as a text

about Reconstruction. While the Comedy for Longfellow is decidedly pro-Union, it

nonetheless pleads for mercy and for reconciliation between the warring parts of a nation, so

that the body politic would come to resemble the ideal, peaceful, imperial union imagined in

the perfect society in the Paradiso, in which God is the one supreme ruler who unifies all of

the universe’s particular, diverse, and often warring locales. Dante himself provided a model

for Reconstruction. In Longfellow’s view, Dante transformed from a Guelph to a

Ghibelline, or (to anachronistically put it in American political terms) from a secessionist to a

unionist. Longfellow’s interpretation of the Comedy—that a benevolent, imperial government

must unify all smaller governmental entities, bringing peace to all of citizens through the

figure of an imperial, federal head—provides a sociopolitical critique of the American nation

at the end of its internecine strife. Moreover, Longfellow’s selection of the Comedy to

comment on and critique contemporary American politics fits the pattern of his entire
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career, in which he adapts some older narrative, representative of a national past, in order to

respond to a pressing political debate or an apparent watershed moment in the American

present (e.g., Evangeline, Hiawatha, Tales from a Wayside Inn). Longfellow’s Divine Comedy,

translated and published in 1867, is an American Civil War epic that both memorialized the

war and provided a vision of benevolent imperialism applicable to the beginning of the

Reconstruction era.

Longfellow the Political Poet

Except for Hiawatha, critics have not looked closely at the politics of Longfellow’s

poetry. The working assumption creating this critical gap, one most noticeable in biographies

of Longfellow, is that he was generally a reserved man who shied away from conflict and

public controversy, choosing instead to inject a generic, moralistic, Unitarian ethos into his

poetry that offered quiet escape from the troubles of this world—a poetry meant for the

fireside instead of the public square. Arvin, for example, claims that by the 1850s, even

though he was emotionally tormented by the “intensifying violence of sectional conflict” in

the United States, Longfellow “could not express these emotions in his work or throw

himself into the active struggle” (133). Calhoun, speaking of Longfellow in the 1830s,

contrasts him to Thomas Carlyle and Leigh Hunt, writers whom Longfellow befriended on a

trip to England. For Calhoun, Carlyle and Hunt were “writers of the first importance who

had not compromised their staunchly held artistic and political beliefs and who were paying

for it.” Longfellow, by contrast, “avoided such confrontations” in his published poetry (104).

His close relationship with Charles Sumner kept him abreast of political developments, even

at times impassioned by them, and yet he himself acted as the calming sedative to Sumner’s

own political passions (136). Longfellow himself had no stomach for political office,
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rejecting John Greenleaf Whittier’s encouragement to enter a Congressional race, a fact

which Calhoun uses to support his general contention that Longfellow “shunned

confrontation and public controversy in every circumstance” (157).

However, these remarks by Arvin and Calhoun, Longfellow’s recent major

biographers, are inconsistent with the entire body of work that they survey. Calhoun’s

assertion that Longfellow “shunned confrontation . . . in every circumstance” is palpably

incorrect and misleading, since it occurs in the middle of his discussion of Longfellow’s

Poems on Slavery (1842). This small volume of poems, eight in total, attacks southern slavery as

“the old and chartered Lie” and as a “feudal curse, whose whips and yokes / Insult

humanity.”123 The book contains standard abolitionist invective and common slave tropes

that would obviously infuriate southern critics and potentially annoy moderates in the North.

In “The Slave’s Dream,” for example, Longfellow portrays a southern slave who remembers

his life in West Africa, where the rich and wild landscape offers the feeling of freedom and

where he rules as a “king” and enjoys his domestic life. By the poem’s end, the “driver’s

whip” and the “burning heat of day” have made the slave a “worn-out fetter” who

eventually dies, failing to realize in this life his dream of liberty (Slavery 11-14). In “The

Warning,” Longfellow uses the Biblical figure of Samson as a type for the coming liberation

of American slaves. A mighty man, Samson unfortunately fell into Philistinian slavery.

Because he was blind and “desperate,” with no future hope, Samson destroyed a Philistine

temple with his own strength, killing himself and thousands of slaveholders. Longfellow

warns his readers to “beware!” of similar slave revolts in the United States:

There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,

Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,

123 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems on Slavery (Cambridge: John Owen, 1842), 10. Hereafter Slavery.
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Till the vast Temple of our liberties

A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies. (31)
Such prophetic condemnations and quasi-threats were the gasoline that fueled the then-small

fire of the infamous “Longfellow War.” Starting in 1839, when he first achieved great fame,

Longfellow had been critiqued by Edgar Allan Poe and other critics for a number of literary

faults, the most serious of which was, allegedly, plagiarism. With Poems on Slavery, their

critique of Longfellow shifted into an aggressive attack based primarily on sociopolitical

issues.

While Poe and other southern literati became his literary enemies, Longfellow, with

the publication of Poems on Slavery, quickly found friends among abolitionists. William Lloyd

Garrison’s Liberator excerpted “A Slave’s Dream” in December 1842 and promoted Poems on

Slavery, advertising it as a “neat little brochure” of poems that are “creditable to the author’s

good taste and feeling.”124 In April 1843, Garrison published a poetic paean to Longfellow,

thanking him for expressing the stirrings of his heart over slavery and asking him to continue

to write anti-slavery poems.125 Longfellow, it must be said, did not back away from his public

anti-slavery stance. Calhoun has suggested that Longfellow retreated from Poems on Slavery

when he agreed to exclude the poems from Carey & Hart’s 1845 edition of his collected

works. To Calhoun, this agreement was “the only deplorable act in a long and otherwise

blameless literary career” (175). Yet the exclusion was actually a compromise with the

publishers, who were marketing an expensive illustrated edition of Longfellow’s collected

works and wanted a broader market that included the southern states. The cheaper edition

of Poems issued that year by Harper and Brothers, as well as all of the editions thereafter,

124 “Poems on Slavery,” Liberator 12:51 (December 23, 1842), 204.

125 C.W.H., “To H.W. Longfellow,” Liberator 13:14 (April 7, 1843),56.

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issued from a variety of publishers, did in fact include the Poems on Slavery collection (Life

2:32).126

Whatever friends Longfellow made among the radical abolitionists in the 1840s,

however, he risked losing in 1850 with his nationalistic poem “The Building of the Ship.”

Garrison denounced the poem at the February 1850 meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-

Slavery Society, introducing a motion to condemn it. Garrison’s reason for doing so was

that, while the poem celebrated the American Union, the Union deserved no such

celebration. Instead, Garrison held, it deserved the strongest condemnation. For Garrison,

the American republic “was formed in utter derogation of all the principles of justice,

humanity, and righteousness—solely by the immolation of one sixth portion of the

population on the altar of slavery—and through the most guilty compromises.”127 This

contrasts with the explicit conceit of “The Building of the Ship,” which describes the

construction of a ship labeled as a “Ship of State,” built by a “Master” who names the ship

with the politically-charged word “Union.” Most of the poem, however, would not be

noticeably political if it did not announce its conceits in the final stanza, since it mainly

describes the construction of the ship and the anticipation of a young hand who will marry

the Master’s daughter once the ship is launched. Yet Longfellow made his purpose explicit in

the last stanza, which was the one that attracted Garrison’s attention:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,

126For the decision to include Poems on Slavery in his collected works, Longfellow was much criticized. In
August 1846, he read a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper “for publishing the Poems on
Slavery in a cheap edition.” But, he adds, “how impatient they are, those hot Southrons. But this piece of
violence is quite ridiculous.” See Life 2:52.
127 “Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator 20:5 (February 1, 1850),
19.
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Is hanging breathless on thy fate!128

Despite the abolitionists’ contempt for it, the poem was a resounding success.

Longfellow records that Fanny Kemble read the poem “to an audience of more than three

thousand . . . standing out on the platform, book in hand, trembling, palpitating, and

weeping” (Life 2:172). The American press printed and reprinted the poem, while rising up

to condemn Garrison’s resolution against Longfellow as “ridiculous, satanic, and

contemptible.”129 During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln supposedly wept after he heard

the poem read.130 Clearly Longfellow articulated mainstream, pro-Union patriotism

effectively in the poem, which celebrates the fact that the ship of state is itself a material

union of lumber from all over the nation: “Cedar of Maine and Georgia pine / Here

together shall combine” (Fireside 18). This pro-Union sentiment was not without purpose; at

the time of the poem’s composition, Longfellow was legitimately worried about the

dissolution of the republic. Sumner had joined the Free Soil party in 1848, and, in

Longfellow’s frequent conversations with him, the two discussed the possibilities of the

expansion of slavery into the Western territories. Longfellow abhorred the possibility of the

Clayton Compromise (1848), which could have allowed slavery to be legal in all Western

territories, depending on future Supreme Court’s rulings (Life 2:127). Longfellow had also

observed through the American press the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, rejoicing at the

possibility of a new Republic in France (2:118). But the failures of these revolutions seemed

to prompt Longfellow to lend poetic muscle to help preserve the American Union. During

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Seaside and the Fireside (Boston: Ticknor, Reeds, and Fields, 1850), 28.
128

Hereafter Fireside.

129Quoted in “Longfellow Denounced,” Liberator 20:8 (February 22, 1850): 1; and see also “Fanaticism and
Folly,” Liberator 20:9 (March 1, 1850), 1.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Samuel Longfellow (Boston:
130

Houghton Mifflin, 1886), I:242.

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the month in which Longfellow wrote “The Building of the Ship,” June 1849, the newly

created Roman Republic in Italy was besieged by Louis Napoleon’s army, an event that

Longfellow condemned in his journals and which eventually led to the failure of the Italian

revolution in that year (153). A similar kind of violent revolution, which might have led to

the breakup of the American Republic, appeared possible in the United States as well.

Longfellow records that Sumner told him that he believed, in January 1850, that “there is

really danger of a dissolution of the Union” (169).

“The Building of the Ship” is far from the only Longfellow poem to contain political

messages. Robert Ferguson has argued that both Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles

Standish (1858) demonstrate Longfellow’s “deep anxieties” over the looming “disintegration

of the country.”131 Hiawatha was written during the fierce controversy over the Fugitive Slave

Act, which was a gross injustice in Longfellow’s view. The poem—through its prophecy in

the first canto of the slow deterioration of the Iroquois caused by the moral decline of

Iroquois artists and their artwork—serves as a veiled warning to the United States about the

failure of civic culture, which for Longfellow is the “alliance of wisdom, [artistic] culture, and

power.” Such a cultural failure would result in political destruction. Thus Longfellow

believed that American poets needed to be dutiful patriots; as Ferguson puts it,

“Longfellow’s true artist owes his allegiance as well as an important duty of service to

virtuous civil authority” (Ferguson 201-203).

In truth, Longfellow had already attempted to exercise this duty when he criticized

western expansion, primarily because of the possibility of the extension of slavery into the

western territories. As an anti-war poem, written in 1845, “The Arsenal at Springfield” was

Longfellow’s response to the Mexican-American war, which he strongly opposed (Life 2:39).

131Robert A. Ferguson, “Longfellow’s Political Fears: Civic Authority and the Role of the Artist in Hiawatha
and Miles Standish,” American Literature 50 (1978), 195. Hereafter Ferguson.
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Prompted to write the poem by a trip to the arsenal, the location that Daniel Shays’ revolters

tried to seize in 1786 and at which hundreds of thousands of guns had been manufactured

and were stockpiled, Longfellow employs an extended metaphor of the stockpile as a “huge

organ” that plays the “dismal Miserere.” Converted into a dreadful sound, the stockpile of

arms plays the songs of scenes from the history of war, carrying these scenes into the

present:

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,

The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer,

Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman’s song,
And loud, amid the universal clamor,
O’er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace

Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din,
And Aztec priests upon their teocallis
Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent’s skin;

The poem ends optimistically, however, hoping that there will one day be “no need for

arsenals and forts”:

Down the dark future, through long generations,

The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease;
And like a bell, with solemn sweet vibrations,
I hear once more the voice of Christ say, “Peace!”

Peace! And no longer from its brazen portals

The blast of War’s great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of love arise.132

The sweep of history, past and future, inspirit the arsenal and provide new perspectives for

the contemporary moment. By referring to the future second coming of Christ and the

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (Cambridge: John Owens, 1845), 23-26.
132

Hereafter Belfry.
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eventual reign of peace, Longfellow argues that contemporary American politics not only

should be, but also must be, striving for peace throughout the world. Moreover, the poem

contains a similar narrative arc as the Divine Comedy, moving from the inferno of war to the

paradise of peace, an arc highlighted by the reference to the “The Florentine.” As well, the

poem exemplifies Longfellow’s nearly lifelong pacifist sentiments.

The arsenal’s triggering of imagined memories of war announces the main theme of

the Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845-1846), the collection in which “The Arsenal at

Springfield” appears. Most of the poems in the collection begin in the present-day, but then

some sense impression activates the imagined past, which intervenes in and momentarily

becomes the present.133 This theme, the direct reincarnation and intervention of a historical

past that can critique present-day morals and politics, is Longfellow’s dominant poetic theme

from the 1840s onward and is no doubt one of the major reasons he was so attracted to

Dante during the Civil War, a poet who himself was deeply concerned with the intersections

of past and present and with the trajectory and meaning of world history. In “The Belfry at

Bruges,” for example, the sound of a church bell at night triggers “visions” and “shadowy

phantoms” of Belgium’s past, so that “they who live in history only seemed to walk the

Earth again” (13). In “Nuremberg,” the town of Nuremberg is literally populated by the

past: “memories haunt thy pointed gables . . . / Memories of the Middle Ages, when the

emperors, rough and bold, / Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old;”

(27-28). “A Gleam of Sunshine” is slightly different, focusing on personal memory, but it

contains an important Dantesque metaphor of the unity of past and present as a river:

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,

Let me review the scene,
And summon from the shadowy Past

One indication of the dominance of this theme in the Belfry at Bruges and Other Poems is that the four poems
133

mentioned here are the first four poems in the collection.

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The forms that once have been.

The Past and Present here unite

Beneath Time’s flowing tide,
Like footprints hidden by a brook,
But seen on either side. (Belfry 19)

The second stanza alludes to Dante’s crossing of the rivers Lethe and Eünoe at the end of

Purgatorio, in the Garden of Eden at the top of Mount Purgatory. While Lethe obliterates the

memory of sin, Eünoe restores good memory so that Dante can move forward into the

blessed state of Paradise while retaining his memory of the past. Interestingly, Dante’s

journey through Eden is one in which he must simultaneously travel backwards and

forwards; he is literally going forward into the past, back to the site of Adam’s fall, and into

the future, up and through God’s celestial kingdom. Longfellow’s poem alludes to a similar

kind of experience at a riverbank. The point is that the past’s critique of the present, through

the re-imagining or retelling of history, is the primary poetic theme that Longfellow

employed to offer contemporary political commentary and criticism.

With his long narrative poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie in 1847, Longfellow began

to write historical narratives, which omit the step that poems such as “The Arsenal at

Springfield” and “A Gleam of Sunshine” take, in which a present-day narrator enters or

envisions some past world. Longfellow’s historical narratives simply begin and end in the

past, but they all unmistakably critique contemporary American culture.134 This is especially

true of Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), which, along with the Divine Comedy translation, forms

Longfellow’s creative output during the Civil War. As a wartime compilation that employs

the general structure of Boccacio’s Decameron, in which a group of people tell each other

134These narratives include some of Longfellow’s best and most well-known works: Evangeline (1847), The Song
of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), The New England Tragedies (1868), and The Divine Tragedy
(1871).
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stories in a country villa, 135 Tales of a Wayside Inn offers insights into Longfellow’s method of

co-opting classic European narratives and re-crafting them so that they subtly offer

commentary on the United States’ wars. In this collection, Longfellow brings together an

odd group of storytellers, whose literary coalition at an inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts,

represents a union of American artistic and intellectual culture. This group consists of the

inn’s landlord, a student, a theologian, a poet, a Norwegian musician, a Sicilian, and a

Spanish Jew. As Calhoun notes, “this is not a collection of people you would have found

fraternizing in many American inns of the 1860s,” and yet such an assembly demonstrates

“the power of storytelling to imagine a nation” (232). Each of the storytellers receives at least

one opportunity to tell a tale, and all of the tales are poetic revisions of older stories or are

based on history: the subjects include Paul Revere, fourteenth-century Florence, Rabbi

Joshua Ben Levi, Robert of Naples, Olaf I of Norway, the Spanish Inquisition, and colonial

New England. The inn itself represents the colonial American past. It was built “when men

lived in a grander way” but is “now somewhat fallen to decay.”136 The inn’s existence at the

“wayside,” an escape from the “far-off noisy town” and the “noisy railway,” suggests that—

potentially, for the reader—the collection of poems is an escape from contemporary affairs,

especially the Civil War. And yet while “a region of repose it seems / A place of slumber and

of dreams,” both the location of the inn and the many tales told are shot through with

images of war, disunion, and death. For example, in describing the inn, Longfellow says:

Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode

Deep silence reigned, save when a gust
Went rushing down the county road,

135Boccaccio’s travelers have gathered at the inn to escape the raging Bubonic plague, and yet there are hints of
the plague and its effects throughout many of their stories. This makes Boccaccio’s model even more useful
for Longfellow, whose “wayside inn” is something of an escape from the Civil War for its travelers, who
nevertheless do not forget in their stories that the war is raging.

136 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 1. Hereafter Tales.
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And skeletons of leaves, and dust,

A moment quickened by its breath,
Shuddered and danced their dance of death,
And through the ancient oaks o’erhead
Mysterious voices moaned and fled. (Tales 2-3)

The decay of nature described here is not simply a memento mori associated to the peaceful,

remote inn, but it actively surrounds and haunts its grounds, on which the “skeletons of

leaves” perform a swirling death-dance. This isolated passage would have served well as an

apt description of the aftermath of all Civil War battles, in which the voices of thousands of

dying soldiers “moaned and fled.”

Other tales in the collection retain this mood of dark gloom. The Spanish’s Jew Tale,

about the “legend of Rabbi Ben Levi,” is based on a Talmudic story in which the rabbi

confronts the Angel of Death. The rabbi bargains with the angel, asking to see Paradise as a

living man before he dies. The angel agrees, but the rabbi tricks the angel and steals the

sword that empowers him. In order to get the sword back, the angel agrees never to appear

before anyone, but to work in silence “unseen.” The terms of the bargain necessitate that

humans never see Death or realize that Death is at war, wielding a sword against the living:

No human eye shall look on it [the sword] again;

But when thou takest away the souls of men,
Thyself unseen, and with an unseen sword,
Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord. (52)

Death’s war is not only constant and concealed from view, but it is waged in the service of

God.

Similarly gloomy, the most famous poem in the collection, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” first

published in January 1861, revels in a brave historical act during wartime, but assumes that

such an act will continue to be necessary in the future course of the United States. Despite

the triumph of the American Revolution, which was dependent upon, according to

Longfellow, Paul Revere’s bravery, the poem offers a troubling warning in its final lines:
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For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere. (25)

The premise is that the ideals of the American Revolution, “borne on the night-wind of the

Past,” will blow into the present and call all citizens to action. Yet Revere’s “midnight

message”—that the “British are coming”—is not necessarily one of optimism but of cold,

hard fact: we have been invaded and attacked, and war is upon us. Longfellow had worried

for years about a war between the states and the need for another Paul Revere. Four months

before he wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride,” he noted that December 2nd, 1859, the day of John

Brown’s execution, is the “date of a new Revolution.” This execution, he says, is “sowing the

wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon” (Life 2:396).137

The full brunt of Revere’s warning of war is delivered later in the collection, in the

epic poem “The Saga of King Olaf,” the longest poem in Tales of a Wayside Inn. Longfellow

first conceived of the poem in March 1859 and worked on it until its publication in Tales.

His journal suggests that most of the poem was constructed at the time when his political

interests were peaking, and when he feared the dissolution of the United States:

[November] 7th [1860]. Lincoln is elected. Overwhelming majorities in New

York and Pennsylvania. This is a great victory; one can hardly overrate its
importance. It is the redemption of the country. Freedom is triumphant.

9th. Wrote at my ‘Saga of King Olaf.’ . . .

[...]

137Longfellow’s observation resembles Herman Melville’s characterization of John Brown as a “portent” of

war. Jill Lepore’s argument that “Paul Revere’s Ride” is a kind of fugitive slave narrative tightens the
connections that Longfellow made between John Brown and Paul Revere in the poem. See Lepore, “How
Longfellow Woke the Dead,” The American Scholar, <http://www.theamericanscholar.org/how-longfellow-
woke-the-dead/>.
 114

30th. With all kinds of interruptions, I have contrived this month to write
nearly the whole of a poem, ‘The Saga of King Olaf,’ in a series of lyrics.

December 3rd. Congress comes together to-day. The sky looks troubled, and
disunion is threatened. I hope the North will stand firm, and not bate one jot of its
manhood. Secession of the North from freedom would be tenfold worse than
secession of the South from the Union. (Life 2:408-409)

To be sure, Longfellow desired to maintain the Union of the country and believed that the

southern states were “treasonous,” yet this desire conflicted with his general antiwar impulse;

he despised war in general, calling it “ghastly” and always a “very bitter thought” (Life 2:414-

415). “The Saga of King Olaf,” in fact, projects his view of the American Civil War back into

the Norwegian epic of Olaf I of Norway, which Longfellow derived from Snorri Sturulson’s

medieval epic Heimskringla. The poem is about the failure of violent conquest and the

inevitable social fragmentation that follows from such violence. Olaf is a valiant leader and

mighty warrior, able to “wield his sword with either hand / And at once two javelins throw”;

“Norway never yet had seen / One so beautiful of mien / One so royal in attire” (Tales 78).

Yet Olaf’s method of conquest—killing pagans or forcing them to convert to Christianity—

is comparable to the description of the Norwegian god Thor in the poem’s prelude. This

prelude initially contrasts Thor and Olaf as pagan versus Christian, and yet the entire poem

ironically demonstrates that Olaf co-opts Thor’s methods. Thor claims his position as the

“War God” and the “Thunderer” whose philosophy is that “Force rules the world / Has

ruled it, shall rule it” (71, 73). Even though Olaf renounces Thor's pagan ways and

champions Christianity, he assumes Thor’s philosophy in the ultimatum that he gives to

conquered peoples: “Choose ye between two things, my folk / To be baptized or given up

to slaughter!” (102). Force is even Olaf’s operating principle in love; in the course of the

poem, Olaf has two failed marriages, both to unwilling pagan princesses—a sign of the

impossibility of union by force.

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Besides the presentation of Olaf as a violent Christian conqueror, the poem’s other

irony is that the institution of slavery initiates Olaf’s violent reign and brings about his

downfall. As a child, Olaf had experienced a “life of slavery” after his father, the king of

Norway, had been killed and Olaf’s family captured. Olaf even re-enacts the common

African-American slave story of being separated from his family and sold at a “market-

place” (75-76). By amazing coincidence, Olaf is sold back into King Valdemar’s court, which

quickly discovers Olaf’s kingly heritage. Once crowned as king, Olaf seeks to avenge his

father’s death and convert the peoples of Norway to Christianity. His first victim is the

slaveholder Jarl Hakon, who, on the run from Olaf, hides in a cave with one of his slaves.

Because the bounty on Hakon’s head is enormous, Hakon’s slave plots to kill his master.

When Hakon questions his slave’s loyalty, the “crafty” slave replies “I will not slay thee! /

For all the king’s gold I will never betray thee!” Hakon answers with a question: “Then why

dost thou turn so pale, O churl / And then again black as the earth?” (80). This racially

charged moment, in which the slave flashes between black and white, augments his eventual

double-cross of his master, for the multi-racial slave kills Hakon for Olaf’s reward. Thus

Olaf, a former slave and now a conqueror attempting to politically unify Norway, initiates

slave revolts to defeat his slaveholding enemies.

Yet Olaf’s hubris leads to his death, when he is betrayed by an Earl of his court, a

“traitor,” who leads Olaf into the hands of his enemies. One of these enemies is the son of

Hakon Jarl. The slaveholder’s son, desperate for revenge, wins a victory over Olaf, who

drowns at sea. Olaf’s failure to create political union by violence and his defeat by internal

traitors, foreign armies, and slaveholders clearly refer to and evoke the stakes for many
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Northerners in the Civil War and Longfellow’s fear of a Union defeat.138 Yet the poem

highlights the tension between a patriotic unionizer and his method of trying to create

political union by violence, a tension that reflects Longfellow’s own personal conflict

between his devotion to the Union and his hatred of war in general. To resolve this tension,

as I argue below, Longfellow chose to devote himself to an epic in the Divine Comedy that

concludes by depicting a powerful empire of mutual love, benevolence, and peace.

Tales of a Wayside Inn demonstrates, as well, Longfellow’s deep wartime interest in

Italian literature and culture, hinting at a purposeful cultural connection between the

American Civil War and Dante. Tales, for example, as I’ve noted, is loosely structured by the

framework of Boccaccio’s Decameron and poetically revises one of Boccacio’s tales, the ninth

story on the fifth day, into “The Falcon of Ser Frederigo.” It also includes the tale “King

Robert of Sicily,” told by the “Sicilian,” who was modeled after Longfellow’s friend and

Harvard colleague Luigi Monti. Interestingly enough, Monti was yet another intellectual

Italian refugee who had fought for the republican revolutionaries in the Revolution of 1848,

thereafter fleeing to the United States where he found a position at Harvard teaching Italian

(Calhoun 232). Also, the character of the Poet in Tales is Thomas William Parsons, at the

time the only published American translator of Dante. This choice is curious since

Longfellow had a wealth of more popular poet friends he could have used to represent The

Poet—including Whittier or James Russell Lowell—but his introductory remarks explain

that Parsons is a poet without hubris, a mere translator willing to put another poet’s name at

the forefront of a book, even though he writes poetry that is “tender, musical, and terse”

138Irmscher has hinted that Tales of a Wayside Inn has something to do with the Civil War. He notes that “the
obsession of some of the storytellers with violence or death was not coincidental;: it would have reminded even
the most oblivious of Longfellow’s readers of the fratricidal mess outside their windows” (191).
 117

(Tales 13). This version of The Poet is a model for what Longfellow was striving for as he

translated the Comedy.

The Italian connections to the wartime Tales of a Wayside Inn were, then, a kind of

preparation for Longfellow’s Dante-inspired poetic output during the Civil War. Besides his

translation of the Divine Comedy, Longfellow also published six sonnets in the 1860s on

translating Dante, as well as snippets of his Comedy translations in the Atlantic Monthly. In

truth, this was not the first time that Longfellow employed Dante during an American war.

In The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, published at the beginning of the Mexican-American

war, Longfellow included a sonnet simply entitled “Dante.” The opening of the sonnet

reveals a tortured poet in a partisan struggle, who retreats to a monastery to find repose:

Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom,

With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes,
Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise,
Like Farinata from his fiery tomb.
Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom;
Yet in thy heart what human sympathies,
What soft compassion glows, as in the skies
The tender stars their clouded lamps relume!
Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks,
By Fra Hilario in his diocese,
As up the convent-walls, in golden streaks,
The ascending sunbeams mark the day’s decrease;
And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks,
Thy voice along the cloister whispers, “Peace!” (Belfry 111-112)

The final word “Peace!” refers to “The Arsenal at Springfield,” which is also in The Belfry of

Bruges, a poem that, as I’ve indicated, looks towards the second coming of Christ, who will

return to end all wars and declare “Peace!” As with “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “Dante”

offers veiled critical commentary reflecting Longfellow’s anti-war feelings about the

Mexican-American conflict. The sonnet calls for “peace” during a time of war while

characterizing Dante’s creative, poetic work as necessarily political. The opening lines

describe the poet as wandering “through the realms of gloom,” an obvious reference to the
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Inferno, yet they also recall Dante’s political exile and political sympathies. The comparison to

Farinata (discussed at greater length below), who appears in Inferno X, recalls the political

quagmires that resulted in Dante’s exile. As a Ghibelline leader and soldier, Farinata desired

the imperial unification of Italy, but waged war in Florence against the Guelphs in order to

achieve his aims. Longfellow’s poem pessimistically suggests that partisan conflict is only

avoidable for the poet through a retreat from the world, since Dante must escape to the

monastery.139 Longfellow’s first sonnet on translating Dante, which prefaces his 1867

translation of the Inferno, offers a similar theme. The poem’s narrator envisions a “laborer”

entering a cathedral to “retreat” from the “loud vociferations of the street.” The narrator, an

obvious stand-in for Longfellow, compares his translation work to this cathedral. Like the

cathedral, work on the translation is a retreat from public affairs. For this narrator, the

translation of the Comedy is a convenient distraction from the “tumult of the time

disconsolate,” or—at the time of its composition—the raging Civil War (Inferno ix).

Yet, as Longfellow himself noted, this attempted retreat from contemporary affairs

would not only dishonor Dante, who himself was always engaged in contemporary Italian

politics, but is actually an impossibility. In his 1838 lecture on the “Life of Dante,”

Longfellow told his students that imagination must recreate history as the present, so that a

text may relevantly critique contemporary affairs: “For it is of great importance to us in

looking back upon any epoch in History, to give it a real existence in our minds, that it may

be present to us, not past—that we may seem for the moment to live in it. This is

139As was the case with many of Longfellow’s poems, “Dante” was reprinted in Graham’s Magazine and the
Liberator, among other periodicals. Longfellow included the “Letter of Frate Ilario,” which describes the
monastery story on which “Dante” is based, in the 1867 edition of the Inferno.
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difficult.”140 (10). Once our minds apprehend the “real existence” of Dante’s Florence, its

political strife offers warnings for the American Republic. Longfellow, in this 1830s lecture,

even goes so far as to condemn Transcendentalist philosophy by labeling Dante’s friend

Guido Cavalcanti, often accused of atheism, as a proto-Transcendentalist (Longfellow

Lectures 32-33). The 1867 translation of the Divine Comedy, for Longfellow, necessarily offers

similar kinds of sociopolitical critiques. Longfellow’s second sonnet on translating the

Comedy, which immediately follows the one in which the laborer enters the cathedral, reveals

that the laborer cannot escape the terrors of the war outside. Inside the cathedral itself are

menacing reminders both of the war and of the nadir of sacred Christian history. “Fiends

and dragons on the gargoyled eaves” loom above and stare at a stained-glass depiction of the

crucified Christ, underneath whom is the “traitor Judas.” This symbol of the ultimate act of

treason points Longfellow to Dante’s psychological condition during the composition of

Inferno. Dante possessed great “agonies of heart and brain,” yet his poem offers a “hate of

wrong” and a “passionate outcry of a soul in pain” (Inferno x). The clearly implied argument

is that, while Longfellow’s choice to translate the Inferno may seem like a deliberate avoidance

of the major events of the day, this translation actually refracts the world of a war-torn

nation divided by “traitors” in which sensitive, poetic souls such as Longfellow deeply suffer

painful emotions, caused by politics and war, emotions that even Dante himself understood,

felt, and communicated in the Divine Comedy.

What the sonnet “Dante” also demonstrates is that Longfellow had connected Dante

and his work to contemporary American political themes at least twenty years before the

Civil War. As his journals show, Longfellow continued to make this connection through the

mid-1860s. Longfellow and Sumner, in their extensive political talks, often referred to Dante

140Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Life of Dante,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Papers (MS Am 1340, Volume
106), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 10. Hereafter Longfellow Lectures.
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and his historical context.141 In January 1857, Longfellow recorded that Preston Brooks, who

in 1856 had famously caned Sumner nearly to death in a Senate chamber, had died. Brooks,

Longfellow says, was a “mere tool of the slaveholders,” and lashing someone was the

slaveholders’ way of “answering arguments.” Then Longfellow describes the weather for the

following day, which was “Dantesque” in that it “promised spring” but deceived everyone

into thinking that winter was finished. This falsely optimistic weather report corresponds

with Longfellow’s outlook on North-South relations in the late 1850s. Once war erupted,

Longfellow became as gloomy as he ever would be. On May-day 1861, he records that the

day is “bleak and cheerless” and “the little girls with bare necks and rose-wreaths on their

heads, remind me less of dancing than of death. They look like little victims.” In these days,

he says, “when the times have such a gunpowder flavor, all literature loses its taste.

Newspapers are the only reading” (Life 2:416). Longfellow was reading newspapers every day

to follow the action of the war closely. Fanny’s death in July 1861 did not lessen his concern

for the course of the war and its tragedies. He notes that his friends, George Putnam and

Oliver Wendell Holmes, lost their sons in battle in October 1861 (2:423). This intensified

Longfellow’s trouble with his own son, Charles, who desired to become a soldier for the

North. Yet, though all literature seemed to have lost taste for him, Longfellow began reading

Purgatorio to his children in the winter of 1861-1862 (3:2). On February 6, 1862, he examined

Gustave Dore’s illustrations of the Comedy for the first time, believing them to be

“imaginative, wild, and vigorous.” One week later, he reveled in the advance of the Union

Army: “great results are looked for.” Those results came two days later, on February 15,

when the Union won several small battles, which made Longfellow rejoice that there was “a

week of victories all along the line, East and West.” Then on February 20, Longfellow began

141See for example Life 2:375. Here Sumner comments on Dante and the oppressive Austrian regime,
anticipating a revolution in Italy in 1859.
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his wartime translation of the Comedy, starting with the “beautiful” Canto XXV of Paradiso.

Significantly, in this canto (discussed in detail below) Saint James examines Dante on the

concept of hope, an apt choice for a gloomy period. Longfellow had similar optimistic

wishes as he translated Paradiso XXII-XXXIII by March 25th. “Great battles, and great

victories for Freedom,” he wrote on April 2, 1862 (3:5).

However, 1862 was not a good year for the Army of the Potomac. Longfellow

became sourer as the year progressed. “What an infernal thing war is! Woe to him by whom

it cometh!” he exclaimed on September 1: “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not

only on the battle-field, but in far-away homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death”

(3:16). While the Emancipation Proclamation gave him some hope for the end of slavery,

Union losses at Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg were painful. On March 14, 1863, he

decided to translate the Inferno. Years earlier, in 1847, when Longfellow had finished

lecturing to a Harvard class on the Inferno, he said that he was “not sorry” to leave the Inferno

behind: the poem is a “painful tragedy . . . Full of wonderful pathos, horror, and never

ending surprise” (2:86). Though it was his least favorite canticle in the Divine Comedy, the

Inferno was perhaps the starkest reminder of the Civil War. On the same day that he began

his translation, his son Charles enlisted in the Union Army. “This has been a sad week to

me,” Longfellow said on March 14; “To-day I began the Inferno. I mean to take a canto a day

till it is finished” (3:21). He accomplished this resolution. The Inferno was finished in a

month, which meant that his first draft of the translation of the Divine Comedy was

complete.142 In late November 1863, he had his translation of the Comedy typeset in order to

have a copy with which to create extensive endnotes, a task that consumed him for the next

three years, as he worked to interpret the poem he had just translated in the light of the war

142Longfellow had translated Purgatorio as a personal project in 1843 and 1853. However, he would revise this
translation in 1864.
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that was raging about him. Just as he was beginning to create these notes, he had to rush to

Washington DC to be with his wounded son (3:24). Thus, at the same time that he was

consumed by the war, Longfellow was deep into his American version of the Comedy. His

decisions to translate Dante’s most famous work not only coincided with the major historical

event of Longfellow’s lifetime, but they were greatly affected by it. For Longfellow, the

Comedy became an American Civil War epic.

The Divine Comedy for the American Civil War

On July 4, 1859, Longfellow went to hear a Fourth of July speech given by George

Sumner, Charles Sumner’s brother and Longfellow’s good friend. Longfellow was influenced

enough by this speech to begin thinking about a patriotic, anti-slavery poem that would

eventually, as Jill Lepore has shown, turn into “Paul Revere’s Ride.” 143 Yet this speech also

likely helped prompt Longfellow to think about translating the Divine Comedy and connect it

to the then-burning issues of abolition and the disintegration of the nation. In the speech,

Sumner claims that France, Hungary, and Italy are examples of nations where the ardent

desire to install republican institutions—which secure “independence, equal rights, and self-

government”—is very high.144 Yet, according to Sumner, certain northern moderates were so

indifferent to republican ideals that their indifference threatened American, if not Western,

civilization:

But there are some who, calling themselves conservatives, conserve nothing, and
who yield, not to the advances of civilization, but to the encroachments of
barbarism; whose whole conservatism is constant concession; who tell us they are

143 See footnote 137.

144 George Sumner, “An Oration Delivered Before the Municipal Authorities of the City of Boston, July 4,
1859” (Boston: Geo. C. Rand and Avery), 23. Of Italy, on page 39, Sumner claims that the ’United States of
Italy,’ if it were to form, “would satisfy the love of unity, so strong in the Italian heart, while the State
organization would give full play to that spirit of local and municipal liberty, which, in former days, was so fully
developed in the Italian Republics.”
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“as much opposed to barbarism as any one,” but they wouldn’t meet it on the field
of politics,—“as much opposed to crime as any one,” but they wouldn’t hear a
warning voice raised against it from the pulpit;—their politics are too pure, their
Sunday slumbers too precious, to be disturbed by any allusions to such exciting
matters as the advances of crime. And so they go on, conceding everything,—not to
civilization, but to barbarism,—not to liberty, but to liberticide—backing down
before every presumptuous aggression—down—and down still—until they fall
among the lost ones whom Dante has described. From them there is nothing to
expect. (Sumner 63)

To bolster his argument, Sumner refers to Inferno III, in which Dante describes the

indifferent angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but instead served

themselves. Their punishments are to remain always just beyond the gates of hell, to desire

that they might have anyone else’s fate, and to endlessly follow a “rapidly” moving “banner”

(Inferno 16). In his 1867 translation, Longfellow called them “The Inefficient or Indifferent”

and compared them to the citizens of Fair-speech in Pilgrim’s Progress (iii; 227). The always-

moving banner, Longfellow says, is an “emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of its

followers” (228). For Sumner, Dante’s depiction of these indifferent souls is an ideal analogy

for the prewar, northern conservatives he had in mind.

Agreeing with Sumner in his own way, Longfellow responded to his friend’s call for

action. His translation of a medieval epic, the Divine Comedy, provided what he thought was

the best literary message about the Civil War. While such a message might have seemed fairly

oblique to contemporary readers, Longfellow’s hundreds of pages of endnotes reveal how he

thought of the war and how he connected it to the Comedy. Even some of the Comedy’s major

themes explain Longfellow’s choice. The Comedy is, in part, about the peaceful benefits of

sociopolitical union and the individual and social transcendence of civil war and conflict,

themes which Longfellow had recognized as early as the 1830s and which seemed
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increasingly appropriate as he translated the text during the American Civil War.145 The

length and depth of his endnotes, as well as their historical and cosmopolitan scope, suggest

that Longfellow’s strategy was to create a transatlantic readership united by (in Longfellow’s

reading) the Comedy’s theological vision of sociopolitical harmony and tolerance.

Framed in this way by the endnotes and critical essays, Longfellow’s edition of the

Divine Comedy offers a Dante who has transformed himself from a local partisan into an

international cosmopolitan, who desires peace through unification via a large-scale political

institution—a potentially apropos narrative arc for the beginning of the Reconstruction era.

The Comedy itself is an epic about such a personal transformation. An ordinary man, a

pilgrim, must experience a journey through the cosmos, traveling from the divided, isolated

factions of hell to the united celestial rose of the saints. During the journey, the pilgrim gains

moral and intellectual refinement while simultaneously discovering and arguing for the

injustice of petty political factions and the justice of political unification. Importantly, Dante

passes through the divided regions of hell, swelling with strife and division, at the bottom of

which are the ultimate rebels and traitors (e.g., Satan, Judas), and concludes his journey with

a vision of the ultimate federal monarch, God himself. To understand Longfellow’s wartime

interest in the Comedy, I offer a brief interpretation of it as a text concerned with civil war

and politics, the point of which is not to offer a novel interpretation of Dante’s poem, but to

show how Longfellow’s translation and endnotes promote such a reading and why the

145Perhaps because it is, in the original, a fourteenth-century text, Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy
does not fit perfectly into categories of Civil War-era literature. Kathleen Diffley has described three kinds of
narratives that emerged between the war and the post-Reconstruction periods. The first are domestic, “Old
Homestead” narratives, in which a home or homeland is invaded and must be defended. Later, romances
emerged in which marriage was a metaphor for union. Finally, adventure stories helped to “reinvent the self,
now to be defined by the state instead of the family” (125). There are, however, aspects of the latter two kinds
of narratives in the Divine Comedy, as I argue below. For studies on popular literature during and after the Civil
War, contemporary with Longfellow’s translation efforts, see Diffley, Where My Heart is Turning Ever: Civil War
Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992; and Alice Fahs,
The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001.
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Comedy was a commercially viable and relevant text for the American literary marketplace

immediately after the Civil War ended.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Divine Comedy’s relevance for the United

States in the 1860s is that it welds Christian faith with political vision, an appropriate

combination for wartime America. Many historians have noted that the Civil War increased

religious fervor in general and that a kind of American civil religion developed during the

war. As Harry Stout observes, patriotism to the national cause—whether Union or

Confederate—was “sacralized to the point that it enjoyed coequal or even superior status to

conventional denominational faiths.”146 The deaths of more than a half-million soldiers were

terrible tragedies, yet many American saw them as a necessary blood sacrifice. These dead

soldiers were literally labeled, in hundreds of sermons, as “martyrs” for their respective

national causes. National flags became objects of devotion and reverence. As well, “The

Declaration of Independence” became—at least for Abraham Lincoln—a kind of sacred

text, with a core principle (“all men are created equal”) that could never be violated. Most

Americans viewed the war as the work of a Divine Providence that controlled all events and

outcomes and that would, eventually, fulfill the prophecy of the Book of Revelation by

inaugurating a peaceful, global millennium.147 For some Northerners, this millennial vision

could be fulfilled through the Union army’s victory. As Stout argues, the welding of religious

faith and political ideology likely prolonged the war, giving soldiers and citizens alike deep

reasons to continue fighting for the causes in which they believed. The war even created

146See Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking,
2006), xviii. Stout also claims on page 254 that, by August 1863, the war “had created and consecrated two
American civil religions, mortally opposed, but both Christian and both ‘American.’”

See George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, North
147

Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1-9.

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believers out of non-believers.148 Both chief executives of the two warring nations relied

heavily on religious rhetoric, on the notion of an all-powerful Providence, and on the

declaration of days of prayer, fasting and thanksgiving to motivate their respective citizens.

Jefferson Davis was baptized into the Episcopal Church in 1862, gaining a “reputation as a

man of God” during the war, though he had not articulated much faith prior to the war

(Rable 189). Lincoln, long a religious skeptic, came to a “mature contemplation of

providence” in the 1860s, viewing himself as an instrument of God, whose ways were

ultimately mysterious (188). As the presidents of their respective nations, Lincoln and Davis

personally exemplified the fusion of faith and political ideology during the Civil War.

Longfellow viewed Dante as a Christian poet who understood the need for this kind

of fusion, albeit one who supported a Unionist version of it. According to Longfellow’s

endnotes to his translation, Dante supported the cause of a powerful executive who would

crush a disruptive rebellion and unify a divided nation. For Longfellow, Dante’s life was a

testament to the tragedy of unending civil conflict. Specifically, Dante was a victim of

destructive sociopolitical divisions in medieval Florence. In Inferno II, he describes his

journey through the cosmos as a “war” through which he must “sustain” himself—or as

Beatrice puts it in Paradiso XXV, his journey is a “warfare to be completed” (I:7 and III:165).

This description of the pilgrim’s journey as a “war” importantly combines autobiography

with theology. The Comedy is at once a description of Dante’s sanctification and of God’s

cosmic triumph over many of Dante’s political and ecclesiastical enemies. As well, the

Comedy potently combines theological doctrine and political prophecy.

Longfellow had long characterized the Divine Comedy as Dante’s critique of violent

partisan politics. In his “Life of Dante” lecture, delivered at Harvard in 1838, Longfellow

148For other examples, Confederate generals Braxton Bragg, Joe Johnston, and John Bell Hood were baptized
during the war. See Rable 311.
 127

argues that Dante’s life was a three-stage journey that ended badly because of Dante’s

entrance into political life. The first stage of his life was early youth, a “quiet and peaceful”

time in which Dante flourished in his study of the liberal arts and developed deep

friendships (Longfellow Lectures 47). The second stage began during adulthood, when Dante

entered “public and political life,” which was “as full of trouble as the first [stage] was full of

peace” (53). Dante was involved in the “clash of parties” between Guelphs and Ghibellines

and fought in their civil wars on the Guelph side. It was because Dante took part in

“political life”—he was “busy in the affairs of state”—that he was forced to travel between

the divided republics of Italy. During one of his “political pilgrimages” to Rome, he was

banished from his “native city,” Florence. His property was confiscated and he was

sentenced to death by fire if he ever returned. This begins the third stage of his life, his “exile

and wanderings,” which were a direct result of his participation in partisan politics. The

implication is that if Dante had continued in his study of the liberal arts, remaining in the

first stage of life and focusing only on contemplative or creative pursuits, he would not have

experienced such serious personal pain. Yet Florence was a nearly lawless republic, prone to

outbursts of violence. Its main problem, for Longfellow, was the unchecked “spirit of

freedom,” which encouraged “drunken quarrels” and “street brawls” that ended in murder:

“Florence was then a Republic. . . . The spirit of freedom was wild ~ not easily tamed ~ not

easily subject to laws. Hence sudden quarrels ending in sudden death. Hence family feuds

hence civil discord. In vain did Charles of Anjou reign in Florence: in vain did Fra Giovanni

da Vincenza preach the Kiss of Peace!” (14). In Longfellow’s view, Florence was a decadent

republic that needed a determined ruler who would stop all violent outbursts and factional

disputes, promoting peace through the exercise of virtuous power. Had such a ruler unified

the republics of Italy, Dante would never have been exiled, an unfortunate circumstance
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that—Longfellow claims, with a nod to the temperance movement that was sweeping

America—can actually be traced back to a “drunken quarrel in a tavern.”

What is most striking about Longfellow’s obsession with the tiniest of details about

medieval Florence is his assiduous focus on the politics of Dante’s Florence, Tuscany, and

even the Holy Roman Empire. His probing of the details of the civil strife that Dante

experienced and incorporated into the Comedy indicates not so much Longfellow’s

fascination with Italian history as his realization that this history was analogous to what

Americans were experiencing during their own civil war. In short, medieval Florence was an

excellent historical example for the war-ravaged United States, a negative lesson that all

Americans could learn from, which warned about the failure to end civil war and peacefully

re-unite. Longfellow’s copious annotations of the Comedy in his 1867 translation offer

extensive details of Dante’s biography and contemporary culture to highlight such historical

lessons. The way that Longfellow interpreted the Comedy and medieval Italian history, then,

offers a window onto how he viewed the Civil War and expected his readers to view it.

One of the most important historical lessons that medieval Florence could teach

Americans was the terrible Tuscan struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines, which was, for

Longfellow as it was for Herman Melville, an apt historical analogy for the division between

the northern states and the seceded southern states. Descriptions of and explanations for

this medieval conflict occupy much of Longfellow’s endnotes in his Inferno volume.149

Indeed, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict is a fundamental issue for Dante throughout the

Divine Comedy. Importantly, Longfellow subscribed to the nineteenth-century liberal or neo-

Ghibelline interpretation of the Comedy, in which the Comedy supposedly advocates the

149Longfellow’s longest single note, on line 52 of Inferno VI, is a “lively picture of the social life in Florence in
Dante’s time” taken from Boccaccio’s description of Ciacco in the Decameron. His notes to Inferno X, which
explain Dante’s encounter with Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti and the origins of the Guelph-
Ghibelline conflict, are his longest in the Inferno and twice as long as those for other cantos.
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formation of a proto-national Italian state, politically unified by the Holy Roman Empire.150

In this interpretation, the Guelphs, who fought for the local, autonomous rule of their own

cities, were hindrances to progressive change and the peaceful unity of Italy. Though his

interpretation is anachronistic, Longfellow roughly identified the Guelphs with the

Confederacy and the Ghibellines with the Union. Longfellow calls Dante a “Ghibelline and

Imperialist in opposition to the Guelfs, Pope Boniface VIII, and the King of France”—a

description that at once makes Dante, in mid-nineteenth-century American terms, a

republican Protestant unionist (I:222).

While Dante is critical of the Ghibellines throughout the Comedy, his famous

prophecy of the Greyhound in Inferno I is crucial (for neo-Ghibelline interpreters) in

determining his choice of sides. In this prophecy, Dante desires that a political savior—the

“Greyhound,” as described by Virgil—shall unite “low Italy” and rule by wisdom, virtue, and

love (Inferno 5). This passage is notoriously ambiguous in Dante studies; as John Carlyle says,

it was “obscure, even to Dante’s contemporaries” (10). While several possibilities exist for

who or what this Greyhound is, Longfellow says confidently that he is “Can Grande della

Scala, Lord of Verona, Imperial Vicar, Ghibelline, and friend of Dante” (Inferno 223).

Longfellow’s extended description of Can Grande explicitly champions the political nature

of the “Greyhound” and frames the Comedy as a political work about the Guelph-Ghibelline

conflict. While Cary in The Vision also argues for the same interpretation of the Greyhound,

he merely describes Can Grande as Dante’s “Veronese patron” (Cary 5). Longfellow, by

contrast, adds the appellations “Imperial Vicar” and “Ghibelline” to emphasize the fact that

Can Grande was a leader who exactly represented Dante’s imperial ideology.

150For an extended description of the neo-Ghibelline interpretation, see Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante:
Cary’s Translation of The Divine Comedy (Market Harborough, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2003).
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Importantly, for Longfellow, Dante moved from the Guelf cause to the Ghibelline

and was thus a good model for the social reconstruction of non-Unionists. Dante’s

progression through the three stages of his life (as framed by Longfellow in his Harvard

lecture) led to this political transformation, which Longfellow emphasizes in the endnotes to

his translation of the Divine Comedy. While Dante’s sociopolitical stance at the time of the

writing of the Comedy is a much-debated subject in Dante studies—Dante may have been

writing as a partisan from either a White Guelph (Bianco) or from a Ghibelline perspective,

or he may be attempting in the Comedy to transcend all particular viewpoints—Longfellow

repeatedly asserts that Dante wrote the Comedy as a Ghibelline. In his notes to the first half

of Inferno I, for example, when Dante encounters the three beasts that block his path up a

mountain, Longfellow frames Dante’s plight as a struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline,

the Guelphs responsible for Dante’s dire situation. The “dark forest” in which the pilgrim is

lost represents, from a political perspective, “the state of Florence with its factions Guelf

and Ghibelline” (Inferno 221). This latter interpretation is even more determined in

Longfellow’s note to line 60 of Inferno I, the final line in the following quotation, which is

much more ambiguous than Longfellow indicates:

And as he is who willingly acquires,

And the time comes that causes him to lose,
Who weeps in all his thoughts and is despondent,
E’en such made me that beast withouten peace,
Which, coming on against me by degrees
Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent.

Here the “she-wolf” (“that beast withouten peace”) prevents Dante from ascending the

mountain, an ambiguous passage that has inspired various moral and spiritual

interpretations.151 Longfellow’s gloss on the final line, however, is entirely political. He

151Henry Cary and John Aitken Carlyle, for example, both state that the she-wolf is definitely “Avarice.” Both
of them also quote four lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes in their respective notes on the line in which
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concludes that Dante must be referring to his political exile from Florence and that Dante,

as a Ghibelline, is explicitly condemning the Guelphs (Inferno 222). The three beasts in Inferno

I therefore oppose unifying peace because they represent a divided Italy ravaged by factions

and civil war, which resulted in Dante’s political exile.

For Longfellow, Inferno I introduces the key political issues in the Comedy, which are

fundamentally moral issues as well. Thus, in Inferno I, Longfellow describes the dark forest as

both the “dark forest of human life, with its passions, vices, and perplexities” and as a

politically divided Florence. Each of the three beasts that Dante encounters represents a

combination of a particular moral vice and a political obstacle to the imperial unification of

Italy. The panther is both “Worldly Pleasure” and the city of Florence; the lion is

“Ambition” and the Royal House of France; the she-wolf is “Avarice” and the “temporal

power of the popes” (Inferno 222). The encounters with the three beasts, Longfellow says, are

like John Bunyan’s encounters with various allegorized sins in Pilgrim’s Progress, which is a

“kind of Divine Comedy in prose” (221), and yet they also represent the institutional

obstacles that keep a nation divided by civil strife and faction. Longfellow’s designation of

Dante as a Ghibelline, and of the Comedy as a polemic in the dispute between Guelphs and

Ghibellines, promotes a moral-political reading of the Comedy that contends for the justice of

national unification. An overarching political institution—for Dante, the Holy Roman

Empire led by the crowned emperor Henry VII—is the necessary unifying power that

establishes peace and quells factional conflict. As a supporter of Lincoln and a unionist

before and during wartime, Longfellow projected his interpretation of Dante’s poetic vision

Dante says he is “thrust back” where “the sun is silent.” See The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante
Alighieri, trans. Henry Francis Cary (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 3; hereafter Cary. And Dante’s Divine
Comedy: The Inferno, trans. John A. Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1849), 6. The latter hereafter is Carlyle.
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onto American politics, reading out of the Comedy the need for a powerful federal executive

to challenge the seceded southern states.

Longfellow’s interpretation of the Divine Comedy is consistent with sophisticated

modern readings of it, which systematically illuminate the political views that Longfellow

offers in small pieces in his translation’s endnotes.152 Joan M. Ferrante’s The Political Vision of

the Divine Comedy, for example, argues that the Comedy is Dante’s poetic attempt to restate the

political views he expresses in his tract Monarchia.153 For Ferrante, the Comedy is not

necessarily a “moral guide for a general audience,” but a “polemic” that is fundamentally

political (39-40). In the Monarchia, Dante argues for a global monarchy, headed by a single

imperial monarch, which unites all human political institutions, since “mankind most closely

resembles God when it is a unity.” This monarchy would establish universal peace and

promote morality.154 Importantly, for Dante, the monarch’s dominion (the temporal realm)

must be separate from the Roman Catholic Church’s dominion, which is limited to only the

spiritual realm. Dante justifies the right of the Holy Roman Empire to claim this universal

monarchical power by attempting to prove that Rome was granted this power by God. Thus

Dante in the Monarchia argues that city-states and kingdoms should not exist autonomously.

Factions and civil wars between smaller political units in Dante’s day “make it apparent that

the well-being of the world requires that there be a monarchy or empire” to promote

152 For additional scholarship on the Monarchia that supplements Ferrante’s interpretation, see Charles Till
Davis, Dante’s Italy, and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); and Davis, Dante and
the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

Joan M. Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
153

Hereafter Ferrante.

154 See Dante, Monarchy, ed. Prue Shaw (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): I.viii.3. Hereafter
Monarchia. It should be pointed out that Dante is not a 21st century globalist, nor is he advocating a benevolent
Big-Brother totalitarian state. The entire political view of Monarchia is premised on the idea that both church
and state serve their constituents, and that those constituents desire to honor their “forebears” and act for the
benefit of “future generations” (Monarchia I.i.1). The monarch must be a man who “can be the purest
embodiment of justice,” possesses “rightly ordered love,” and fears God (1.xi.13). Thus Dante would be the
first to castigate dictatorship and imperial tyranny.
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universal peace (Monarchia I.v.10). For Ferrante, the Divine Comedy’s three canticles describe

three different political societies, and Dante’s journey proceeds first through the worst

society and ends in the best. Hell, frequently likened in the Inferno to the city of Florence, is a

“corrupt society based on greed and selfishness without order and justice”; Purgatory, a

kingdom, is a “society in transition” in which individuals are seeking to purge themselves of

corruption in order to achieve ordered, moral community; and finally Heaven is an empire

ruled by one emperor (God) that exemplifies the “ideal society” (Ferrante 42). Thus Dante

the poet-pilgrim travels from hell to purgatory to paradise, or from corrupt city to the

“kingdom without a center” to the ideal “city-empire.” This sequence, when put in terms of

Dante’s historical context, means that Hell is Florence, Purgatory is Italy, and Paradise is the

Roman Empire (46-47). Importantly, the paradise of Heaven unifies all of the locales in the

poem and properly distributes mercy and justice, while operating as the “divine model, the

organization . . . on which human society and government must be based.” God as cosmic

emperor is the exemplar monarch in the Divine Comedy, the moral model for all would-be just

rulers.

While almost all Northerners in the 1860s would have denounced monarchy as a

political system, ironically the majority view was not so far from Dante’s vision of a powerful

imperial ruler who could impose his moral will and defeat immoral rebels and slaveholders.

James Russell Lowell, Longfellow’s friend and fellow member of The Dante Club, forlornly

wrote in 1861 that the United States might have achieved the status of a great empire if not

for slavery:

A single empire embracing the whole world, and controlling, without extinguishing,
local organizations and nationalities, has been not only the dream of conquerors, but
the ideal of speculative philanthropists. Our own dominion is of such extent and
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power, that it may, so far as this continent is concerned, be looked upon as

something like an approach to the realization of such an ideal. 155

In this same essay, “E Pluribus Unum,” Lowell labels James Buchanan as an imbecilic

“Executive” and a suspect in the “complicity in a treasonable plot against the very life of the

nation” (45-48). The United States is not, Lowell says, a “congeries of medieval Italian

republics”—an obvious reference to Dante’s historical context—but a nation that must

forcefully coerce its wayward elements to honor the “constituted and acknowledged

authority” of the central government (48, 68). For Lowell, Lincoln was the opposite of

Buchanan. Lincoln excellently fulfilled the moral duties of chief executive, one whom

“History” will consider the “most prudent of statesman and the most successful of rulers”

(184). Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1862, supported the government’s use of

the “absolute powers of a Dictator” to rectify the moral confusion caused by Confederate

secession and to restore morality proper back to the nation (which included the immediate

emancipation of slaves). In his essay “American Civilization,” Emerson articulated a

common northern idea about morality as the linchpin of “civilization,” combining

nationalism and moral virtue to argue for the need for a powerful, active, and virtuous chief

executive to defeat the “semi-civilized” American South.156 Both Lowell and Emerson agreed

to an extent with Dante, then, about the moral and civil role of a “monarch,” literally a single

ruler over all who exercised power—if necessary, violent power—in the name of peace and

155See James Russell Lowell, Political Essays (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896),
66. Hereafter Political Essays.
156The essay was first delivered as a speech at the Smithsonian Institution in January 1862, and Lincoln may
have been in attendance for it. Indeed he was probably its target audience. See Emerson, “American
Civilization,” The Atlantic Monthly 9 (April 1862), 502-511.
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unity, the kind of role that apparently could be assumed by a U.S. President during a national

emergency.157

Besides its supposed need for a powerful ruler to suppress rebellion, medieval

Florence reminded Longfellow and his contemporaries of the war-torn United States in

another important way. Florence, like the U.S., had been a peaceful republic that had

disintegrated over time because of moral degeneracy, which caused internal tensions and

civil war. Longfellow had featured this historical interpretation of American political decline

in Tales of a Wayside Inn, where the deteriorating inn—built during the mid-1750s and now

“fallen to decay”—is the central metaphor for this decline. Conveniently for Longfellow, in

the Comedy Dante interprets Florence’s history in a similar way, depicting a divided polis in

Inferno VIII-X and moralistically criticizing the cause of its division in Paradiso XV. Just as he

did in his Harvard lectures on Dante, Longfellow points in his endnotes to Dante’s

condemnation of the kind of sociopolitical division that had torn apart the United States,

just as centuries earlier it had destroyed Florence. In Paradiso XV, for example, the canto in

which the pilgrim meets with his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida on the planet Mars,

Cacciaguida contrasts mid-thirteenth-century Florence with the Florence of Dante’s day

several decades later. That earlier Florence was “a safe community” and “so sweet an inn”—

the mistranslated word “inn” resonating back to the historical-political significance of the

setting of Tales of a Wayside Inn.158 Florence also offered, Cacciaguida says, “such a quiet, such

a beautiful life of the citizen,” which contrasts sharply with the violence of Dante’s late

157As is well known, Lincoln acted not only as a commander-in-chief of a large military, but he also powerfully
ruled the northern states, suspending habeus corpus, censoring newspapers, and jailing some of his political
opponents (e.g., Clement Van Landingham). Lincoln claimed that his actions were constitutional, and therefore
lawful.
158 All other English translators of Paradiso XV in the last two centuries have used “dwelling” or “homestead”
to translate the original word, “ostello,” which (to them) implies permanence and homeliness. By contrast, the
word “inn” for Longfellow, just as it does today, signifies a place of temporary lodging.
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fourteenth-century experience in Florence (Paradiso 100). As well, the city once was

altogether “temperate and chaste” and “abode in quiet” (99). Longfellow’s long footnote on

the line “abobe in quiet, temperate and chaste”—which quotes from Henry Edward Napier’s

book Florentine History (1846)—juxtaposes a historical description of Florence in the year

1260 with a description from 1313. In the earlier year, Florence looked like Cacciaguida’s

pleasant description of it, but fifty years later, in 1313, it had degenerated into all manner of

vile corruptions, such as “usuries, frauds, rapine, extortion, pillage, and contentions in the

commonwealth” (301-302). Importantly, Cacciaguida’s historical characterization of

Florence is connected with his position as a righteous soldier and patriot—he is a figure of

war, as well as a representative of a peaceful past.159 As Longfellow says, Mars is the place of

“Martyrs and Crusaders who died fighting for the faith,” and thus Cacciaguida speaks as a

just warrior who fought for and represents a just cause (294).

The City of Dis in Inferno IX-X contrasts with this scene in Paradiso XV. In these

cantos in the Inferno, civil war is intimately connected to sociopolitical division, a topic that

Longfellow especially focuses on in his commentaries. Significantly, Longfellow’s endnotes

to Inferno X are over nine pages long, which makes them longer than the endnotes to all

cantos but one (which is Purgatorio VI, also a politically-charged canto, discussed below).

When viewed in combination with the eight-page-long notes to Inferno VI, which like Inferno

X also describes the origins of and issues in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, Longfellow

explained and editorialized on the political divisions between the Guelphs and Ghibellines

far more than any other topic in his translation of the Comedy. This is not because the topic

necessarily needed a more extensive explanation than other topics did, but because

Longfellow saw an uncanny resemblance between the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict and the

159 For a detailed overview of Cacciaguida, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in
the Divine Comedy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 126. Hereafter Mazzotta Desert.
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American Civil War (North-vs.-South), and he rendered this resemblance noticeable to

contemporary readers. Inferno X, for example, provides an especially sad and poignant picture

of civil war. In that canto, the two former leaders of the Guelphs and Ghibellines in

Florence, Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, are depicted as spirits who share the same

grave. Longfellow points out the irony of Dante’s depiction of this scene, in which neither

spirit acknowledges or speaks to one another. After Cavalcante passionately asks Dante

about the fate of his son, Farinata (as Longfellow puts it) “pays no attention to this outburst

of paternal tenderness on the part of his Guelfic kinsman, but waits, in stern indifference, till

it is ended” (Inferno 258). The word “kinsman” particularly highlights the shared social bond

between the two men, a bond that Longfellow claims was of blood, soil, and religion. Yet

even in hell, both “kinsmen” are antagonists forever in the mode of civil war—a point that

Dante clearly criticizes in the canto.

The scene in Inferno X augments this theme. The interior part of Dis is an “ample

plain / Full of distress and torment terrible” on which are thousands of “sepulchres.” The

entire scene is compared to the ground at Arles, France, which, as Longfellow tells his

readers, is the battlefield graveyard of Charlemagne’s army (252). Thus the politically divided

city is packed with graves that represent the results of war, and one of these graves is

occupied by the leaders of two related but warring factions. Similar to the American Civil

War, then, in which both sides were ostensibly related by “blood, soil and religion” but

divided by ideology—or as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address, “both [sides] read

the same Bible and pray to the same God”—Inferno X represents the devastation and

irrationality of civil war. Farinata, for example, cannot understand why the Guelphs still fight

against his Ghibelline allies. He asks Dante to “say why that people is so pitiless / Against

my race in each one of its laws?” Dante responds with the rather obvious point that the
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Guelphs despise the Ghibellines so much because of Farinata’s own aggression against them:

“The slaughter and great carnage / Which have with crimson stained the Arbia, cause / Such

orisons in our temple to be made” (60). Importantly, for Longfellow, Dante’s criticism of

Farinata here is from Farinata’s own perspective as a Ghibelline. Quoting Boccaccio in his

endnotes, Longfellow stresses that no one was a “fiercer Ghibelline” or a “bitterer enemy”

to the Guelphs than Dante (254). Yet the canto, in its negative depictions of Farinata and

Cavalcante, advocates peace and temperance towards vanquished enemies, a pertinent

political message for the Reconstruction era, for which Dante himself (as Longfellow

suggests) offers useful advice.160

As in this example, what made the Inferno so thematically potent during and after the

American Civil War was the Comedy’s repeated emphasis on the link between civil war and

social schism—either familial, ecclesiastical, or (in nineteenth-century terms) national.161 In

160In his endnotes, Longfellow shows that Farinata could be a benevolent statesman, too, the kind of
statesman necessary for American Reconstruction. After successfully commanding the Ghibelline army to
victory at the battle of Monteaperto, in which (as Longfellow says, quoting Napier’s Florentine History) the
Guelphs “were routed, and driven out of Florence,” the Ghibellines “urged the demolition of Florence”
because they were “prompted no doubt by provincial hatred” (253; 258-259). Farinata “vehemently opposed
this project” and demanded mercy for the Guelphs in the post-war reconstruction phase, asking a rhetorical
question to the Ghibellines that was pertinent for the beginning of Reconstruction: “Are you indeed ignorant
that if I have carried arms, that if I persecuted my foes, I still have never ceased to love my country, and that I
never will allow what even our enemies have respected to be violated by your hands, so that posterity may call
them the saviours, and us the destroyers of our country?” Farinata’s magnanimity thus saves Florence from total
destruction. Farinata’s entire speech is quoted in the endnotes, a speech that ultimately humbles the Ghibellines
and makes them quit their “project” of destruction. See Inferno 259.

161In the Comedy, the philosophical relationship between war and schism relies on Thomas Aquinas’ exposition
of social unity and disunity. In his Summa Theologica, as Giuseppe Mazzotta points out, Aquinas connects “war
and schism, along with strife and sedition, as vices contrary to the unity and peace of the church and of civil
society.” See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 91. Hereafter Mazzotta Vision.
As well, Dante’s concern with civil war and harmful political division is also evident in the
symmetrically linked cantos of the Inferno VI, Purgatorio VI, and Paradiso VI, the number ‘six’ representing in
Biblical numerology the number of “man” (see Ferrante 47). The three canto VIs thus exemplify the intricate
structure of the Divine Comedy as a whole, which demonstrates Dante's sociopolitical ideas of a unified body
politic by containing one hundred individual parts (cantos) that link together thematically.
In Inferno VI, after Dante’s famous encounter with the private sins of Paolo and Francesca, Dante
enters the circle of gluttony and associates that sin with the public square. Because gluttony is a sin of
consumption that satisfies individual wants over social needs, the sinners grovel in mud, incapable of any
shared communal experiences. In Purgatorio VI, Dante castigates civil discord throughout Italy with the example
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Inferno XXVIII—to offer another example—Dante criticizes the role of poets and artists in

fomenting civil war in his depiction of the Provençal poet Bertran de Born.162 Because

Bertran attempted to divide a kingdom—according to Longfellow’s endnotes, he tried to

instigate a civil war between King Henry II of England and the king’s son—in hell Bertran’s

head is severed from his body, which carries the head around like a lantern so that the head

and body are “two in one, and one in two.”163 Longfellow emphasizes that Bertran’s

punishment is directly related to his use of poetry to incite familial and civil war. According

to Longfellow, Bertran was “alike skilful with his pen and his sword, and passed his life in

of the meeting between the Italian poets Virgil and Sordello. When Virgil reveals to Sordello that he is also
from Mantua, both he and Sordello embrace in a gesture of civil kinship, even though they lived 1200 years
apart. Dante uses this opportunity to deliver half a canto of prophetic invective against the condition of civic
relations in Italy. Calling Italy a “brothel,” Dante accuses it of being “not without war,” a place where neighbor
pits himself against his neighbor. Dante contrasts the embrace of Virgil and Sordello (“one embraced the
other”) with strife between Italian brothers (“one doth gnaw the other”). (See Mazzotta Desert 135.) The
Italians, Dante says, have embraced divided, local rule. Thus “all the towns of Italy are full of tyrants,” and
small-time civil wars, as in the example of the Montagues and Capulets, are commonplace (Purgatorio 35-38).
Longfellow’s note on VI:97 describes Dante as a universal monarchist who desires a “constitutional sovereign.”
This ideal ruler honors the relative independence of local cities and states under his rule, yet exercises his
proper “supreme authority” to mitigate disputes between sections of his kingdom. Thus the ruler bestows
peace through unity under a federal headship because “mankind is most like God when at unity, for God is
one” (248-249). Paradiso VI features this ideal ruler in the figure of Justinian, whom Dante finds on the planet
Mercury, the sphere of the dialectics. Justinian delivers a long history of Rome that offers a dialectical
consideration of the Virgilian and Augustinian views of Roman history, agreeing with and criticizing both
views. (See Mazzotta’s chapter “Vergil and Augustine” in Mazzotta Desert.) Yet Justinian validates the medieval
institution of the Holy Roman Empire and the necessity for the Empire to intervene in local Tuscan affairs.
His speech on Rome’s history transitions into a criticism of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, arguing that it is
difficult to know “which [faction] sins the most.” Justinian says that imperial power must be strong in its
efforts to unify the Guelphs and Ghibellines.

162
While Dante had praised Bertran’s style in his treatise on language, De vulgari eloquentia, his condemnation of
Bertran in the Inferno recognizes that justice and ethics are intertwined with aesthetics. As Mazzotta argues, “it is
appropriate . . . that Bertran, the poet-counselor who encroached on the king’s political authority, should
paradoxically become an emblem of the authority of divine law and have his own body become a metaphor for
the disruption he incited: his head, cut off from his body, literally bears witness to his revolt against the
figurehead as well as to the objective collapse of the metaphor of the body politic” (Vision 80). For Mazzotta,
Inferno XXVIII is Dante’s “farewell to arms,” a condemnation of war as a heroic and poetic enterprise (92).

163Tedolinda Bartolini notes that Dante’s description of Bertran’s head is that it makes a light of itself for itself.
She contrasts this description with that of Statius’ tribute to Virgil in Purgatorio XXII, in which Virgil’s poetry is
described as leading Statius to Christian conversion, as one “who goes by night [and] who carries the light
behind him and helps not himself, but makes those who come after him wise.” Thus “Bertran is a grotesque
inversion of Virgil: in one there is total severance, a self-sufficiency that is not strength but meaninglessness,
whereas in the other there is a sharing, a passing on, and an illumination of others at the expense of oneself.”
See Bartolini, Dante’s Poet’s: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 172. Hereafter Bartolini.
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alternately singing and fighting, and in stirring up dissension and strife among his neighbors”

(Inferno 319). In the body of the translation, this “dissension and strife” is akin to political

rebellion, as Bertran directly connects his punishment with his earthly sin: “I made the father

and son rebellious; / . . . Because I parted persons so united, / Parted do I now bear my

brain, alas!” (Inferno 176). The passage particularly implicates poetry that glorifies violence

(“war-songs” as Longfellow calls them) and incendiary discourse in the incitement and

perpetuation of civil war and the destruction of political union. 164 In essence, Bertran’s

objectives as a poet—to foment secession and civil war—were exactly the opposite of

Longfellow’s.

Again, as with Inferno X, the surrounding scene in Inferno XXVIII augments that

canto’s themes. Famously, in this circle, schismatics like Mohammed and Ali repeatedly have

their body parts cut off as eternal punishments. Thus the circle features body parts

everywhere, swollen and bloody, strewn all over the ground—resembling Whitman’s well-

known description of a scene just outside a Union hospital in 1862, where he found “a heap

of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c.” and several dead bodies.165 Dante compares the

topography of this circle to ancient battlegrounds, and yet, as translated by Longfellow, this

description directly speaks to the experiences of many American readers in the 1860s who

saw or read about the bloody results of modern-day battlegrounds. Dante begins the canto

by saying how impossible it is to “tell of the blood and wounds in full” which he witnessed

there, because speech and memory can never accurately describe those horrors. He then lists

several well-known slaughters in history, including the Roman conquest of the Apulians, the

164Emphasizing this point is Dante’s comparison of Bertran’s fomenting of civil war in King Henry II’s reign
with the Old Testament story of David and Absalom, one familiar to American readers of the Bible, in which
father and son opposed one another in an internal power struggle for the rule of the Kingdom of Israel.

165 Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996), 736.
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Battle of Cannae, and Robert Guiscard’s conquest of southern Italy. All of these battles

combined, he says, “would be nothing to compare / With the disgusting mode of the ninth

Bolgia” (171-172). In this circle, the innumerable body parts scattered about not only remind

readers of the carnage of war, but signify the split political and religious “bodies” that the

schismatics divided during their lives, these divisions often causing wars.

The obvious contrast to the “secessionist” Bertran de Born in the Comedy is the poet

Sordello in Purgatorio VI-VII. As I mentioned earlier, Purgatorio VI has the longest section of

endnotes of any canto in Longfellow’s translation. It’s important to understand why this is.

Part of it has to do with the unusual structure of the canto, which does need some

explanation by editors and translators. In it, Dante and Virgil encounter the Mantuan poet

Sordello, who, after learning that Virgil is also from Mantua, immediately embraces him

solely because both men share the same homeland (despite living centuries apart). This

embrace prompts Dante to break off his narrative and deliver a long political apostrophe full

of scorn and sarcasm directed at his own contemporaries in Italy. In this apostrophe Dante

criticizes all manner of civil strife and internal power struggles in medieval Italy—political

criticism which Longfellow highlighted and augmented in his endnotes because Dante’s

apostrophe particularly stresses Italy’s lack of union, unity, and friendship between its

brothers and citizens. In Longfellow’s translation, Dante calls Italy a “ship without a pilot in

great tempest,” a country unwilling to heed God’s revelation and, as a result, one without a

benevolent “Caesar” to correct and guide it (Purgatorio 35-36). This lack of leadership means

that, instead of citizens embracing and honoring each other as Sordello and Virgil do,

Italians are “not without war” and consequently that each citizen “doth gnaw the other”

(35).
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Moreover, Sordello is the model poet-citizen whom Longfellow showcases for his

readers, the one with whom he himself—as a poet-critic of the American Civil War—found

much in common. Sordello’s appearance in the Comedy, as Teodolinda Bartolini argues,

signifies the idea of political unity in three ways: his “historical identity as a poet,” whose

works condemn unjust rulers; his gracious and civil embrace of Virgil in Purgatorio VI; and

his representation as a poet who justly and morally displays the “theme of the love of one’s

native land” (Bartolini 161). In short, Sordello is a noble patriot and a political unionist, one

well-known for his condemnation of inept or warlike Christian rulers (155-157). Longfellow

even questions in the endnotes whether the historical Sordello that Dante refers to was in

fact a Troubadour poet or a soldier and nobleman, leaving the reader with the possibility that

Sordello could be either or both, a complicated interpretation that conflates political poetry-

making with political office (Purgatorio 245-248).

Importantly, then, Purgatorio VII features the social relationship between patriotic

poets and selfish politicians. Here Dante, Virgil, and Sordello gaze down into the valley of

Ante-Purgatory, which contains ineffective Christian rulers. As Longfellow shows in his

endnotes, these rulers failed either by abdicating their respective imperial seats, and thus

neglecting to dutifully wield their power, or by wrongfully waging war that resulted in

political divisions (Purgatorio 255-258). The poets therefore look down on the rulers, down

into the valley, just as they might condescend to critique them in their verse; the depiction of

the poets is really Dante’s representation of Sordello’s poetic ethos. As Sordello points to

each ruler in this canto, he also points out his earthly flaws, thereby suggesting what the

proper exercise of political power is and demonstrating the poet’s moral responsibility to

offer such critiques. Longfellow, indeed, had already subtly engaged in this kind of criticism

during the American Civil War, especially in Tales of a Wayside Inn. Of that volume’s seven
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tales, four are critiques of egomaniacal or violent rulers and magistrates (e.g. “The Saga of

King Olaf”). Longfellow even borrowed one from Italian literature in the tale of King

Robert of Sicily, who, after being supernaturally transformed into a jester because of his love

for power, must attain the necessary level of humility and “penitence” before God to

become king again (Tales 67-68). By featuring Sordello in his translation’s endnotes,

Longfellow not only reassessed the cultural worth of Sordello (known then most

prominently as a hesitant, doubtful character in Robert Browning’s famous poem),166 but he

promoted his own role as poet-critic of the turmoil created by politicians and divisive

ideologies.

The final cantos of the Inferno were especially useful to American unionist

interpretations of the Comedy because these cantos focus on the injustice and insanity of

political rebellion. The Inferno ends with Dante’s encounter with Satan (the fallen angel

Lucifer), who is depicted as forever eating Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. These three men at the

bottom of hell have committed, in Dante’s hierarchy of sins, the worst of all possible

deeds.167 Having betrayed Christ, Judas rebelled against God’s Son, but Brutus and Cassius

are nearly co-equal with him, their great sin being the murder of Julius Caesar. All three had

willingly rebelled against the natural loyalty they owed to their just emperors or “lords.”168

166 Ticknor and Fields released a new edition of Robert Browning’s collected poems in 1863, which garnered
several reviews in the press. The Christian Examiner, for example, assessed Browning’s Sordello as a hesitant
Hamlet figure who is “dragged to and fro by [the] opposite counsels” of the Guelphs and Ghibellines,
ultimately dying without deciding whom he should support. See “Robert Browning,” Christian Examiner 77 (July
1864), 53-54.
167Longfellow, following Dante, who followed Aristotle’s Ethics, divides hell into three sections: Incontinence,
Malice, and Bestiality. Dante’s hell is an inversion of his purgatory. In the former Dante descends in circles to
his left, while in the latter he ascends in circles to his right. The path and the punishments that Dante
encounters in hell become progressively worse as his journey proceeds.
168
The traitors in Inferno XXXIV contrast with the figure of Cato in Purgatorio I. Longfellow says that Cato is a
figure of “Liberty,” both political and soteriological (Purgatorio 225-226). While Cato’s placement in ante-
purgatory, since he was a pagan suicide, may be a vexing problem for Dante’s Christian schema that has a
special circle in hell for suicides, Longfellow explains that Cato is “adorned with the light of the four stars
 144

Longfellow labels them as “Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors,” with the term

“traitors” evoking the apparent treason of southern secession (Inferno vi). Satan, of course, is

the ultimate traitor. Longfellow calls Satan and his accomplices “rebel angels,” who warred

against and were ultimately thrown out of heaven (246). This ending to the Inferno furnishes

one of the more potent connections to the Union cause, as the southern states were often

condemned by Northerners (including Longfellow) for their unnecessary and unjust

rebellion. Union Theological Seminary professor George Prentiss, for example, called the

Confederate cause the most “flagitious conspiracy and rebellion the world ever saw,” a

rebellion “like that waged in heaven” when Satan was smitten by the sword of Michael.169

Periodicals such as the Liberator, The New York Evangelist, and The Continental Monthly, a

Boston magazine, repeatedly compared the South to Satan, the latter claiming in 1862 that

secession was “the vilest rebellion against a good government that been seen since Satan.”170

Lowell, arguing that “coercion is the exercise of legitimate authority,” wrote sarcastically that

of course “the first great secessionist [Satan] would doubtless have preferred to divide

heaven peaceably”—and that, in truth, secession is rebellion, which is “chaos” (Political

which are the four [classical] virtues, Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.” Cato’s famous honesty
and integrity in politics, combined with Virgil’s praise in the Aeneid of Cato’s just execution of laws in Hades,
make him an ideal representative of “Liberty” at the beginning of Purgatorio. What Longfellow does not
mention, but what would probably not go unnoticed by a classically trained American reader, is that Cato
committed suicide during the Roman Civil War between Pompey and Caesar, which signified the dissolution of
the Roman Republic. For Dante, Cato chose the one route that exemplified pagan political freedom by refusing
to take sides in a no-win conflict and to become embroiled in a partisan struggle for power. Ironically, Cato
represents the link between the pagan and Christian worlds and Dante’s moral instruction in freedom, which
continues to the end of the Divine Comedy. While Dante calls his journey through the entire cosmos a “war,”
the journey through purgatory and then heaven is also a reconstruction of the self, one in which Dante learns
the righteous and benevolent exercise of free will within the just bounds of God's laws. His will, incapable of
total autonomy, must obey the decrees of the ultimate ruler, God, and so Dante’s individual purgation and
restoration necessarily places the good citizen properly in the political kingdom of the universe. The kingdom
of heaven, as a perfectly ordered society united by the rule of God, is an ideal reconstruction of the divided
realm of hell. What Dante discovers is that the path to the perfect society is through the Garden of Eden,
which is at the top of Mount Purgatory, and so the way to beatification and political peace is the road back
through Eden.

169 George L. Prentiss, “The National Crisis,” The American Theological Review 16 (Oct. 1862), 707, 716.

170 See “Southern Hate of New England,” The Continental Monthly 4 (Sept. 1863), 242.
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Essays 53). The Inferno, according to many northern readers like Longfellow, affirmed that

those involved in secession and rebellion belonged in the depths of hell.

In contrast to the traitors in Inferno XXXIV is the united moral community of angels

and saints as depicted in the cantos of Paradiso, for which the travelers in the Purgatorio are

preparing themselves.171 The Paradiso provided an appropriate ending for a Civil War-era epic

for numerous reasons. Through most of the canticle, Beatrice guides Dante upwards

through the heavens to the Empyrean, where Dante witnesses the Celestial Rose of the

saints. While Beatrice is consistently depicted in Paradiso as a maternal figure who both cares

for and chastises Dante, many readers viewed her as Dante’s lost lover, pointing to both the

Vita Nuova and the tradition of Beatrice paintings in European art for that interpretation.

The Christian Examiner in November 1862, for instance, asserted that the “lady” of the Vita

Nuova “appears one and the same with the lady of the ‘Divine Comedy,’” as Dante’s “earthly

171The travelers through purgatory must pass through the Garden of Eden, one of the most important tropes
in all of American literature, including for Longfellow. Whether it represents the ideal pastoral scene, a
naturalistic retreat, a sociopolitical utopia, or the peaceful psychological condition to which our original sin
keeps us from ever returning, Eden is at once signifies social, political, religious, and environmental ideas. See,
for example, the classic studies of Henry Nash Smith (Virgin Land) and Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden).
Longfellow found during wartime that the image of Eden was potent. His tale in Tales of a Wayside Inn, “The
Falcon of Ser Frederigo,” is the tale of a failed courtship that ends in a reacquaintance of Frederigo and
Giovanna and their successful marriage, though both parties must lose something (the wife loses her son, and
the husband his prized falcon). The tale thus turns disunion into union, and the pivot point is when Frederigo
meets Giovanna in a garden. In Boccaccio’s original story of Frederigo, the scene is only a generic garden, but
Longfellow increases the stakes by comparing the scene to a return to Eden:

[Giovanna] found Ser Frederigo at his toil,

Like banished Adam, delving in the soil;
And when he looked and these fair women spied,
The garden was suddenly glorified;
His long-lost Eden was restored again,
And the strange river winding through the plain
No longer was the Arno to his eyes,
But the Euphrates watering Paradise! (Tales 38-39)

Here, as with the Divine Comedy, Longfellow chose to publish during the Civil War a medieval Italian story in
which the road to paradisiacal union is the road that leads simultaneously backwards and forwards into the
Garden of Eden.
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mistress” who in the Comedy is transformed into a celestial vision.172 French artist Ary

Scheffer’s painting “Dante and Beatrice” had been on display in Boston in late 1863, 173 in

which Beatrice is depicted as an idealized lover and fair maiden, a painting that prompted

Frances B. Willard to admire the “rapt features of the Italian maiden and the saintly mien of

her lover.”174 Dante’s reunification with Beatrice in purgatory and their travels through

heaven thus not only represent the rejoining of the living with dead loved ones, but it

resembled (for some American readers) contemporary narratives in which marriages or the

reuniting of lovers symbolized the reunion of the nation.175 Moreover, Beatrice’s

resurrection in Paradiso, as published in 1867, concurs with a post-war trend in which readers

demanded books on or about heaven—specifically, books that featured dead soldiers and

friends in heaven. Prior to the Civil War, very few books existed that described or discussed

heaven, and yet after the war, books on heaven exploded onto the marketplace. Between

1865 and 1875, ninety-four books about heaven were published, many of which, like

Paradiso, described what heaven is like in great detail.176 This sudden interest in reading about

heaven occurred for a number of reasons, including the need for assurance about the eternal

fate of the massive numbers of war dead and the hope for an eternally peaceful life beyond

the grave.

172 “New Translations of the ‘Vita Nuova,’” Christian Examiner 73 (November 1862), 368.
173 See “The Boston Fair,” Saturday Evening Post (January 2, 1864), 3.
174 Frances B. Willard, “According to Law,” The Ladies’ Repository 24 (August 1864), 499.
175
Kathleen Diffley’s Where My Heart is Turning Ever has numerous examples of wartime and Reconstruction-
era stories that employ the separations, reunifications, and marriages of lovers to signify themes of national
union and disunion.

Phillip Shaw Paludan, “Religion and the American Civil War,” Religion and the American Civil War, eds.
176

Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31.
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The Paradiso not only filled these needs, but it also provided the blueprint for a re-

united nation. Dante’s heaven offered a political vision wrapped in theological terms of a

united community—the kind of ultimate national union that most Northerners fought for

during the war. For these Northerners, the idea of preserving the Union was the driving

force behind fighting and sacrificing for the war effort. As Whitman said, in retrospect, of

the beginning of the war, “Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form’d

and harden’d a primal hardpan of national Union will, determin’d and in the majority,

refusing to be tamper’d with or argued against, confronting all emergencies, and capable at

any time of bursting all surface bonds, and breaking out like an earthquake.” 177 This

“national Union will” was a form of patriotic nationalism that, as Gary Gallagher argues,

influenced hundreds of thousands of northern soldiers to enlist and continue fighting in a

long, bloody war. Preserving the Union meant saving the nation and “affirming the rule of

law under the Constitution and punishing slaveholding aristocrats,” who were the antithesis

of republican government.178 Lincoln, elected by over two million people while running for

the National Union party in 1864—and not the Republican party as is commonly believed—

reflected the popular enthusiasm for Union in his well-known comment to Horace Greeley

(published on August 23, 1862): “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,”

Lincoln wrote, “and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. . . . What I do about slavery

and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I

forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” Whether Lincoln is to be

condemned or defended for this letter to Greeley, its plain message is that “saving the

177 See Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996), 731.

178See Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 34.
Gallagher points that only for very few Northerners was the issue of emancipation a good enough motive to
enlist and fight.
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Union” was the main—if not, for some, the only—motivation for fighting the Civil War on

the northern side (Gallagher 50).179

The idea of Union also had theological qualities, which made the perfect union of

saints as depicted in Dante’s paradise all the more poignant in the mid-1860s. While

Gallagher characterizes the war aim of Northerners as practical—a kind of realpolitik

strategy whereby the elimination of southern aristocrats would empower free labor and other

republican political goals—he admits that the idea of Union had a “transcendent, mystical

quality as the object of . . . patriotic devotion and civic religion” (47). This “mystical quality”

was an integral part of the idea of Union, a religious feeling that helped trump the practical

reality of thousands, and then (by 1865) hundreds of thousands, of dead young men. As

Lincoln told Congress in his second annual address in 1862, the Union’s war effort was the

“last, best hope on earth,” a hyperbolic statement that was nevertheless earnestly repeated by

Lincoln and his cabinet members many times. Secretary of State William Seward remarked

that the Union army’s “great work is the preservation of the Union, and in that, the saving of

popular government for the world” (2). Similarly, in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln implies

that the northern dead at Gettysburg ensured that democratic governments “shall not perish

from the earth.” The logic of such remarks—that there could be no democratic

governments anywhere thereafter if the Union lost—is faulty at best, but the thrust of them

was that the war had international, world-historical, and perhaps even cosmic importance.

Given the war’s tremendous costs and its half-million casualties, the desire to preserve the

Union by military force often edged closer to political theology than political strategy, a

theology in which the Union was an abstracted, transcendent ideal to be maintained at all

179As Gallagher points out in his introduction, causes are different from motivations. While one could argue
that slavery was an important cause, if not the chief cause, of the war—as Gallagher believes—one could
simultaneously argue that ending slavery was not a motivation for most Northerners to wage war.
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costs. The Union war cause became for many of its supporters—as wars often do—a holy

crusade. Whitman, for example, reaffirmed this ideal of Union in his postwar poem “As a

Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” in which the enabling freedom of the “transcendental Union”

of the States is personified as the female spirit Columbia, a spirit of national unity that

provokes Whitman (much like Beatrice provokes Dante) to look heavenwards for the “new,

Spiritual World,” which is also politically united.180 In wartime, this inextricable mixture of

political reality and theological abstraction, wedded to Christian doctrines, provided a

welcome climate for Dante’s epic, including his depiction of heaven as an ideal, united

political realm.

Longfellow clearly believed that the Paradiso was appropriate for his fellow Unionists,

helping to reinforce the political theology of Union by publishing a translation of Paradiso

XXIII-XXV in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1864, his first publication of any part of his

translation of the Comedy.181 In these cantos, Dante has ascended beyond the planets and into

the heaven of the fixed stars, where he witnesses “Christ’s triumphal march” and is

examined by Saint Peter and Saint James on the topics of faith and hope. The cantos

combine pastoral images with militaristic references and metaphors, while offering visions of

ultimate soteriological and universal victory. The saints in the heaven share an everlasting

communal joy in a state of repose possible only because God reigns as a just and triumphant

Emperor.182 Odd as such images may seem for early 1864—the fourth year of a terrible

Whitman, “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” New York Herald (26 June, 1872), 3. See The Walt Whitman
180

Archive, <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/poems/per.00090>.
181 See Longfellow, “Three Cantos of Dante’s ‘Paradiso,’” The Atlantic Monthly 13 (January 1864), 47-55.
182
The final cantos of Paradiso—XXX to XXXII—offer visions of peace through unification. Dante’s image
of the celestial rose combines the natural beauty of the “garden”—Longfellow’s often-used word in these final
cantos—with the “ranks” of the saints. Each particular saint has a place, an everlasting home, on the rose
amongst his/her fellow saints. Dante gazes on each “rank” of the rose, picking out particular Old Testament
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war—Longfellow’s translation of these cantos was published during a relatively hopeful

winter for the North. In the previous summer, Union armies had beaten back Lee’s invasion

of Pennsylvania at Gettysburg and had secured the Mississippi River and cut the

Confederacy in two at Vicksburg. Then in late November, U.S. Grant’s army took control of

Tennessee during the Chattanooga campaign, pushing back Braxton Bragg’s force and

and New Testament saints, yet the rose unifies the heavenly hosts. In Paradiso XXXI, Longfellow’s translation
continues the theme of militarism, developed in cantos XXIII-XXV, by describing the hosts as an army:

In fashion then as of a snow-white rose

Displayed itself to me the saintly host,
Whom Christ in his own blood had made his bride,

But the other host, that flying sees and sings

The glory of Him who doth enamour it,
And the goodness that created it so noble,

Even as a swarm of bees, that sinks in flowers

One moment, and the next returns again
To where its labour is to sweetness turned,

Sank into the great flower, that is adorned

With leaves so many, and thence reascended
To where its love abideth evermore.

Their faces had they all of living flame,

And wings of gold, and all the rest so white
No snow unto that limit doth attain.

From bench to bench, into the flower descending,

They carried something of the peace and ardour
Which by the fanning of their flanks they won. (Paradiso 202)

Longfellow explains in his endnotes that the “swarm of bees” metaphor is similar to a passage from Book II of
the Iliad, in which the Achaeans prepare for battle against the Trojans. This is a particularly interesting because
of the thematic forging of the two passages; in Dante, the ranks of saints peacefully worship God, yet in the
passage from the Iliad, Agamemnon’s dream prompts the Achaean force to “swarm” as soldiers to battle. (The
connection is not exclusively Longfellow’s; the footnotes in Cary’s Vision point to the same passage in the Iliad.
See Cary 514.)
Dante characterizes the vision of the Rose as an ongoing conquest that perpetuates universal peace.
The hosts carry “something of the peace and ardour / Which by the fanning of their flanks they won.” This
“fanning of the flanks,” an allusion to military maneuvers, proceeds presumably forever. Later in Paradiso
XXXI, Dante describes himself as a “barbarian” who arrives in Rome “wonder-struck” at the city’s awesome
sights. In this moment Dante mentions the transition from local city to spectacular empire; he is one who has
traveled “from Florence to a people just and sane” (204). The implication is that the massive, unified
community of the celestial rose, when compared to the warring city of Florence, is like the magnificence of the
Roman Empire in comparison to barbarian tribes. Here again, the greatest political body is the institution that
brings peace to every place; the implied challenge to the newly strengthened American federal government as it
undertook the massive task of reconstruction and reconciliation with the ravaged South after Appomattox is
clear.
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setting up the Union for an invasion of the Deep South. The last battle of this campaign was

perfectly timed, occurring one day before the first Thanksgiving Day, which Lincoln had

announced on October 3. Lincoln’s proclamation about this new national holiday

optimistically looked forward to the future reconciliation of the states. “The year that is

drawing toward its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful

skies,” the first sentence of the proclamation reads, blithely ignoring the deaths of tens of

thousands of soldiers that year: “Peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been

maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed

everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict. . . . [These things] are the gracious gifts

of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless

remembered mercy.” Lincoln concluded his proclamation by asking all citizens to pray that

the “Almighty Hand” would restore the Union to the “full enjoyment of peace, harmony,

tranquility and Union.” Of all things, peace and hope are the dominant themes of this

proclamation, the chief reasons to give thanks to God.

In the late months of 1863, just as in the Thanksgiving Proclamation, the blessings

of Union were proclaimed in periodicals and pulpits. According to Stout, 1863 was the year

when “political preaching in the North and South had virtually completed the apotheosis of

‘patriotism’ into a full-blown civil religion” (248). For a great majority of American

Christians, revealed religion and nationalism were intertwined. Stout notes that many

Northerners believed that the abiding nature of the discourse of Union, lasting for almost

three years by that point, was proof that social and political divisions “would end with the

war’s end” (272). Thanksgiving sermons in the North generally avoided a discussion about

the war itself, instead focusing on the coming restoration of the country, due solely to God’s

providential hand (273). For example, the Christian Advocate and Journal in December 1863
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published extracts from three sermons, noting that each of them offer the hope of “great

blessings to ensue” once the Union has triumphed.183 Implicit in this discourse that

trumpeted an inevitable Union victory was the notion that Providence took the side of the

Union army. Sometimes this claim was even explicitly made. The Continental Monthly put it

plainly: “God is on the side of our country. . . . The same vigorous vitality which will renew

the growth of our national authority and maintain it in the Union [once the war is won], will,

at the same time, establish its predominant influence on the continent.”184

At the beginning of 1864, then, Longfellow appropriately chose the Divine Comedy’s

cantos on faith and hope, the last of which, Paradiso XXV, reiterates that Dante’s journey is

(in Longfellow’s translation) “warfare” soon to be completed. Moreover, Dante wishes that

the Divine Comedy itself would allow him to return home from exile, to Florence, to be the

righteous enemy to the “wolves that war upon” his native city (Paradiso 163). Dante

compares his cosmic journey to the Biblical exodus. He has traveled from Egypt to

Jerusalem—that is, from hell to heaven—and is worthy of such a journey because “no child”

in the “Church Militant” possesses “greater hope” than him. These multiple metaphors,

particularly powerful and freshly relevant when placed into a Civil War context, mix

emancipation from slavery—the journey from Egypt to Jerusalem represents both

soteriological and bodily deliverance from forced, perpetual servitude—with an expectation

and hope that a militant but benevolent institution will inevitably triumph and unify the

cosmos.

In Paradiso XXIII, the saints of heaven perform a display of ultimate military victory.

Beatrice tells Dante to “Behold the hosts / Of Christ’s triumphal march, and all the fruit /

183 “Thanksgiving Sermons,” Christian Advocate and Journal 38 (Dec. 24, 1863), 409.

184 “The Restoration of the Union,” The Continental Monthly 4 (Oct. 1863), 444.
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Harvested by the rolling of these spheres!” (151). Dante sees Jesus and Mary, displayed as a

Sun and a Rose, and Peter, who “triumpheth . . . in his victory” beneath the “exalted” Jesus

and his mother (155). Longfellow’s endnote on the phrase “Christ’s triumphal march,” in his

1867 translation, points out that this is specifically an apocalyptic, millennial image

comparable to the Book of Revelation 19:11-15 in which Jesus sits on a white horse and “in

righteousness . . . doth judge and make war.” Following him are the “armies which [are] in

heaven . . . upon white horses” (350). Yet such militarism is mixed with feminine beauty in

Paradiso XXIII. Dante witnesses for the first time Beatrice’s smile, an event so spectacular

that he says he cannot adequately describe it, and one so entrancing that it distracts him

from other sights. When Beatrice tells Dante to turn his eyes to the “garden fair,” he views

Mary as a rose and the host of saints as lilies. Longfellow renders the hosts of heaven first as

a “meadow of flowers,” a pastoral image, but next as “troops of splendor,” returning back to

a military metaphor (153). It is as if, for Longfellow in Paradiso XXIII, natural and feminine

beauty color and soften the grisly consequences of military victory, turning it into an ideal

celebrated by the divine in the holiest and most glorious place possible.

Symbolizing the authority of universal victory, Saint Peter quizzes Dante on the

essence of faith in Paradiso XXIV, while Saint James, figured as a kind of warrior, questions

Dante on hope in Paradiso XXV. As Longfellow was aware, both faith and hope are

intertwining concepts that help define each other. These two relatively ecumenical cantos

reaffirm doctrines of basic Christian orthodoxy with which most nineteenth-century

American Christians would have agreed. Indeed, all of Longfellow’s sidenotes in the Atlantic

Monthly stress the gentle religious symbolism in the three cantos. Yet Longfellow, faithfully

translating the original text, doesn’t shy away from connecting the Civil War to Christian

theology, reaffirming civil religion’s role in promoting military triumph. Paradiso XXIV-XXV,
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for example, emerge from canto XXIII’s description of the heavenly host as the “Church

Militant” and a celebration of Christ as triumphant conqueror. When Dante is examined by

Saint Peter in canto XXIV, then, he describes himself as a baccalaureate who “arms himself”

with arguments. The metaphor is not simply about a university examination; the word

“arms,” twice used by Longfellow, indirectly references Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in

which Paul describes the Christian believer’s necessary battle preparation for spiritual

warfare, which includes the use of the “shield of faith” against the “fiery darts of the

wicked.”185 Both of the examiners, Peter and James, are labeled as “Barons,” who represent

the authoritative office of God as Emperor. James in particular, for Longfellow, is a

militaristic figure. Not only is James killed “by the sword” of the tyrant Herod in the Book

of Acts 12:2, but Longfellow inserted in the endnotes to his 1867 translation a lengthy

Spanish legend from Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art (1848). The legend reveals that

James, or “Saint Jago,” became the patron saint of Spain and that he descended from heaven

and “commanded the [Spanish] armies against the Moors,” leading the Spanish to military

victory and turning the military order of Saint Jago into the “greatest and richest” order in

Spain (Paradiso 355). As a figure of war, then, James offers not simply a generic kind of hope,

but the specific hope that wars will end and all traitorous enemies will be defeated.

Dante’s answer to James about the proper definition of hope is likewise charged with

the topic of war. Hope, Dante says, is the expectation of future glory. Dante reveals that he

learned this answer from the psalms of King David, warrior, musician, and figurehead of the

nation of Israel. It is chiefly David’s Psalm 9 that Dante has in mind, as he quotes verse 10

from the psalm, “Sperent in te . . . those who know thy name.” This particular psalm calls

upon the Lord to reign, rule, and judge righteously, in acknowledgment that an ongoing war

Ephesians 6:16. The entire passage, verses 10-17, is relevant since Paul uses offensive and defensive
185

weapons as metaphors for spiritual battle.

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has yet to be won. In this psalm, David particularly calls out his enemies for backing the

wrong cause in war: “O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end; and thou hast

destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them. But the Lord shall endure for ever:

he hath prepared his throne for judgment.” Dante calls David the “chief singer” unto the

“chief captain,” who is God. Longfellow’s choice of the phrase “chief captain” for God is

unique among all Divine Comedy translators. Dante’s phrase is “sommo duce,” which modern

translators have rendered as “Sovereign Guide,” “Ultimate Majesty,” or simply “God.”186

Henry Francis Cary translated the phrase as “the Supreme,” while John Dayman employed

“noblest king.” Among these translations, only Longfellow’s “chief captain” strongly

connotes militarism while practically failing to acknowledge Dante’s original description in

the phrase of a transcendent, all-powerful God. Longfellow’s “captain” is a leader of

soldiers, the head of the Ship of State (just as Lincoln himself would the next year become

Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”), and the one who leads the “Church Militant.” In

Longfellow’s translation of Paradiso XXV, the idea of hope is thus attached to military

victory, and God’s role is one of commander-in-chief.

Of course, Dante’s epic concludes with the pilgrim’s vision of this God, the ruler of,

as Paradiso XXXII puts it, the “most just and merciful of empires” (215). This vision is of a

triune God, depicted as three circles in one circle. With his journey complete, Dante finds

that a powerful eternal “Love” is “turning” his “desire and will,” just as this Love directs and

gives motion to the “sun and the other stars” (223). The final lines of Paradiso, then, reaffirm

orthodox Christian doctrines of the Trinity and of God’s sovereign providence over nature.

A lifelong Unitarian, Longfellow put aside his doctrinal quibbles with Trinitarianism to

present Dante’s vision faithfully, just as the religiously unorthodox Whitman embraced

186 My sample here includes John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Esolen, and Dorothy Sayers.
 156

trinitarian imagery (“trinity sure to me you bring”) to elegize Lincoln in “When Lilacs Last in

the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865). Reflexively, Dante speaks of his inability to communicate

such a vision of God, while asking the great “Light Supreme” to help him remember the

vision properly so that “more of thy victory shall be conceived!” (220). Part of this victory is

eschatological—God has triumphed over all enemies in heaven and earth—but it is also

emancipatory. As Dante says to the Virgin Mary in Paradiso XXXI, “Thou from a slave hast

brought me unto freedom” (206). Such lines suggest Longfellow’s hopes for the success of

the abolition movement and anticipate the end of slavery upon the Union’s victory

(Longfellow’s translation appeared in the Atlantic just a year after the Emancipation

Proclamation was issued, which declared the freedom of slaves in the Confederacy).

Published in its entirety in 1867, the Divine Comedy championed the triumph of the

Union, backed by God’s providence, and promised a new era of peace and freedom. Yet

Longfellow’s translation offered a political pivot point: the celebration of a transition from

democratic republic to empire, modeled by Dante’s journey from hell to heaven, from

degenerate Florence to the regenerate celestial rose of the saints. In the Comedy, the seceding

traitors are not only wallowing in defeat, but are subjected to the dictates of divine order,

contained in God’s cosmos in the circles of hell. Mixing theology and politics, Dante

celebrates imperial unity in Paradiso; as Beatrice tells Dante in Paradiso XXX after gazing

upon the “city” of the “Rose Eternal,” there is a “great throne” reserved in heaven for

Henry VII, the emperor whom Dante desired to unite Italy, the one who is “to be the

Augustus on earth” (201). Such obvious celebrations of emperors and empires make

Longfellow’s translation, in part at least, a political polemic. Choosing not to write his own

creative work during the war, Longfellow let Dante speak for him and for other northern

readers. The Comedy’s vision of benevolent, universal empire was a model for what the
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northern states fought for during the war, and for what the Union of the States might

become after Appomattox. With God reigning in heaven, the consolidated American federal

state should resemble the cosmic empire—not just in power and scope, but in its outpouring

of sovereign grace and its establishment of moral order in its jurisdictions and territories.

For Longfellow, Dante offered a vision of imperialism suited for the North’s military

mission and for the beginning of American Reconstruction.

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CHAPTER IV

WALT WHITMAN’S INFERNO:

DANTE IN LEAVES OF GRASS

“Mark, I say, his economy of words—perhaps no other writer ever equal to him.”
— Walt Whitman, on Dante

Of all people, Teddy Roosevelt once noticed a similarity between Walt Whitman and

Dante Alighieri. Roosevelt, in an essay on Dante, argues that the two poets wrote poetry

about the common man and common woman of his respective era: “Of all the poets of the

nineteenth century Whitman was the only one who dared use the Bowery—that is, use

anything that was strikingly and vividly typical of the humanity around him—as Dante used

the ordinary humanity of his day.” 187 This connection, however simplistic it may appear,

actually shows Roosevelt’s keen perspicuity, for Whitman and Dante are poets who have

rarely been compared. Indeed, to most critics, the two poets have seemed almost entirely

dissimilar, and thus have no relation to each other. Whereas Whitman wrote unbounded

free-verse, Dante in the Divine Comedy used a tightly constructed terza rima scheme. Whereas

Dante, a medieval Christian, created an autobiographical epic that demonstrates the universal

truth of Christian theology with a poet’s journey through the universe, Whitman—call him a

transcendentalist, a pantheist, a hedonist, though no label really fits—created a sprawling,

evolving epic that trumpets the vastness and the contradictions of nineteenth-century

American democracy. As Ezra Pound said of Whitman, “He knows that he is a beginning

187Theodore Roosevelt, “Dante and the Bowery,” History as Literature and Other Essays (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 220.
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and not a classically finished work”; and perhaps no poem is more representative of a

“classically finished work” than the Comedy.188

In Whitman scholarship, there is almost no commentary on Whitman’s relationship

to Dante, perhaps in part because of these apparent differences that seemingly separate these

poets. Glauco Cambon has offered an explanation for this lack of critical comparison in his

discussion of Dante’s influence on American poets:

“ [. . .] the fact remains that the two major American poets of the [nineteenth]
century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, were unaffected in their creative
practice by whatever knowledge of Dante they had. It is surprising to learn that
Whitman admired Dante’s spareness (along with his directness), for nothing in
Whitman’s verse could be called Dantean, and of course his avowed intent was to get
away from the strict formal traditions of European literature (which he identified
with the class-bound heritage of feudal dogmatism), the better to sing the
regenerating all-inclusiveness of fledgling democracy in a very un-Dantesquely
effusive chant.189

In agreement with Cambon’s assessment, Edward F. Grier believed that Whitman’s interest

in Dante was “moderate at best,” even though Grier edited thirteen different Whitman

notebooks that either mention Dante or discuss him at length.190 J. Chelsey Mathews has

offered the only substantial criticism of Dante’s influence on Whitman, which characterizes

Whitman as somewhat of an admirer of Dante, but also as a befuddled reader of the Divine

Comedy, partly ignorant and partly blind to the complexities of medieval poetry—Whitman,

for example, overlooked Dante’s “wonderful sense of justice and a heart full of

188Ezra Pound, “What I Feel About Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, 2nd edition, ed. Jim
Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion (Duluth, Minnesota: Holy Cow Press, 1998), 112.

189 Glauco Cambon, “Dante’s Presence in American Literature,” Dante Studies 118 (2000), 217-218.

190Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume V: Notes, The Collected Writings of Walt
Whitman, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1861. Corresponding with this
point is the testimony of Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Even though this work has hundreds of entries,
including those on Homer and Lucretius, and though it mentions Dante ten times, it has no entry on Dante in
Whitman. See Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings,(New York: Garland
Publishing, 1998).
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tenderness.”191 Still, Mathews does not analyze how Whitman’s poetry uses Dante, and so

Cambon’s comment that Whitman was “unaffected in [his] creative practice by whatever

knowledge of Dante [he] had” has stood as our de facto understanding of Whitman’s

relationship to Dante.192

But Whitman’s own reading habits demonstrate that this current critical

understanding is woefully inadequate. We know that Whitman read John Aitken Carlyle’s

translation of the Inferno in 1859 and again in 1862, perhaps multiple times, but these were

not the only years in which he read it.193 Richard Maurice Bucke in 1883 wrote that Whitman

kept the Carlyle Inferno “by him for many years,” that he “reads in it often,” and that he

“learned much from it.”194 Horace Traubel records that Whitman constantly kept near him

Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy, one of the few books that he “still reads

lingeringly and never tires of.”195 Traubel also records a lengthy conversation between

Whitman, Traubel, and Tom Davidson in which, as they all discuss the place of Dante in

world literature, Whitman boasts of his thorough knowledge of English translations of

Dante:

J. Chelsey Mathews, “Walt Whitman’s Reading of Dante,” Studies in English 19 (1939), 178-179. Hereafter
191

Mathews.
192A number of critics have noted in passing that Whitman read and carried with him a copy of Dante while he
was visiting Falmouth Camp and various hospitals during the war, but the comparisons between the two poets
have never been given a thorough treatment. See, for example, Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989,) 212; hereafter Erkkila; and George B. Hutchinson, The Ecstatic Whitman:
Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of Union (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 138, 145.
193Whitman’s 1859 reading is described below. As for his 1862 reading of the Inferno, not only is there a great
deal of indirect evidence for it in his poetry and journals, as I argue throughout this chapter, but Whitman’s
copy of John Carlyle’s Inferno contains a note dated “July. 1862.” This copy was donated to Bryn Mawr college
by Herbert G. Harned, the son of Whitman disciple Thomas Harned. See Peter Van Egmond, “Bryn Mawr
College Library Holdings of Whitman Books,” Walt Whitman Review 20:2 (1974), 41-42.

194 Quoted in Mathews. 178.

Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 8, eds. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac
195

(Oregon House, California: W.L. Bentley, 1996), 376.

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[Traubel] [r]eferred to Tom Davidson’s seeming belief that Dante was “the greatest
poet that ever lived.” W. considered: “I know that is sometimes believed, sometimes
said, but to me the statement is not conclusive.” And reinforcing himself with
Carlyle, Davidson said again that Dante’s was “the serenest”—“the most earnest”
book ever written. W. again: “This I do not believe at all.” Then [Whitman]
acknowledged Dante’s high place. “The translations have been many, and, curiously,
all good ones—remarkably good ones, too. I know them all—Longfellow’s well. But
it seems to me that greatest among them—indisputably so—is John Carlyle’s,
Thomas Carlyle’s Doctor brother’s.”196

For at least thirty years, then, Whitman was an avid reader and critic of English translations

of the Comedy, especially Carlyle’s translation of the Inferno.

But was Whitman’s poetry unaffected by Dante, as Cambon claims? Whitman’s 1862

reading of the Carlyle Inferno offers the beginnings of an answer. On one page of Whitman’s

“1862” notebook, he records several basic facts about the Divine Comedy and its manuscript

history, cribbed from Carlyle’s prefaces to his translation. At the bottom of the page,

Whitman provides a date that corresponds approximately to one of his readings of the Inferno

and to what is likely his first glance at Gustave Doré’s illustrations of the Inferno: September

1862. This is the same month, as Ted Genoways shows, in which Whitman and his family

grew anxious about George Washington Whitman, Whitman’s brother who was deployed in

the 51st New York regiment. During the many weeks in which they waited to hear of

George’s survival, the Whitmans heard reports of battlefield carnage, learned of the Union

defeat at Second Bull Run, and mourned the deaths of friends. Whitman in the span of two

days in September learned of the death of two of his friends, Bill Giggie and Elanson Fargo,

both of whom were in the same regiment as George. 197 It was a difficult, anguishing month,

and it was at this time that a tortured Whitman turned to Dante’s Inferno.

196Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 5, ed. Gertrude Traubel (Carbondale, Illinous:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 74.

Ted Genoways, Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862 (Berkeley:
197

University of California Press, 2009), 162-169.

 162

Three months later, just after the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to

the Union army’s camp near Falmouth, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C. There

Whitman had his first war-time experience among soldiers and in makeshift army hospitals.

In the same “1862” notebook in which Whitman wrote his notes on Dante, Whitman

recorded his experiences at Falmouth, wrote two regimental histories of the 51 st New York,

and drafted several poems that ultimately were published in Drum-Taps and subsequent

editions of Leaves of Grass.198 Significant sections of this important notebook bear the

influence of Whitman’s reading of Dante. As this chapter argues, Whitman’s personal and

poetic vision of the Civil War was deeply affected by his reading of Dante’s Inferno in 1862, a

book he would continue to read for the rest of his life.

Whitman’s reading of Dante during this period illuminates a number of critical issues

surrounding Whitman and the war. Typically, in Whitman scholarship, critics have viewed

Whitman’s poetry and non-fiction writings on the war as directly linked to his engagement

with contemporary newspapers and to his own first-hand experience199—his caretaking in

the war hospitals, as is well known, is considered a chief source of his poetry and prose

about the war. Yet his reading of the Inferno in 1862 demonstrates that Whitman’s

198 The notebook is available in print, in Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume II:
Washington, Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press,
1984). Hereafter Grier Volume 2. However Grier’s editing procedures lead him to present the notebook’s
pages out of order. Images of the original notebook are currently available on the Library of Congress’
website, at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/whitman/index.html>, as the “1862” notebook.
Throughout this chapter, when discussing the notebook I refer to page images on this website. I use the
notation “LC image #.” For example, the notebook page on which Whitman recorded his notes on the Inferno
is “LC 187.”
199To offer just two examples, Jerome Loving says that “the poignant Drum-Taps poems were born at
Fredericksburg [in December 1862], where [Whitman] first saw ‘war-life, the real article.’ The scenes along the
Rappahannock and subsequently in military hospitals . . . opened up new horizons for him.” (Interestingly,
Loving quotes from a letter in which Whitman compares Civil War hospitals to Dante’s Inferno.) Also, M.
Wynn Thomas argues that “it was at least partly through George [Washington Whitman] that Whitman was led
to an intimate understanding of the real, hidden nature of the war,” and that George’s experiences in the Union
Army influenced Whitman’s war poetry. See Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of
California Press,1999), 19; and Thomas, “Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whitman and the Civil War,” The
Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.
Hereafter Thomas Fratricide.
 163

understanding of the war also was clearly shaped by books, and in this case a book that many

Americans deemed as classic literature. Indeed, Whitman’s reading of Dante’s Inferno, three

months prior to and probably also during his trip to Falmouth Camp in December 1862,

tinted his poetic visions of Civil War battlefield experience. The Inferno gave Whitman a

theological-poetic lens with which to view his 1862 experience at Falmouth Camp and his

subsequent experiences in Civil War hospitals. Several Drum-Taps poems, many of which

emerge from the drafts in the “1862” notebook, strive to depict what Whitman called the

“seething hell” of the war’s “interior scenes.” These poems offer rhetorically complex

visions of battle, which Whitman associated with his feeling in 1862 that civilization, and

therefore the course of American history and perhaps world history, would regress if the

Union lost the war. Dante also offered Whitman a poetic model of the poet’s journey

through hell, witnessing subjects caught in a complex relationship to time and death. Finally,

he gave Whitman suggestive ways of poetically constructing the “real war,” which Whitman

declared would never “get into the books,” ways to subtly and retrospectively represent, in

the pages of Leaves of Grass, the on-the-ground battlefield experiences of Civil War soldiers as

a sort of ongoing, ever-present hell.

Whitman Reads Dante, 1859-1891

In the spring of 1859, Whitman first read Dante. He chose to read Carlyle’s

translation of the Inferno, possibly because of John’s brother Thomas Carlyle, whom

Whitman avidly read (Mathews 173-174). In one of his notebooks, Whitman made lengthy

remarks on his first impressions of the Inferno, the kind of extensive and rich commentary

that he offered on very few other authors:

Spring of ’59—read Dante’s “Inferno”—It is one of those works, (unlike the

Homeric and Shaksperian.) that make an intense impression on the susceptibilities of
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an age, or two or three ages of the peculiar temper fitted (by previous training and
surrounding influences) to absorb it, and be mastered by its strength.— But as what
it grows out of, and needs presently for its understanding and love, has passed quite
away, it has also passed away.— It rests entirely on the fame it achieved under
circumstances fitted to it.—
The points of the “Inferno,” (I am giving my first impressions,) are hasting on,
great vigor, a lean and muscular ruggedness, no superfluous flesh; and the fascination
there always is in a well told tragedy, no matter how painful or repulsive.— It
signifies in its way that melancholy and imperious temperament part of humanity, or
its elements, out of which the whole structure of the angry stern and vindictive
Jehovahn theology has arisen—from the times of the primitive Jews down—
vengeance, bad men gloating in the agony of sinners, bad men, enemies to be
punished, and the usual distinctions of good and evil.—
It is a short poem—Dante’s whole works appear to lie in a very moderate
compass.— It seems strange that he should stand as the highest type of Italian
imaginative art execution in literature—so gaunt, so haggard and un-rich,
unjoyous.— But the real big Italian art-execution flourishes of course in other
fields—in music, for instance, peerless in the whole earth teaching high over the
heads of all lands, all times.
Mark, the simplicity of Dante—like the Bible’s—different from the tangled
and florid Shakespeare. — Some of his idioms must be charming in Italian cut like a
knife.— He narrates like some short-worded superb illiterat, an old farmer, or some
New England blue-light minister, or common person interested in telling his or her
story yet is not garrulous—makes the impression of believing bona-fide in all that he
says, as if it were certainly so.— I do not wonder that the middle ages thought he
indeed had really descended into Hell and seen what he described.— (How much is
Milton indebted to Dante? How much is Swedenborg indebted?) Mark, I say, his
economy of words—perhaps no other writer ever equal to him.— One simple trail
of idea, epical, makes the poem—all else resolutely ignored. It is beautiful. This alone
shows the master. In this respect is the most perfect in all literature. A great study for
diffuse moderns.—
Dante's other principal work, the Paradiso, I have not read. In it, I believe,
Beatrice, a pure and beautiful woman—conducts him through heaven—as Virgil has
conducted him through Hell. Probably he does not succeed so well in giving
heavenly pictures. —
What is more effective, conforming to the vulgar and extreme coarsely rank
pattern of Hell, than the tableaux in the “Ninth Circle,” where two brothers that
have hated and murdered each other are made to continually “butt” each other by
their heads, steeped in mud, ice, and filth?—200

Whitman repeated many of these observations throughout his life. He consistently

associated Dante with the terrors of hell, focusing on the depictions or “tableaux” of sinners

in the Inferno, the tone of which is “unjoyous” and “signifies . . . that melancholy and

200 See Grier Volume 2, 1861-1863. I have included the passage’s significant deletions.
 165

imperious part of humanity.”201 Yet Whitman admired Dante’s style, particularly his

conciseness or “economy of words.” It is Dante’s focus on the “epical” that makes his work

the “most perfect in all of literature.” Most importantly, perhaps, Dante wrote an epic poem

in what Whitman took to be a style like that of a common, nineteenth-century American,

which was high praise from Whitman, who liked to depict himself as “one of the roughs.”

To Whitman, Dante “narrates like some short-worded superb illiterat, an old farmer, or

some New England blue-light minister, or common person interested in telling his or her

story.”

But Whitman’s praise for Dante’s style is odd for a number of reasons. Whitman

read a translation that is both linguistically and aesthetically removed from the original and

that obviously has a style all its own. The Carlyle Inferno is not just an English translation of

the original Italian, but it is also a prose translation of Dante’s poetry. Having read a

translation so far removed from the original poem, then, how could Whitman make such

definitive declarations about the poem’s style? It is possible that Whitman simply saw

through these barriers, understanding that Dante had depicted the vast territory of his hell in

just thirty-four cantos. But the prefatory content and the page layout in the Carlyle edition

surely helped contribute to Whitman’s assessment of Dante’s style. As discussed in Chapter

II, the Carlyle Inferno presents the prose translation, the original Italian poem, and

explanatory footnotes all on the same page (see Figure B13). This means that both the prose

section and the poetry are tightly compact. There are on average roughly ten lines of prose

201 On numerous occasions, Whitman associated the horrors of the Civil War with Dante’s “pictures of hell,”
as argued below. But there were other occasions when he thought of Dante as the poet of hell. In the notebook
entry “Pictures,” one of Whitman’s pictures is of Dante: “And this head of melancholy Dante poet of
penalties—poet of hell?” In 1879, on his tour of the American West, Whitman claimed that the Rocky
Mountains had many “spots of terror & sublimity Dante and Angelo never knew.” See Walt Whitman,
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984),
4: 1299; and Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press,
1978), 1: 164.
 166

and thirteen lines of poetry per page, which means that the lines on each page appear to be

brief and efficient. The Carlyle Inferno also encourages readers to imagine that they are

practically reading the original Italian, since the original appears on every page. Such close

proximity to Dante’s actual language might have given Whitman the impression that he

could discern Dante’s style visually.

Adding to the visual element of the page layout are Carlyle’s own remarks on Dante’s

style in his translator’s prefaces. Carlyle’s stated intent was to make the tersest translation he

possibly could. The very first sentence of his Preface states that the goal of his translation is

to “give the real meaning of Dante as literally and briefly as possible.”202 The rest of the

prefatory content—divided into the translator’s “Preface,” the essay “Manuscripts and

Editions,” and a second essay on “Comments and Translations”—emphasizes the fact that

the original poem is extraordinarily concise. The poem is “distinguished for its intense

brevity . . . and can have had no superfluous words even for [Dante’s] nearest

contemporaries.”203 In his “1862” notebook, Whitman recorded a quotation from one of

Carlyle’s prefaces that also highlights Dante’s economy of language: “The whole works of

Dante, in prose and verse . . . might be comprised in two moderate volumes” (Carlyle

xxxi).204 Whitman copied much from the prefatory content and absorbed it as his own

opinion. When Whitman says that Dante’s language is like some “short-worded superb

illiterat” American, he echoes the opinion of Carlyle, who likens Dante’s style to that of a

homely family member:

202See Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno, trans. John A. Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall,
1849). Hereafter Carlyle. It is unknown if Whitman read the 1849 London edition or the 1849 New York
edition. I have used the London edition for the practical reason that I have a copy of it. Except for different
paginations, the London and New York editions are identical.

203Mathews uses parts of this quotation and its surrounding passage to establish the case that Whitman
certainly read the Carlyle Inferno. See the Mathews’ footnotes on 172.

204 See LC 187 for Whitman’s 1862 notebook entry on Dante’s Inferno.
 167

The language, throughout the whole poem [the Inferno] . . . has a tone of plain
familiarity which comes home to the subject with marvelous sequency and effect. It
is like the language of a brother, whose position and feelings we are understood to
know in detail; and who handles only the summit of things with us, leaving to us all
the filling-up of circumstances, and the minuter shades and ramifications of meaning.
(Carlyle xxxii)

Whitman’s opinion of Dante, then, was significantly shaped by the paratextual

content of the Carlyle Inferno. Indeed, Whitman’s reading of this edition is a textbook case

for why paratexts and page layouts of the book matter. As well, given that Carlyle only

translated the Inferno, Whitman’s enthusiasm for Carlyle focused his attention on the first

canticle of the Comedy. In the 1859 notebook entry quoted above, Whitman says that he only

read the Inferno: “Dante’s other principal work, the Paradiso, I have not read. . . . Probably he

does not succeed so well in giving heavenly pictures.” Similarly, the “1862” notebook

contains a note for Whitman to “see the other book of Dante ‘the Paradise’” (LC 187). It’s

unclear if Whitman had read the rest of the Comedy, the Purgatorio and Paradiso, by the time of

his trip to Falmouth in December 1862, but his antebellum and wartime work indicates that

Whitman’s interest in Dante was limited to the Inferno.

The prefatory content in the Carlyle Inferno also guided Whitman’s reading in other

ways. The front matter in this translation is far different than in any of the editions of Cary’s

Vision. In Carlyle, the focus of the prefaces is on textual scholarship and translation history,

while there is almost nothing on Dante’s life or on the historical context of his life and

works. If Whitman would have read any edition of the Cary translation—the prefaces of

which focus on Dante’s biography—he probably would have conceived of Dante in terms of

the confluence of poetry and biography, and he certainly would have been able to read the

Divine Comedy in full. As it was, Whitman recorded notes in his “1862” notebook that echo

the focus of Carlyle’s prefaces. Whitman’s notes show a concern for the historical rise to

fame of Dante’s works. The notes state that Dante’s age was 35 in the year 1300, adding that
 168

“it [the Inferno] seems to have been known soon,” presumably meaning it was known widely

soon after Dante finished it. The first printed edition was in 1472, and the first edition with

the title “Divina commedia” was in 1516. Whitman then wrote more notes from the second

section of the preface, “Comments and Translations.” He recorded that, in 1373, the

republic of Florence “set apart an annual sum of 100 florins for lectures on Dante —

Boccaccio was the first lecturer.” Then Whitman wrote verbatim a quotation from Carlyle

(mentioned above): “The whole works of Dante, in prose and verse, may be comprised in

two moderate volumes,—when separated from the unwieldy notes, &c” (LC 187). All of

Whitman’s notes from 1862 show a concern for Dante’s output and for his public reception

long after his death, the same concern expressed in the prefaces to Carlyle’s Inferno.

The reason for Whitman’s turn to Dante in 1859 is unknown, but Whitman surely

would have heard or read that Dante was one of the world’s great poets, enough of an

impetus for someone aspiring to be the great poet of America to pick up the best book of

the great national poet of Italy. Whitman also had a keen interest in Italian art and culture

throughout his life. He famously loved to attend operas, especially Italian operas. He saw at

least twenty different operas written by Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini, and Bellini, and attended

many of them multiple times.205 According to John Townsend Trowbridge, Whitman

claimed that Italian Opera was a direct inspiration for Leaves of Grass.206 In a review of his

own work, Whitman even compared it to the opera, claiming that both his poetry and Italian

opera initially confound any American accustomed to minstrel-show music, but then

205 Robert D. Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press), 14-15.

206 John Townsend Trowbridge, “Reminisces of Walt Whitman,” Atlantic Monthly 89 (February 1902), 166.
 169

“impresses him as if all the sounds of earth and hell were tumbled promiscuously

together.”207

As he aged, Whitman’s esteem for Dante increased. In “Democratic Vistas” (1871),

Dante is hailed as one of the great geniuses of the past, whom we should admire for his

“majesty and beauty.” Dante’s chief characteristic is that he is “stalking with lean form,

nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh.”208 These wheat metaphors, commenting

on Dante’s style and agreeing with Whitman’s assessment of Dante in 1859, nevertheless

contrast with what Whitman said in 1859 of Dante’s influence—that “what grows out of”

Dante has “quite passed away.” By the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman began to

mention Dante in his poetry and explicitly acknowledged his lasting influence. In “Song of

the Exposition,” the poem’s speaker calls upon the “Muse” to migrate from the Old World

to the New, asking whether the “shades of Virgil and Dante [...] magnetize and hold on to

her?”209 All of Whitman’s references to Dante in the 1891 “deathbed edition” of Leaves of

Grass similarly esteem the Italian poet. He is in a short list of the world’s great poets in both

“To Get the Final Lilt of Songs” and “Old Chants” (Whitman 1891, 394, 415). In that

edition’s appended essay, “A Backwards Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” Dante’s work is

among the few “masterpieces” that Whitman names as books that he once read outdoors on

Long Island and that inspired Leaves of Grass (433).

It is possible that Whitman’s increasing attention to Dante in his published works

was a result of his disciples’ enthusiasm for Dante, as well as the attention that Whitman was

207“All About a Mocking Bird,” Saturday Press 3:1 (January 7, 1860), 3. The Saturday Press is currently available
online at <http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/pfaffs/sat/press/>.

208 Walt Whitman, “Democractic Vistas,” Two Rivulets (Camden, New Jersey: Author’s Edition, 1876), 52.

209Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1881-82), 158. All of Whitman’s
editions of Leaves of Grass are available online at the Walt Whitman Archive,
<http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/index.html>. For the sake of brevity, when I refer to Whitman’s
works, I will use Whitman, the year of the LG edition, and the page number. For example, Whitman 1881, 158.
 170

receiving from Italy itself. As early as 1879, Whitman gained significant praise in Italy from

professor and critic Enrico Nencioni and poet Giosuè Carducci (who would eventually win

the Nobel Prize for Literature).210 Whitman acknowledged this praise by corresponding with

Nencioni and sending him copies of Leaves of Grass.211 Whitman’s disciples were oftentimes

intermediaries for this correspondence. In 1890, Whitman asked Richard Maurice Bucke to

procure a copy of Nencioni’s latest book “in wh[ich] is a chapter devoted to L of G & me

quite appreciative and favorable.”212 Bucke and Traubel were among a number of disciples

and friends who talked to Whitman about Dante. While Traubel and Whitman both

expressed some disdain for Dante and Milton as poets who were part of the “age of

sermonizing,” Whitman used Dante in a conversation with Traubel to praise one of his

favorite novels, George Sand’s Consuelo, which to Whitman seemed “Dantesque” in its

nature imagery.213 In similar conversations, Whitman claimed to know every English

translation of Dante, and the proof of that was close at hand, since he kept copies of

Carlyle’s and Longfellow’s translations in his Camden home. Whitman’s interest in Dante

extended even to Dante criticism. In an 1890 letter to Bucke, Whitman remarks that he

received John Addington Symonds’ An Introduction to the Study of Dante from Symonds, a book

which was “pretty good, interesting” (Corr. V 49). All of this activity late in life demonstrates

Whitman’s continuing awareness of Dante as a literary force and his knowledge of Dante’s

210See Rea McClain, “Walt Whitman in Italy,” Italica 20 (March 1943), 4-16; and James Jackson Jarves, “Art
and Poesy in Italy—Walt Whitman Held Up as a Model to Italian Poets,” The New York Times (October 24,
1881).

Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, Volume II: Daybooks, December 1889-1891, ed. William White
211

(New York: New York University Press, 1978), 596.

Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, Volume V: 1890-1892, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Edwin
212

Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 61. Hereafter Corr V.
213Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume III (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914), 35. For the
context of Whitman’s comments in which he says that he doesn’t “care much for Milton and Dante,” see
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume I (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1906), 105.
 171

works. Intense as his interest was late in life, however, the real impact of the Italian writer on

Whitman’s own poetry was greatest during the years of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Whitman’s Hell and the “Interior History” of the War

In the early 1860s, Whitman fixated on Dante’s poetic representation of hell,

primarily because he read the Inferno several times. Whitman’s personal understanding of hell

changed between 1855 and 1863, the same period in which he was reading the Inferno

multiple times. By the end of the war, Whitman would be quick to describe the Civil War

battlefield as a “seething hell” and would often talk about the war’s “hell-scenes.” Yet

whenever Whitman mentioned ‘hell’ in the antebellum period, he generally either disparaged

the concept or subverted it. In 1859, when Whitman first read Dante, he was actively and

publicly denying the orthodox Christian view of hell. In his notes on Dante, he openly

discredits the Inferno’s depiction of hell as a theological reality. The Inferno, Whitman wrote in

1859, “signifies . . . that melancholy and imperious part of humanity . . . out of which the

whole Jehovahn theology has arisen—from the primitive Jews down—vengeance, gloating

in the agony of sinners, bad men, enemies to be punished, and the usual distinctions of good

and evil” (Grier 2:1861). Whitman had denied these distinctions of good and evil,

particularly when applied to the afterlife, in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. In its Preface, Whitman

declares that the poet of the United States shall be the “common referee” and the “equable

man” of the masses. As such, the great poet denies the reality of hell to the average man:

“The presence of the great poet conquers [. . . .] Now that he has passed that way see after

him! there is not left any vestige of despair or melancholy [. . .] or delusion of hell or

necessity of hell . . . . . and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or

weakness or sin” (Whitman 1855, v). The poetry that follows this Preface tries to represent
 172

the Preface’s construction of this great poet of the United States. The opening lines of “Song

of Myself” declare the immanence of earthly reality:

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. (14)

Later in the poem, Whitman declares himself the poet of body and soul: “The pleasures of

heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me / The first I graft and increase upon

myself . . . . and the latter I translate into a new tongue” (26). These “pains of hell” are

exclusively earthly oppressions of which Whitman, as the poet in Leaves of Grass, will be the

sole voice. He derides social injustices, as in the depiction of the “hounded slave,” who, as

he is being whipped, cries “hell and despair are upon me” (39). This is one of the only

moments in his antebellum works when Whitman aligns ‘hell’ with some kind of punishment

or agony, and in this case he used it to further the social cause of abolitionism. Hell is never

outside the natural realm in his antebellum poems, then, but rather is only a suggestive word

for the torments of life, not the torments of an afterlife or a spiritual realm.

Whitman’s conception of ‘hell’ in the antebellum editions of Leaves of Grass stands in

contrast to nineteenth-century Christian orthodoxy. Much as in Dante, hell for Baptists,

Methodists, Presbyterians, and many other Protestant groups was the place in the afterlife in

which unrepentant sinners suffered eternal punishment for their sin and rebellion against

God. This punishment was (and still is) commonly associated with burning fire. One Union

soldier, for example, wrote that he had experienced during battle “heat enough to make a

fellow contemplate the place prepared for the ungodly.” 214 Yet theologians were aware that

214Quoted in Steven E. Woodworth, Where God is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers,
(Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 47. Woodworth finds that such talk of hell by Civil War
soldiers was relatively rare, meaning that “most Civil War soldiers thought of hell as something that, if
mentioned at all, was no joking matter.”
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the Bible is vague about the precise details of the afterlife’s punishment. One example of this

is found in The Gospel of Mark (9:45), when Jesus quotes from the poetic language of the

prophet Isaiah to describe hell, a state of being in which “the worm does not die and the fire

is not quenched.” Such ambiguity meant that writers like Dante were free to invent

punishments, as in the Inferno, where torments range from the slothful, who are gurgling in

mud, to the treasonous, who are frozen in a lake of ice. But there was one certain truth

about hell that was clear from the Bible’s poetic language: hell means that punishments in

the afterlife are everlasting. The Calvinist systematic theologian Charles Hodge, Whitman’s

contemporary, emphasized that the Bible teaches the everlasting punishment for sin, which

even begins existentially during earthly life (an idea Dante agrees with in Inferno XXXIII).215

The well-known Protestant preacher Henry Ward Beecher agonized over this concept of an

eternal punishment but accepted it nonetheless: “The thought of the punishment of the

wicked, which the Bible reveals, is enough to make an earthquake of terror in every man’s

soul. . . . [I]t does not help me to take the word ‘everlasting,’ and put it into a rack like an

inquisitor, until I make it shriek out some other meaning; I cannot alter the stern fact.”216

There was a twist, however. Theologians could also use the term “hell” to describe a

morally neutral place for the dead, instead of a place of punishment. It could relate to the

Greek concept of Hades or the Hebrew concept of Sheol, a mere holding-place or resting

place of the dead. This meaning is actually the second definition of “hell” in Webster’s 1828

Dictionary. Hodge, when seeking to properly define the meaning of the phrase “He [Christ]

descended into hell” in the Apostle’s Creed, argues that the Greek word for Hades and the

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), 875. Hodge’s
215

work was originally published in 1872.

Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts, Gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourse of Henry Ward Beecher (New
216

York: Sheldon and Company, 1860), 196.

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English word ‘hell’ simply mean “the unseen world”: “All the dead, the righteous and the

wicked, alike go into the invisible world, or, in this sense, ‘descend into hell.’ Hence to be

buried, to go down to the grave, to descend into hell, are in Scriptural language equivalent

forms of expression.”217 This classical notion of hell is employed, for example, in the Davidic

Psalms and in Virgil’s Aeneid. In this sense, hell is a state frozen in time, a place where the

dead are static and only the living, if they are brave enough to travel there (e.g., Aeneas) can

access the figures and memory of the dead.

Dante’s hell combines the classical and the Christian ideas, though it emphasizes the

latter. In the Inferno, Dante the pilgrim descends into hell, just as a number of classical figures

did, including Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Jesus Christ. Almost

everyone Dante encounters in hell is dead, damned for some reason. As the spirits wait to

be ferried across the river Styx by Charon, they “blaspheme God and their parents; the

human kind, the place, the time, and origin of their seed, and of their birth” (Carlyle 33).

When Dante questions Virgil about them, Virgil responds that “those who die under God’s

wrath, all assemble here from every country,” adding that they are propelled onwards to their

proper place in hell by “Divine Justice” (34). In Inferno IV, Dante and Virgil enter Limbo, a

realm that includes infants who died unbaptized. Sorrowful, Dante asks Virgil if any of the

souls in Limbo had ever left hell. Virgil replies in the affirmative. At the time when Christ

descended into hell, he took to glory all of the great Old Testament patriarchs and prophets

and made them blessed. Prior to Christ’s descent into hell, Limbo was akin to Hades, a

holding-place for the pre-Incarnation Hebrews. Dante contrasts Virgil’s information with his

next encounter in the same circle of hell. When they reach the garden of the classical

philosophers and poets in Inferno IV, Dante encounters a kind of procession of great

217 Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), 616-617.
 175

ancients: Electra, Hector, Aeneas, Camilla, Saladin, Caesar, and so on. In this place (“a

meadow with fresh verdure” inside a “Noble Castle”), Dante is tempted to stay and discuss

poetry with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, joining them as the sixth great poet.

But this place is Limbo, unglorified and far removed from heaven’s bliss and God’s love.

Hell, after Christ’s resurrection, no longer operates both as a holding-place for saints and as

a punishment for sinners; it is now only the latter, and so Dante, however tempted to stay

and talk shop with his great ancient predecessors, must continue with his journey and leave

the ancients in hell. In this way, Dante employs but also denies (in the post-Resurrection era)

the idea of hell as the holding-place of the dead.

But in another sense Dante’s poem does operate as a sort of holding-place. The

Inferno memorializes the dead poetically, summoning them up and presenting them as living

to any reader (this would have been especially meaningful for Dante’s contemporaries, who

would have known many of the recently deceased Italians whom Dante summons up in his

text). Dante as poet-narrator conjures up historical figure after historical figure, presenting

their names and sometimes representing their voices. In Inferno VI, for example, the

gluttonous are empty bodies, “shadows” pounded by a “heavy rain” (Carlyle 62). They are as

they would be if left unwritten: anonymous, empty, voiceless shadows. But when the pilgrim

passes by them, one of the bodies “[sits] up forthwith” when he sees Dante. Immediately a

conversation begins between Dante and this lost soul, who names himself as Ciacco, a

former citizen of Florence. Here the pilgrim’s journey symbolizes the poet’s act of writing.

Just as the close contact of Dante the pilgrim brings the shadow to life by passing close by,

Dante the poet conjures up and represents the historical figure, who in an instant transforms

from a forgotten or unknown person (in the mind of the reader) to the textually alive

construction of Ciacco. This kind of narratorial act—summoning up the dead to give them
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voice—occurs on almost every page of the Divine Comedy, and, as I’ll argue, was crucial to

Whitman’s representational strategies in his own wartime poetry. While almost all

representations of the dead in the Inferno are unflattering, they are nevertheless a textual

memorial, allowing any reader to remember or become personally familiar with the famous

or forgotten dead. Dante’s hell, in other words, is more complex than a simple place of

punishment and torment for dead sinners.

Whitman’s conception of hell became more complex after his multiple readings of

the Inferno in 1862. Reversing his antebellum subversion of its cultural uses, the idea of hell

emerged as a serious issue for Whitman during the war, when he began describing both the

reality and the memory of Civil War battlefields and hospitals as “hell.” In his “1862”

notebook, during his visit to Falmouth Camp, Whitman drafted a poem that eventually was

revised into “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” This draft contains one of Whitman’s most well-

known poetic deletions:

O the hideous horrid damned hell of

war were the preacher's preaching of hell?
O there is no hell, more damned
than this hell of war (LC 147)

These lines never made it into Whitman’s published works probably because of their

overload of sentiment, closely related to the now famous expression “war is hell.”218

Whitman allowed the final descriptive lines of the published poem to suggest the “damned

hell of war” without overtly mentioning it:

And ever the hastening of infantry shifting positions — batteries, cavalry,

moving hither and thither;
(The falling, dying, I heed not — the wounded, dripping and red, I heed not

218
As I mention below, Whitman here is clearly contemplating an emerging cultural mood, one I’m arguing
that was influenced by a pervasive reading of Dante (Whitman being a key example), that associated modern
warfare with the theological doctrine of “hell.” This association is most famously expressed in an oft-quoted
line from General Sherman that, simply, “war is hell,” a line Sherman supposedly uttered in a postwar speech.
Yet Whitman here, midwar, anticipates Sherman’s line many years before Sherman used it.
 177

—some to the rear are hobbling;)

Grime, heat, rush — aid-de-camps galloping by, or on a full run;
With the patter of small arms, the warning s-s-t of the rifles [. . .]
And bombs bursting in air, and at night the vari-color’d rockets.219

In this scene, bodily death and destruction loom everywhere, but it’s not entirely certain if

the artilleryman’s reminiscences are, for him, scenes of excitement or of tragedy. Is he

remembering this scene with sadness, or with fondness, or with blank numbness? Without

the deleted comment, it can only be inferred that the speaker’s experience is of the “damned

hell of war.” Given the literary cultures in which Drum-Taps appeared, such an inference is

far from the only possible interpretation. Despite the current cultural view that hell is an apt

analogy for battlefield action—many post-Vietnam war movies perpetuate this kind of

analogy visually and in dialogue, for example—nothing in the poem or in Drum-Taps

explicitly says that the battlefield is akin to the theological doctrine of an everlasting

punishment. Popular Civil War poetry about battle, especially during the war’s first two

years, could have a far different tonal register than the “war is hell” sentiment, ranging from

the humorous to the jingoistic; many of Whitman’s own poems in Drum-Taps are patriotic

and attempt to “support the troops.”220 Julia Ward Howe’s still popular “Battle-Hymn of the

Republic,” for example, figures battlefield action in terms of triumphant, destructive,

glorious cosmic justice: on the battlefield, God sounds “forth the trumpet that shall never

call retreat” and he “loose[s] the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.” This is not to

say that Whitman abandoned the idea that “there is no hell more damned / than this hell of

war” when he deleted the line from “An Artilleryman’s Vision”; it is only to say that this

message about war as a kind of hell is never overt in Drum-Taps, but is instead an undertone

219 Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, ed. F. DeWolfe Miller (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959), 56. Hereafter Miller Drum-Taps or Miller Sequel.
220 Alice Fahs has analyzed the multiple rhetorics and tones of popular Civil War writing. See Fahs, The

Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of
North Carolina, 2001).
 178

of many of Drum-Taps’ soldier poems, one made more obvious when we recognize the many

intertextual connections to Dante’s Inferno. Whitman’s deleted statement about the “hell of

war” needs to be unpacked and understood in terms of the descriptive moments in Drum-

Taps, since many of Drum-Taps’ battlefield poems express scenes similar to “An

Artilleryman’s Vision” but never explicitly relate battle to hell, as Whitman’s prose writings

often do.

For Whitman himself, all battlefield scenes were imagined, never experienced. His

trip to Falmouth Camp in December 1862 has often been called a turning-point in his

feelings and in his poetic vision of the war.221 There, for example, Whitman witnessed,

outside a mansion-turned-hospital, a pile of human body parts that he described as “human

fragments cast, bloody, black and blue, swelled, and sickening” (LC 113). On December 26,

Whitman recorded that he saw soldiers digging graves in the morning:

There was a row of graves there already, each with a slat of board, generally a piece
of barrel-head on which was inscribed the name of the soldier. Death is nothing
here; as you step out in the morning from your tent you see on the stretcher a
shapeless extended object, the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the reg’t
died in the hospital tent during the night. Perhaps there is a row of three or four of
these corpses lying covered over. No one makes an ado.222

These corpses were the results of battles that Whitman himself did not see; for accurate

accounts of battlefield action, he had to rely on other witnesses. His “1862” notebook

contains two attempts at a written regimental history of the 51st New York, pieced together

from newspaper reports and the eyewitness accounts of acquaintances with whom Whitman

conversed. These conversations were many and varied. Whitman spoke at length with a

“Captain Sims” and other officers (LC 112, 115), the men of the 26 th Pennsylvania regiment

221Harold Aspiz, for example, states that the “poet’s life changed dramatically” after his visit to Falmouth
Camp. See Aspiz, So Long! Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press,
2004). Hereafter Aspiz.

222 See LC 122. I have edited the passage for readability. The original has a number of deletions.
 179

(124), and an unnamed doctor (133). For a brief time at Falmouth, Whitman took on the

role of observant news reporter, using his notebook to record notes for future newspaper

articles.

This “1862” notebook is a fundamental document to Whitman’s published war

writings. Like so many other Whitman notebooks, it is a collage-like assemblage of texts and

voices, containing Whitman’s observations, soldier names, regimental histories, and poem

notes and scraps. Several poems emerge from it: most obviously “An Artilleryman’s Vision,”

“A Sight in the Camp in the Day-Break Grey and Dim,” “Quicksand Years,” “By the

Bivouac’s Fitful Flame,” and the basic ideas for almost every other Drum-Taps poem that

deals with soldier life. The notebook spawned parts of Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps

(1865) and the prose-retrospective Memoranda During the War (1875), as well as some of

Whitman’s journalistic efforts, such as his regimental history of the 51st New York published

in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on January 5, 1863. The notebook records Whitman’s varying

moods. While he is somber about the body parts and corpses, he writes excitedly of a

military reconnaissance balloon and of a “picturesque scene” of an artillery drill. Perhaps this

display of military power only momentarily cheered him, though. The general mood on the

Union side during the Christmas of 1862 was bleak. The Union had just suffered heavy

casualties in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside there became another example

of the incompetence of Union generalship, and, on a personal level, Whitman had nearly lost

his brother George, who was wounded at Fredericksburg. Of this battle Whitman wrote that

it was “the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s

wars.”223 Lincoln himself remarked of his mental state in December 1862 that “if there is a

Whitman wrote this in a letter to his brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, on January 16, 1863. See Walt
223

Whitman, The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842-1867, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York
University Press, 1961), 67. Hereafter Correspondence.
 180

place worse than Hell, then I am in it.”224

It was in this mood that Whitman took an unusual, albeit momentary, turn. The

“1862” notebook shows that Whitman, mid-war, seriously considered the idea that

American civilization was regressing, which meant an abandonment of one of his core poetic

ideas found in the antebellum editions of Leaves of Grass: that human history is progressing,

with America both signaling and enabling this progress, and that such progress (morally,

socially, politically, and technologically) is always positive. This temporary change in views,

as we shall see, helped bring Whitman closer to Dante’s Inferno, since this poem is deeply

concerned with what “progress” and “history” really mean. Importantly, Whitman’s

notebook contains only one newspaper or magazine clipping from another text, one about

historical regression (or the devolution of civilization). While his notebooks usually contain

numerous newspaper clippings, the fact that the Falmouth Camp section of the “1862”

notebook contains only one quotation from another text demonstrates how potent and

meaningful this particular quotation was to Whitman in December 1862. Next to a page

that lists the names of many hospitalized soldiers, Whitman quoted the following from the

British periodical Once a Week:

from once a week Nov. 1 1862

reminiscence of a conversation with Hallam the English historian

xxxxxxxxxxxx
“When I listened to him as the younger generation delighted to listen to a man who
knew so much, and who took such care to preserve a dispassionate habit of mind, he
told me he could admit nothing that was grounded on the assumption that the
human race or its work of human society are progressive. He believed it probable
that there were periods of progress now and then, here and there; but it seemed plain
to him that affairs recurred to their old position and there were men as wise and
good in the most ancient and the most modern times. Whether en masse, or in

224Quoted in Roy Morris, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 57
 181

regard to the best specimens of each age, it was to him very doubtful whether we got
on; and indeed he considered the evidence tended to another conclusion.”
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx (LC 187)

Whitman likely read this November issue of Once a Week at Falmouth Camp in December

1862, since periodicals like this one were widely available as the “principal reading fare” of

Civil War soldiers.225 The quotation comes from an article titled “The Season of Unreason,”

and it refers to a conversation between the British historian Henry Hallam and the article’s

anonymous writer. From the writer’s point of view, Hallam espouses a cyclical theory of

history. Whitman’s selection of quotation is curious because the article itself does not

assume Hallam’s point of view but instead goes on to argue against Hallam and for historical

progress. In fact, immediately after this quotation ends, the writer counters Hallam’s theory:

“I was a good deal surprised . . . at a doctrine which I, for one, had not been in the way of

hearing: and I do not . . . agree in it.”226 Yet Whitman highlights Hallam’s point of view and

omits the writer’s, underlining the word “plain,” as if the truth of the view that “affairs recur

to their old position” is obvious to Whitman. At Falmouth Camp, then, Whitman was at

least thinking about, if not momentarily subscribing to, a non-progressive, cyclical theory of

history, one in which any progress is ephemeral and temporary, the future inevitably

returning back to the past.

Hallam’s theory of cyclical history is not necessarily pessimistic, especially if one is

on the upswing, rather than the downswing, of historical trends.227 Yet Whitman’s

David Kaser, Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle:The Civil War Experience (Westport, Connecticut:
225

Greenwood Press, 1984). 34.

226 “A Season of Unreason,” Once a Week (November 1, 1862), 508.

227I label this philosophy “cyclical” because this seems to closely approximate the Once a Week writer’s
description of Henry Hallam’s view, which states that as time passes, progress is made every “now and then”
but that “affairs recurred to their old position” eventually. Of course, the cyclical theory that Hallam espouses
resembles numerous similar views of history expressed worldwide, past and present. Because time moves only
in a forward direction for us, the actual shape of this theory is better described (if we are going to use
 182

consideration of cyclical history in December 1862 surely was entirely pessimistic. Should

the Confederacy win the war, the United States would break apart, shattering the Union.

This would destroy Whitman’s antebellum dream of a future glorious America, politically

united by homosocial comradeship, which Whitman envisioned and declared himself the

poet-prophet of in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. In the prefatory poem to that work, “Proto-

Leaf”, Whitman promises to poetically declare the necessity of union in Leaves’ subsequent

poems:

I will make a song for These States that no one state under any
circumstances shall be subjected to another State,
And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night
between All the States, and between any two of them,
And I will make a song of the organic bargains of These States—and a shrill
song of curses on him who would dissever the Union;
(Whitman 1860, 10)

In “Chants Democratic,” Whitman waxes rapturously about the glories of the coming

centuries, of which the Union is a necessity:

O haughtiest growth of time! O free and extactic!

O what I, here, preparing, warble for!
O you hastening light! O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling, and take
his height—and you too will ascend;
O so amazing and so broad! up there resplendent, darting and burning;
O prophetic! O vision staggered with weight of light! with pouring glories!
O copious! O hitherto unequalled!
O Libertad! O compact! O union impossible to dissever!
O my Soul! O lips becoming tremulous, powerless!
O centuries, centuries yet ahead! (107)

Historical progress, figured in the ascent of the sun, is intimately tied to “Libertad” and the

“union impossible to dissever.” Of this future political glory the poet is nearly overpowered.

His lips become “powerless,” as if the glory of the future is too stunning to allow him to

speak his prophetic utterances. For Whitman in 1860, union was achieved through civil

mathematical terms) as a sine wave, but as we shall see, Whitman used circular imagery and circular formal
structures in his poetry to describe the historical situation from 1862-1865.
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“comradeship” instead of through some political agreement. In “Calamus,” Whitman’s

narrator names himself the “poet of comrades”:

There shall from me be a new friendship—It shall be called after my name,

It shall circulate through The States, indifferent of place,
It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each other—Compact
shall they be, showing new signs,
Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,
Those who love each other shall be invincible,
They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name.
One from Massachusetts shall be comrade to a Missourian,
One from Maine or Vermont, and a Carolinian and an Oregonese, shall be
friends triune, more precious to each other than all the riches of the
earth. (349-350)228

For Whitman, the social bonds of “affection” unite all citizens into the American

geographical trinity of North, South, and West, creating friendship and unity everywhere.

Whitman attached the idea of historical progress to social bonding on a nationwide scale,

assuming that increased comradeship results in the inevitable progression of civilization (he

poetically champions a global comradeship as well). His praise for new technologies that

shortened travel times and improved long-distance communication—the railroads and the

telegraph, for instance—was wrapped up in his optimism for social progress. Yet war,

especially civil war, was antithetical to Whitman’s notion of American comradeship. By

December 1862, dreams of this comradeship and the social unification of the North

American continent had vanished. The best Whitman could hope for was a Union victory to

restore the promises of these dreams, but in that month, Union defeat seemed likely. Under

these conditions, Whitman’s outlook changed radically from 1855 to 1862; while the mid-

1850s offered hope and optimism, the early 1860s threatened to overturn all social progress

that Whitman believed had been made in the United States. Thus he considered Hallam’s

view of cyclical history, which would explain and perhaps justify to Whitman—because it

228 This passage was reworked into the Drum-Taps poem “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice.”
 184

would make the outcome inevitable from a theoretical point of view—the possible collapse

of the Union.

Whitman’s unsettling indecision about history’s future course in 1862 explains the

troubling uncertainty about the future expressed in many Drum-Taps poems that also

reference or allude to Dante’s Inferno. In “Quicksand Years that Whirl Me I Know Not

Whither,” for example, the poem’s speaker attempts to find something that is certain,

concluding that “One’s-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out of all

is sure” (Miller 30). The speaker falls back on trust in “One’s-Self” in recognition that

“schemes” and “politics” are completely unreliable. Some critics have suggested that the

poem is optimistic about the future, especially death,229 but the poem ends with two lines

that question the assertions of the speaker: “Out of politics, triumphs, battles, death—what

at last finally remains? / When shows break up, what but One’s-Self is sure?” As questions,

these lines can be read grammatically or rhetorically—as questions to which the speaker

doubts the possibility of a firm answer, or as rhetorical questions that imply the speaker’s

certainty.230 Is the speaker content or discontent with total reliance on the self? Neither

reading allows the other to be simultaneously true, but both are present as possible

229 William Scheick, for example, argues that the poem “embraces death” by “defin[ing] death in terms of an
underlying unitary life-force that integrates all perceived opposites.” See Scheick, “Death and the Afterlife,” A
Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2006)
334. Hereafter Scheick. He also makes the observation that the “quick” in quicksand implies both death and
life, an ambivalence that corresponds with the uncertain historical stance of the poem, as discussed below.
230This observation owes a heavy debt to Paul de Man’s reading of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Among
School Children,” the final line of which is a rhetorical question, “How can we know the dancer from the
dance?’ De Man argues that this question may be looked at rhetorically, as asserting the unity “between form
and experience, between creator and creation,” or it may be interpreted grammatically, as questioning the
possibility of such unity entirely. He further states that the poem has “two entirely coherent but entirely
incompatible readings [that] can be made to hinge on one line . . . . The two readings have to engage each other
in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone
by it. Nor can we in any way make a valid decision as to which of the readings can be given priority over the
other; none can exist in the other’s absence.” Although de Man’s point ties into his development of a theory of
rhetoric and criticism, which is not necessarily pertinent here, his point about the Yeats poem is applicable to
“Quicksand Years.” See de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3:3 (Fall 1973), 27-43.
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interpretations. Always confident in the American Union, Whitman nevertheless projected

his uncertainty about historical progress into the speaker’s voice in the poem.231 The image in

the title of the poem suggests that time and history make up the quicksand that has a firm

hold on the poet. The poet is therefore powerless to control any part of the future, and is

uncertain about his or the nation’s future destiny: “Quicksand years that whirl me I know not

whither” (my emphasis). Interestingly, the poem uses the image of quicksand whirling its

victim instead of engulfing or enveloping, although both of these actions are implied. The

action of whirling suggests the vortices of time as active agents, as if the poem’s speaker is

being spun or swirled by these vortices in endless circles. Where and when will the quicksand

of time whirl us? Backwards or forwards, resulting either in progress or regress, but the

speaker simply cannot know the end result.

Whitman drafted “Quicksand Years” during 1861 and 1862, and the draft for the

poem is in the “1862” notebook, just a few pages away from the notes on Dante’s Inferno

that he took in the same period. This draft shows Whitman considering his options for the

word “whirl.” “Engulf” and “engulfing” are written above “whirl” as looming possibilities

for what the quicksand years will do to the poem’s speaker. At the top of the draft page,

Whitman wrote the word “descending,” as if the poet caught in quicksand years might

descend and be engulfed (LC 201). Whitman’s consideration of word choice is intimately

tied to the Inferno. In its employment of images of circular or swirling movement,

symbolizing the unknown trajectory of human history, “Quicksand Years” calls upon the

imagery of the Inferno, which in numerous places combines metaphors of circling or whirling

with sand and eternal stasis in hell’s depths. Throughout the canticle, Dante the pilgrim is

Another Drum-Taps poems that questions the possibility of historical change, less ambiguously than
231

“Quicksand Years,” is “Year that Trembled and Reel’ed Beneath Me.” The poem ends with the poet asking,
“Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat?” See Miller Drum-
Taps 54.
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descending down the circles of hell, following a leftward circular path and not knowing

exactly where and when his journey will end. Sand is one of the chief topographical features

of hell. The Seventh Circle of hell is the “naked plain of burning sand,” where “the violent”

against man, nature, and God—including the murders of war—suffer eternal punishment

(Carlyle 157). In Inferno III, Dante witnesses the indifferent angels just inside the gates of

hell. Their “horrible outcries” and lamentations result in a constant “tumult,” a sound which

Dante describes metaphorically as “sand that the whirlwind breathes” that swirls perpetually

in the air (27-28). Likewise, every sinner in hell has been “whirled” at some point. In Inferno

V, where Dante sees each sinner judged by Minos and sent to his appropriate place in hell,

Minos “with his tail makes as many circles round himself” as the judged sinner will have to

descend. Then, after the sinner confesses, Minos “whirls” each one down with his tail (48-

49). Similarly, in Inferno XXVI, a canto that Whitman repeatedly alluded to in his poetry,

Ulysses gives in his grandiloquent speech an image of the devastating whirlwind. A figure of

the unceasing desire for all knowledge, with human progress and exploration as a means to

new knowledge, Ulysses and his crew sail beyond the point where any human being has

traveled. Ulysses repeatedly describes this sailing voyage as one of flying: “we of our oars

made wings for foolish flight,” he says. When the crew reaches the other side of the world,

spotting Mount Purgatory, a terrible storm arises and devastates the ship. The storm makes

the ship “whirl round with all the waves” until the ship and crew perish at sea (317-318).

All of these images of whirling in the Inferno concur with some notion of doomed

destiny and deny the possibility of human progress. In the Inferno, for a sinner to be

“whirled” by Minos or for Ulysses to be “whirled” to his death implies descent and then

stasis; the sinner who has been whirled ends up permanently in a far worse position than he

was in. Dante, at times, worries about what his own future is and whether he will be stuck
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forever in hell; in Inferno VIII-IX, the citizens of the City of Dis halt him outside the city

gates and nearly keep him from moving forward. This kind of threat to Dante’s forward

progress even occurs in Inferno I. In that opening canto, Dante is lost and therefore fearful,

his path to the light of the sun blocked by three beasts, and so his only other path requires a

descent into the Earth (2-12). As is the case for Whitman’s narrator in “Quicksand Years,”

in Inferno I, the pilgrim is uncertain about his future course and at a crisis point where time

and experience have made him unsure of everything, leading to his spiraling descent into

hell.

Whitman embedded the idea of circling, linked to the possibility of historical

regression, with the uncertainty of the future in the structures of a number of Drum-Taps

poems. Several soldier poems in Drum-Taps have a quasi-chiastic structure, in which each

poem’s beginning and ending are the same. As self-contained entities, these poems simply

repeat themselves, returning back to where they began, even though some of their content

may imply historical progress. “An Army on the March” provides an example. The poem

begins with an army pressing forward, its “cloud of skirmishers in advance” (Miller Sequel

20). The poem describes the army’s “swarming ranks” and “dense brigades” on the move.

The “columns” and “wheels” and “horses” all imply progressive movement, building up to

the poem’s final line: “As the army resistless advances.” But where does the army advance

to? The end of the poem simply repeats the beginning of the poem, that the army is on the

advance, but offers no destination or outcome. The poem’s content implies progress—

“pressing on” and “advancing”—yet its structure is circular, implying that the action in the

poem is cyclical and recurring. In this poem Whitman uses the imagery of army movement

to dramatize the historical problem of “Quicksand Years,” whether history will whirl us

forward or backwards, putting us on a course of progression or regression.

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A similar kind of problem is dramatized in the poem “O Me! O Life!” Here

Whitman gives a Dantesque assessment of the war situation:

O Me! O life! ... of the questions of these recurring;

Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself ever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who
more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle
ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around
me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life!
(Miller Sequel 18)

The despair of the poem is reinforced by its circular structure. The first and last lines repeat

that there are unknown “questions” which are “recurring,” and the poem begins and ends

with the lament “O me! O life!” The phrase “endless trains of the faithless” references Inferno

III, where Dante encounters a “long train of people” who eternally follow a “whirling” flag

just outside of hell, because in life they were cowards who refused to choose sides (Carlyle

29-30). The tone and structure are almost too depressing for Whitman, who appended two

more lines to the poem, in the form of another voice:

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Who the voice of this sage-like “Answer” is—whether it is the same voice moaning “O Me!

O life” or another’s—is unclear, but the poet is encouraged to continue practicing the art of

poetry. This exchange strongly resembles many of the conversations between Dante and

Virgil in Inferno, two poets, one of whom often fears or despairs while encountering the

“endless trains of the faithless” and the “cities fill’d with the foolish,” while the other plays

the encourager and the guide.

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While Whitman’s anxiety about the course of history and civilization is dramatized in

many Drum-Taps poems, his postwar, non-fiction writings display a different concern about

history. In these writings, Whitman worries, sometimes angrily, about the ways in which the

Civil War will be remembered and memorialized. His primary concern in the postwar years

was with the historical fate of the common man and woman—the ordinary soldiers,

workers, and nurses—who made the Union victory possible. Whitman’s famous quip that

“the real war will never get into the books” is a lament that the fate of the average soldier

and his wartime experience will be forgotten, while the “books” of history will simply tell a

heroic version of the War, focusing only on politicians, generals, and major battles. In

Memoranda During the War, Whitman described this concern and expressed his belief that

modern American society—then ten years removed from the war—could not stomach the

hellish realities of the Civil War:

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of
countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface-courteousness of the
Generals, not the few great battles) of the Secession war; and it is best they should
not—the real war will never get into the books. In the mushy influences of current
times, too, the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of
being totally forgotten. . . . [The] interior history will not only never be written—its
practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual
soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness,
habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his
superb strength, and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and
shades of camp, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be. . .
. Think how much, and of importance, will be—how much, civic and military, has
already been—buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.232

Whitman’s observation, that “it is best [that future years] should not” know the details of the

war, subtly mocks post-war nostalgia and idealism. The war, Whitman says, “was not a

quadrille in a ball-room.” Of course Whitman was concerned with remembering and

honoring the “actual soldier of 1862-’65, North and South,” and with writing the war’s

232Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996), 802-803. Hereafter
Prose.
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“countless minor scenes and interiors.” But Whitman uses chthonic metaphors to describe

these scenes: “the seething hell” and the “black infernal background,” the majority of the

war’s interior history “buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.” These metaphors were

deliberate on Whitman’s part because, starting with his experience at Falmouth in December

1862, he associated Dante’s Inferno with the terrors of Civil War battles. In Memoranda he

compares the dark scenes of war to Dante, claiming that they surpassed anything that Dante

depicted in the Inferno:

The dead in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and
battle-fields of the south—Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern hill and Fair Oaks—the
banks of Chickhominy—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the
grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties
of the strayed dead, [. . .] the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere—the
crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations—and blackest
and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of
Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante’s pictured hell and all its woes,
its degradations, filthy torments, excell’d those prisons) [. . .] (Prose 800-801)

This choppy, fragmented sentence continues for another two hundred words, trying but

failing to exhaust what can be said about the Civil War dead. The sentence appears in the

section titled “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up.” As Ed Folsom has pointed out, the

word “Summ’d” ambiguously signifies both the word “summed” and “summoned.”233 Just

as Whitman’s texts about the war summarize the war of the past, so they also summon up the

past, including and especially the millions dead, who in Drum-Taps come alive textually.

Importantly, it was during wartime when Whitman began associating the “interior history”

of the war—the experiences of common soldiers in battle, in the bivouac, on the march, in

the hospital—with his descriptors “seething hell” and “eternal darkness.” In March 1863,

See Ed Folsom, “Walt Whitman and the Civil War: Making Poetry Out of Pain, Grief, and Mass Death,”
233

Abaton 2 (Fall 2008), 12-26.

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Whitman wrote Nathaniel Bloom and John Gray from Washington, D.C., and compared the

army hospitals to scenes from classical poetry:

To these, what are your dramas and poems, even the oldest and the tearfulest? Not
old Greek mighty ones, where man contends with fate, (and always yields)—not
Virgil showing Dante on and on among the agonized & damned, approach what
here I see and take a part in. For here I see, not at intervals, but quite always, how
certain, man, our American man—how he holds himself cool and unquestioned
master above all pains and bloody mutilations . . .234

Despite the horrors of the hospitals, the American character courageously endures the worst

of pains and agonies better than any classical hero. Interestingly, Dante is the major poet

Whitman evokes to find a parallel to his own wartime experiences. Both the Civil War

battlefield and the hospital remind Whitman, again and again, of his reading of the Inferno.

Whitman’s inclusion of some version of Drum-Taps in all postwar editions of Leaves of

Grass allowed him to counter the romanticized histories of the war that he disliked so much.

Many Drum-Taps poems describe the “interior history” of the war from a soldier’s

perspective, and relate soldiers’ stories either as memories or as present-tense events, most

of which are “hellish.” In effect, Whitman encapsulated particular wartime experiences and

presented many of them in his poems as eternally recurring for their respective narrators. 235

Several battlefield scenes in Drum-Taps, such as in “An Army on the March,” take place, as

the text states, “now.” “With now the sound of a single shot, snapping like a whip, and now

an irregular volley, / The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on;”

(Miller, Sequel 20). For Whitman, the “hell” of Civil War battle needed to be represented for

readers as anguish experienced in an eternal now. In Drum-Taps’ chiastic poems, Whitman’s

234Correspondence 80-82. Whitman actually drafted this passage in a notebook entry titled “These Hospitals,”
with no apparent audience in mind, earlier in 1863. See Grier Volume 2 594.

235Tangential to this point is Maire Mullins’ observation that Drum-Taps features many moments of “stopped
and frozen” time. For Mullins, these moments of frozen time display Whitman’s stories of “comradeship and
homoerotic desire.” See Mullins, “Stopping History in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps,” Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 17:1 (1999), 4-14.
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anonymous soldiers experience something similar to the sinners depicted in Dante’s

Inferno—Dante describes nearly every figure in the Inferno as one doomed to eternally repeat

his/her punishment, stuck in the same place forever, and (in some cases) traveling

incessantly in a circle (e.g., the lustful in Inferno V, the hypocrites in Inferno XXIII). The

poems about the war’s “interior history” in Drum-Taps are also deliberately haunting; they

call the dead back from the region of memory and present them as suffering in battle now,

in the present-tense. As M. Wynn Thomas observes of Drum-Taps, Whitman was “trying to

admit the dead into the community of the living; trying to stare the ghastly faces of the dead

back into answerable, human shape, by recognizing their sacrifice.”236 Part of the “hell” of

Drum-Taps is the collection’s present-tense representation of the horrors of the war, which

textually “summon up” and represent the figures of dead soldiers, who are eternally

experiencing the war textually. 237

A good example of a poem that depicts Whitman’s “hell-scenes” is “A March in the

Ranks Hard-prest, and the Road Unknown,” which is one of the chiastic poems in Drum-

Taps, ending where it begins. This poem originated from a story that a Maine soldier told

Whitman in a hospital, a story that describes the Battle of White Oaks Church; Whitman

recorded extensive notes on the battle in one of his notebooks, which he used to compose

236M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University
Press, 1987) 217. Whitman’s summoning of the dead is part of what Thomas calls the “ritualistic and liturgical
character” of Drum-Taps (Thomas, Fratricide 36). In that sense Drum-Taps has a certain sense of religiosity to it.
Michael Warner has called Whitman’s posture in Drum-Taps one of “devotional observation.” While Whitman
“reject[ed] the theodicy of Christianity,” he “shows a delicate instinct for negotiating the dialectical distortions
of religion and secularism in late Christian culture.” See Warner, “Civil War Religion and Whitman’s Drum-
Taps,” Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City,
Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2008).

237 Adam Bradford has made the crucial observation that while Whitman summons up dead soldiers, often
called “shadows” or “phantoms” in Drum-Taps, he often does not give them a voice. When the soldiers do
speak, as narrators of their poems, they are anonymous. For Bradford, Whitman’s reason for keeping his
fictional soldiers anonymous was so that a reading public could imagine their friends or relatives, or anyone
else, as the soldier-figures described in the poems. See Bradford, “Re-collecting Soldiers: Walt Whitman and
the Appreciation of Human Value,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27:3 (Winter 2010), 127-152.
 193

the poem (Grier 2:651-652). Yet Whitman stylizes the soldier’s story by coloring it with

scenes from Dante’s Inferno. The poem begins with a soldier marching, his army retreating

from battle, taking a “route through a heavy wood,” which echoes both Inferno I, in which

Dante is lost in a dark forest, and Inferno XIII, the infamous Wood of the Suicides. The army

comes to an “open space in the woods” which is illuminated by a “dim-lighted building.”

Here the soldier sees an old church-turned-hospital and describes the scene thusly:

'Tis a large old church, at the crossing roads—’tis now an impromptu

hospital;
—Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems
ever made:
Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of
smoke;
By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the
pews laid down;
At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to
death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)
I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;)
Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene, fain to absorb it all;
Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of
them dead;
Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of
blood;
The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers—the yard outside
also fill’d;
Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-
spasm sweating;

The army’s emergence from a wood into an “open space,” in which an indistinct crowd is

illuminated by a “wild red flame” that emits clouds of smoke, refers to Inferno XIV. There

Dante has emerged from the Wood of Suicides onto a great, open “burning plain,”

illuminated by falling fire that tortures sinners. Significantly, these sinners are being punished

for violence, an idea that corresponds with the results of war as described in “A March in the

Rank Hard-prest.” In this circle of hell, Dante witnesses “many herds of naked souls,” some

“lying supine upon the ground; some sitting all crouched up; and others roaming
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incessantly” (Carlyle 158-159). This is precisely what the narrator in “A March in the Ranks

Hard-prest” witnesses inside and just outside the hospital: the crowd of the bloody forms,

“some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm

sweating.” In the hospital, the narrator also witnesses another soldier bleeding to death.

This particular scene Whitman added to the original story; the dying soldier’s abdomen

emanates a steady flow of blood that the narrator cannot stop. This kind of bloodflow is

what Dante witnesses in Inferno XIV, in which a “little rivulet” of blood constantly runs from

the Wood of the Suicides through the burning plain (163).

The striking correspondences between Inferno XIV and “A March in the Ranks Hard-

prest” are not limited to mere descriptions of death and suffering. Inferno XIV is deeply

concerned with the intersections between violence and the course of human history, an idea

which Whitman surely recognized, since he incorporated the same issue into his own poem.

In Inferno XIV, Virgil tells Dante about the origin of the four rivers of hell, which all begin

their flow at a statue in a mountain on the island of Crete. The description of this statue, a

famous passage in the Divine Comedy, is of a “great old Man” whose head is gold, breast

silver, abdomen brass, legs iron, and feet clay. Each part of the statue, except the golden

head, is “broken with a fissure that drops tears,” which collect at the bottom of the statue

and form the four rivers of hell (164-166). Allegorically, the statue describes the decay or

decline of civilization.238 Dante connects civilization’s decline to violence; the description of

the statue is an aesthetic representation of the reason why the violent sinners in Inferno XIV

suffer as they do. Similarly, and as with other Drum-Taps poems, “A March in the Ranks

238As many commentators have noted, the statue’s head represents the mythical “Golden Age,” or the first age
of human history, and the statue’s body represents the successive eras of history that, as represented by lesser
material goods (silver, brass, clay), depict the moral degeneracy of civilization. Dante was familiar with the myth
of the decline of civilization from an ancient “Golden Age” from classical Greek and Roman literaure—it is
used to great effect in, for example, Hesiod and Ovid. But the myth is embedded in a prophecy from the Book
of Daniel as well.
 195

Hard-prest” troubles the notion of historical progress by questioning whether the violence

of war can ever be a means to such progress. The poem is a chiasm that suggests progress is

being made—the army is marching, marching, ever marching—while formally denying that

progress is at all possible. The opening and closing lines demonstrate this formal denial of

progress:

A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown;

A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness;

[...]

Resuming, marching, as ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,

The unknown road still marching.”

The first and last lines focus on the “march,” while employing the mirror phrases “road

unknown” and “unknown road.” The second and second-to-last lines qualify the marching

as an advance into “darkness.” The poem simply returns to the point at which it began,

circling back upon itself, signaling the uncertainty of the end of marching. Do we march

forwards, backwards, or in circles? Whatever the case, the march takes place “ever in

darkness” on an “unknown road” and dramatizes Whitman’s midwar uncertainty about the

future of civilization. The poem thus describes the hellish “interior history” of the war, from

a soldier’s perspective, by pointing to and using the Inferno to accentuate the problem of

violence and war as a means to some kind of progress.

Perhaps the Drum-Taps poem that best represents Whitman’s use of the Inferno to

describe the Civil War’s “interior history” is “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame,” one generally

underrated by Whitman critics. The poem is similar to “A March in the Ranks Hard-prest”

in that a wild or fitful “flame” illuminates the scene of the action and offers proper vision

(poetic as well as visual) to the poem’s narrator:

By the bivouac’s fitful flame,

A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but first I note,
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The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and woods’ dim outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac’s fitful flame.

The structure, again, is chiastic, suggesting the circularity of the moment. The first and final

lines are identical (except for end-punctuation). The “fitful flame” illuminates the whole

world of the speaker, both internal and external, and allows him to witness the solemn and

slow “procession,” mentioned in the second and next-to-last lines.

“By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” began in Whitman’s “1862” notebook, where

Whitman attempted to compose the framing line of the poem. “By the bivouac’s fitful fires
light flame
,” he wrote, trying to find the right final word for the opening and closing lines (LC

89). ‘Fires,’ ‘light,’ and ‘flame’ are each left as possibilities, but Whitman ultimately chose

‘flame’ for potent reasons. In the 1848 Webster’s Dictionary—Whitman’s preferred

dictionary—the word ‘flame’ is denotatively similar to “fire.” They both suggest the burning

of objects, the “heat of passion,” and the “warmth of affection,” but ‘flame’ has one further

linguistic advantage over ‘fire.’ It can additionally mean “rage; violence; as the flames of war.”

This choice also suggests that Whitman in his war poetry was not always making the literary

turn from romance to realism and acting as “poet-historian,” as several Whitman critics have

argued.239 Calling the campfire a “fitful flame” gives an emotional and spiritual charge to the

poem, which, because it subjectively distorts the external world, romanticizes the scene.

239For a fuller explanation of the argument for Whitman as a realist “poet-historian,” see Erkkila, Whitman the
Political Poet 205. Certainly, there is much truth to this critical view, but there is still much romantically charged
language in Drum-Taps. Another example of such charged language would be “Bivouac on a Mountain Side,” in
which the speaker ends by looking at the sky “studded with the eternal stars.” This poem and “When I Heard
the Learn’d Astronomer” both conclude with the same visionary experience as Dante’s Inferno, with the poet
looking up to see the stars.
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Whitman also incorporated Inferno XXVI-XXVII, cantos about flames, war, and

deception, into “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame.” What prompted him to do this was not just

the text of these cantos, but an illustration of them. Sometime in September 1862, Whitman

looked at a quarto volume of Gustave Doré’s illustrations of the Inferno and admired them.

While some of them, he said, were “melodramatic,” in all they were “very, very fine” (LC

187). One of the illustrations Whitman saw was Doré’s depiction of Inferno XXVI (see Figure

B14), which shows Dante and Virgil standing on a dark hill looking into a fire. Here the two

poets listen to Ulysses, who as an evil counselor bears the punishment of being all-consumed

in a flame, which he shares with Diomedes. As the Carlyle Inferno says, the punishment is

that the spirits are “wrapped in the Flame of [their] own Consciousness” (Carlyle 307). In

the beginning of the canto, Dante first looks upon the wider scene, a valley of flames, which

he views as a peasant would look from a hillside down into a valley of vineyards at dusk.

The chasm he sees is aglow “with flames”—much like the speaker’s description in “By the

Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” of “the darkness lit by spots of kindled fire.”

For Dante, it is impossible to see the punished sinners’ figures in the flames, which

completely consume them (310-311). When Virgil points out the flame that contains Ulysses,

Dante desires to talk to him. Ulysses is obviously a figure of war, and the poem references

his Trojan Horse deception, stating that for both Ulysses and Diomedes, “in their flame they

groan for the ambush of the horse” (312-313). Dante’s description of the appearance of

Ulysses’ speech is that of a “fitful flame”: the “ancient flame began to shake itself,

murmuring, just like a flame that struggles with the wind. Then carrying to and fro the top,

as if it were the tongue that spake, threw forth a voice” (314-315). This description is

repeated in the following canto, Inferno XXVII, when Dante in the same valley of flames

speaks to Guido de Montefeltro. Guido is a flame and, as he speaks, the “sharp point” of the
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fire moves “to and fro.” Further, like Ulysses, Guido is also associated with war. He was “a

man of arms,” he says, until he became monk, but he gave evil counsel to Pope Boniface

VIII, who was “waging war” against his fellow Christians (325-327). Guido asks Dante

whether war is raging in “Romagna”—wondering whether his own counsel has perpetuated

civil war between Italian Christians—to which Dante replies that, no, there is no war

currently; but “thy Romagna is not, and never was, without war in the hearts of her tyrants”

(322). Thus Inferno XXVI and XXVII use “fitful flames” to associate deceptive speech with

war, and the flames are former soldiers punished eternally deep in hell.

Whitman also drew upon other parts of the Inferno in “By the Bivouac’s Fitful

Flame.” Doré’s illustration of Inferno I (see Figure B15), in which Dante is lost in a “dark

wood,” highlights the lone poet’s terror, who is surrounded by the foreboding forest. Both

the tree root hovering above the poet and the vines on the ground threaten to ensnare or

grab Dante. The various shades of black suggest other unknown figures looming in the

woods. Whitman’s description of the external world in “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”

offers the same eerie view of nature. The speaker’s gaze at his surroundings moves from the

army’s tents, to the dim outline of the woods, to the darkness pocked by fire, to unknown,

phantom-like figures, to the shrubs and trees. The vegetation, the speaker says, seems to be

“stealthily watching.” This kind of scene is similar to what Whitman witnessed at Falmouth

Camp. In the “1862” notebook, Whitman recorded his observations of the nightly

campfires. Of the army tents, Whitman wrote that they are called “shebangs,” which were

“the little huts of green boughs, pine or what not, put up for the . . . impromptu shelters of

soldiers” (LC 104). This means that in “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame,” the “tents of the

sleeping army” are actually made from the surrounding natural environment (according to
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Whitman’s understanding of the term). At night, this environment blends together so that

the entire natural world merges—tents and woods and all—and returns the speaker’s gaze.

Because of the eerie world, the speaker turns to a “procession of thoughts,” which

the “fitful flame” also seems to illuminate. Like Ulysses in Inferno XXVI, the flame in “By the

Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” offers vision of the Inferno-like landscape, including the “thoughts”

not only of the speaker but of the soldiers surrounding him. The flame, as in Inferno XXVI, is

an image of deception. It offers “tender and wondrous thoughts . . . of home and the

past”—a nostalgic glance backward—but keeps the speaker focused on memories and not

on war itself and the threatening nighttime environment. The word “procession” seems to

imply a kind of progress, but it is a progress that the circular structure of the poem denies.

The moving procession of thoughts heightens our awareness of the speaker’s eternal,

stationary existence by the campfire. This use of “procession” is unusual for Whitman, who

ties the idea of “procession” throughout the rest of Leaves of Grass to jubilant diversity and

progress. Whitman’s seemingly never-ending, poetic catalogues—a sort of procession that

the poet parades in front of his readers—is a key example of this kind of onward flow.

Whitman also, elsewhere in Leaves, associates “procession” with the progress of natural and

social history. In “I Sing the Body Electric” Whitman writes that “All is procession / The

universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion” (Whitman 1891 255), which

relates directly to the poem “Roaming in Thought [After Reading Hegel]” in which Whitman

claims that the “Good” in the universe progresses toward eternity, while the “Evil” becomes

“lost and dead” (216). The notebook that contains rough outlines for his historically

progressive poem, “Passage to India,” is titled “The Soul’s Procession,” where Whitman

proposes to “make a succession of splendid gorgeous stately pageants and moving

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panoramas.”240 Yet the flame in “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” offers a far different kind of

procession, a “sweet” retreat into visions of the past that erase the present war. The poem

suggests that romanticized memories, offered by the deceptive flame, result in eternal

stagnation, the condition in which the speaker of the poem remains.

As these Drum-Taps poems demonstrate, Whitman wanted the “interior history” of

the war to be remembered as a modern-day Inferno. Whitman would press home this point

firmly in the section of Memoranda During the War entitled “A Glimpse of War’s Hell-Scenes.”

In this section, Whitman writes retrospectively of a Confederate ambush of a Union cavalry

convoy that escorted “ambulances” of dozens of wounded soldiers and officers. Whitman

claims that after the convoy surrendered, the Confederates began “robbing the train and

murdering their prisoners, even the wounded” (Prose 772). The Confederates were a

“demoniac crowd,” repeatedly stabbing their victims. “The wounded had all been dragg’d (to

give a better chance also for plunder,) out of their wagons,” Whitman writes; “some had

been effectually dispatch’d, and their bodies were lying there lifeless and bloody. Others, not

yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning and groaning. Of our men who surrender’d,

most had been thus maim’d or slaughter’d.” But the Confederates were overtaken by more

Union cavalry, which captured, tried, and shot them in a town square the following day.

This “hell-scene,” Whitman says, was typical of the war:

Multiply the [scene] by scores, aye hundreds—verify it in all the forms that different
circumstances, individuals, places, could afford—light it with every lurid passion, the
wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate, boiling volcanoes of
human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and
heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere
black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war. (773)

Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Volume IV: Notes. The Collected Writings of Walt
240

Whitman. ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 1392.
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This passage is as dark and despairing of the average “human heart” as the usually optimistic

Whitman ever gets. Tellingly, he directly references Inferno I. The figures of the wolf and the

lion, which have a “lapping thirst for blood,” are two of the three animals that block Dante’s

journey before he meets Virgil and descends into hell. The Wolf, according to a footnote in

Carlyle’s Inferno, is the figure of avarice. The Lion is the figure of murderous “ambition or

pride,” referencing the “King of France, who shewed these qualities most, maintaining

tyranny, bloodshed, and discord all over Italy” (Carlyle 5-6). Whitman’s description of these

beasts, as symbolizing “lurid passion,” is much the same as Virgil’s observation that the Wolf

“lets not men pass her way, but so entangles that she slays them; and has a nature so

perverse and vicious, that she never satiates her craving appetite” (9). Both the wolf and the

lion, then, are appropriate figures for Whitman’s story of Confederate robbery and murder.

Significantly, in this passage Whitman invites his reader to “multiply” the scene and

“light” it with “lurid passions.” This notion of “lighting” has a double meaning. For

Whitman, as we have seen, various “flames” illuminate the speakers of his poems so that

they can witness their surroundings. While the flames provide light, they tend to illumine

that which is ghastly—disturbing scenes of the war—and create eerie shadows or

“phantoms.” But “lighting” also signifies inspiration. The scenes of the Civil War, such as

the Confederate robbery, need to be colored and framed, presented with some kind of moral

charge. For inspiration, Whitman often turned to the Inferno to color his poetic presentation

of the war. The Inferno gave Whitman a theological-poetic framework for the war; it offered

not just a way to call the war “hell,” but a way to describe what hell is like and what war’s

relation to memory, history, and poetry are. Because of Whitman’s deep reading of the

Inferno in 1862, Dante’s text became an integral thread in the tapestry of Drum-Taps. While

General Sherman is famously remembered for his pithy postwar saying “war is hell,” a saying
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still commonly used today, Whitman was integral in developing the cultural context for

Sherman’s memorable (though, as we’ve seen, unoriginal) comparison. As Whitman knew,

thanks in part to his reading of Dante, the Civil War was hell.

Sailing into the Afterlife with Ulysses

In the postwar years, Whitman was optimistic about the afterlife; it was a period in

which he offered visions of the soul’s immortality in positive and sometimes ecstatic terms.

Harold Aspiz has argued that Whitman’s view of the afterlife gradually evolved during his

life, so that by 1868 Whitman embraced some notion of the earthly transcendence of the

soul: “The fear that had surfaced in [Whitman’s] early poems—that death may be an eternal

nothingness—[became] sublimated into a faith in an afterlife during which elements of the

conscious (mortal) identity are somehow preserved.” Aspiz uses the example of Whitman’s

poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which is a “striking statement of Whitman’s faith in

immortality” (Aspiz 209-210). Also striking is the fact that the draft for “A Noiseless Patient

Spider” is one page away from Whitman’s notes on Dante’s Inferno in the “1862” notebook.

It is quite possible that Dante—whom Whitman repeatedly characterized as depicting the

agonies and torments of hell—was an instigator in Whitman’s move to poetically consider

the afterlife more explicitly in the postwar years.

Sometime after the war, Whitman would read the Divine Comedy in full. In his book

Passage to India (1871)—the book he then characterized as the poems of the soul, as opposed

to the poems of the body that had been the focus of Leaves of Grass—Whitman explicitly

acknowledged the full scope of the Divine Comedy as a journey of the poet from the Earth to

the stars to a vision of God. In “Proud Music of the Storm,” the poem’s speaker dreams of a

majestic symphony that begins with a storm but morphs into a blend of the artistic, the
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organic, and the musical. The speaker hears a natural symphony, with “every instrument in

multitudes / The player’s playing—all the world’s musicians,” set in the “Earth’s diapason /

Of woods and winds and mighty oceans of waves.” This magnificent event is compared to

Dante arriving at the Empyrean, near his journey’s end, and contains a direct reference to

the Paradiso:

A new composite orchestra—binder of years and climes—ten-fold renewer,

As of the far-back days the poets tell—the Paradiso,
The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering done,
The journey done, the journeyman come home,
And Man and Art, with Nature fused again.

Tutti! for Earth and Heaven!

The Almighty Leader now for me, for once, has signal'd with his wand.241

Similarly, in “Passage to India,” Whitman compared the soul’s journey—whether in the

mind or after death—to a journey into the heavens:

Passage to more than India!

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?

[...]

Passage to more than India!

O secret of the earth and sky!
Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land!
Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks!
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
O day and night, passage to you!
O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you! (Passage 14-15)

The desire for passage to the stars re-enacts the same universal quest of the soul and of the

poet that Dante undertakes in the Comedy. The dozens of exclamations at the end of the

poem heighten the excitement of this journey beyond India and into the stars.

241 Walt Whitman, Passage to India, Washington D.C., 1871, pg. 19. Hereafter Passage. The entire text is available
at the Walt Whitman Archive, <http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html>.
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But Whitman’s view of the afterlife in this poem is not all rosy. Critics have read

“Passage to India” as a rapturous paean to technological progress, spiritual progress, or some

form of Western imperialism.242 All of these readings that declare Whitman’s optimism for

progress, however, are undercut by an allusion to the Inferno in the poem’s final lines, when

Whitman quotes directly from Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno XXVI.243 With this

allusion, Whitman questions the future results of “progress” and the nineteenth-century’s

faith therein (in both the progress of the soul and of history). At the very end of “Passage to

India,” the poem’s speaker implores the “soul” to set sail to some unknown destination and

to boldly sail “farther, farther”:

Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!

Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel'd here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!

Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?

242 There are numerous examples of this kind of reading. To cite a just a few, see Aspiz 212; Harsharan Sign
Ahluwalia, “A Reading of Whitman’s ‘Passage to India,’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1 (June 1983), 9-17;
Martin K. Doudna, “’The Essential Ultimate Me’: Whitman’s Achievement in ‘Passage to India,’” Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 2 (Winter 1985), 1-9; John B. Mason, “Passage to India,” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R.
LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Press), 507-509; and Walter Grunzweig,
“Imperialism,” A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell,
2006), 151-163.
243 The connections between “Passage to India,” Inferno 26, and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” were first noted by

Charles B. Willard and Milton Hindus. See Charles B. Willard, "Whitman and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses,’” Walt
Whitman Newsletter 2 (March-June 1956), 9-10; and Milton Hindus, “Literary Echoes in Whitman’s ‘Passage to
India,’” Walt Whitman Review 7 (September 1961), 53. There is, however, a substantial difference between
Dante’s Ulysses, whose position Dante morally condemns, and Tennyson’s Ulysses, whose standalone speech
has other classical intertexts besides Dante. As Hindus suggests, the final lines in “Passage to India” more
closely resemble Ulysses’ speech from John Carlyle’s Inferno than those from Tennyson’s poem. For this
reason, and given the spiritual overtones of “Passage to India,” I think Whitman is in dialogue with Dante here,
and not Tennyson.
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O farther, farther, farther sail!

Just prior to this passage, the speaker likens the soul’s journey to a sea voyage but, just as

Ulysses does in the Inferno, metaphorically describes a sailing vessel as one in flight: “Passage

to more than India! / Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?” The speech to the

Soul here resembles almost word-for-word the speech that Ulysses gives his men in Inferno

XXVI, in which he pushes his men to sail beyond the boundaries of the known world.

Significantly, in the Divine Comedy, Ulysses is a counterpoint to Dante. Both are

figures in attempted cosmic journeys, but Dante uses Ulysses to show the moral and spiritual

hazards of such a journey, one which Whitman in “Passage to India” implores his own

“soul” to take. Ulysses’ entire relation of his story to Dante is worth quoting here from

Inferno XXVI:

When I departed from Circe, who beyond a year detained me there near
Gaeta, ere Aeneas thus had named it, neither fondness for my son, nor reverence for
my aged father, nor the due love that should have cheered Penelope, could conquer
in me the ardour that I had to gain experience of the world, and of human vice and
worth: I ventured into the deep open sea, with but one ship, and with that small
company, which had not deserted me. Both the shores I saw as far as Spain, far as
Morocco; and saw Sardinia and the other isles which that sea bathes round.
I and my companions were old and slow, when we came to that narrow pass,
where Hercules assigned his landmarks to hinder man from venturing farther. On
the right hand, I left Seville; on the other, had already left Ceuta. ‘O brothers!’ I said,
‘who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West, deny not, to this
brief vigil of your sense that remains, experience of the unpeopled world behind the
Sun. Consider your origin: ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue
and knowledge.’ With this brief speech I made my companions so eager for the
voyage, that I could hardly then have checked them. And, turning our poop towards
morning, we of our oars made wings for the foolish flight, always gaining on the left.
Night already saw the other pole, with all its stars; and ours so low, that it rose not
from the ocean floor. Five times the light beneath the Moon had been rekindled and
quenched as oft, since we had entered on the arduous passage, when there appeared
to us a Mountain, dim with distance; and to me it seemed the highest I had ever seen.
We joyed, and soon our joy was turned to grief; for a tempest rose from the new
land, and struck our forepart of our ship. Three times it made her whirl round with
all the waves; at the fourth, made the poop rise and the prow go down, as pleased
Another, till the sea was closed above us. (Carlyle 315-318)
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Dante describes Ulysses as a restless homebody in Ithaca after the Trojan War, who desires

to leave his family and native land to “gain experience of the world, and of human vice and

worth.” He thus sails in one ship with his men to the unknown parts of the Earth. In a

speech that implores his men to continue on, Ulysses states that their aim is to find “virtue

and knowledge” beyond human experience. Thus Ulysses tells his men that they “were not

formed to live like brutes” because they should not deny to themselves “experience of the

unpeopled world.”

Despite the apparent heroism of Ulysses’ ambitions, he is a figure of trangression in

the Divine Comedy. Ulysses’ desires know no boundaries, as he fails to understand the moral

limits of the will and the intellect.244 Consequently, while Ulysses sails to the ends of the

Earth, he is destroyed just before he reaches Mount Purgatory, the location in the afterlife at

which the soul is purified so that it can ascend into Heaven. Ulysses is a comparative foil for

Dante’s own quest, who, traveling beyond where any mortal has yet gone, actually

accomplishes Ulysses’ goals. Dante remembers Ulysses throughout the Comedy, mentioning

him explicitly in Purgatorio XIX and Paradiso XXVII. In the latter canto, when he reaches the

Primum Mobile, Dante literally looks back at the Earth and the planets, and the first person

he remembers is Ulysses. Here Dante acknowledges that quests can be both redemptive and

progressive, provided that the one who quests exercises humility and understands the moral

boundaries of the human will.

The speaker in “Passage to India” is actually a kind of Ulysses figure, encouraging

readers to “farther sail” without the proper, Dantesque warnings about moral and spiritual

244For Dante, Ulysses transgresses a number of boundaries—moral, spiritual, intellectual, but also
geographical. The Inferno shows that Ulysses is clearly going beyond the boundaries of Europe and North
Africa, or the known world, when he himself mentions passing by Spain and modern-day Morocco (Seville and
Ceuta). This geographical transgression fits well with the explicitly geographical nature of the voyage in
“Passage to India,” in which the speaker desires to have a passage to India, and then to go beyond even India.
 207

boundaries. In the poem, for example, the speaker echoes Ulysses’ wanderlust with the

question, “Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?” echoing the

symbol of Ulysses’ marriage-bed (as described in Homer’s Odyssey), which is literally carved

out of a massive tree rooted in Ithaca’s soil. Then the speaker quotes from Ulysses’ speech in

the Inferno (“ye were not formed to live like brutes”) with the question, “Have we not

grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?” since “we are bound

where mariner has not yet dared to go.” The reaction of Ulysses’ men in the Inferno is

precisely what Whitman in “Passage to India” is trying to inspire in his readers with his

exclamatory, ecstatic statements: “With this brief speech I [Ulysses] made my companions so

eager for the voyage, that I could hardly then have checked them.”

Whitman’s selection of this allusion at the end of “Passage to India” is rich and

complex. He could have simply used Dante himself in “Passage to India” as a poetic model

of the Soul’s journey, as he did in “Proud Music of the Storm.” Instead Whitman uses as a

model Dante’s Ulysses, whose quest ultimately ends in failure and destruction. The speaker

in “Passage to India” is willing to risk all to be “reckless . . . exploring.” The poem names no

final destination for the voyage beyond India, and it ends during the middle of this voyage

with the optimistic call to “farther, farther sail!” The penultimate line has been read as one

that implies doubts about the poem’s affirmation of progress,245 but viewed in the context of

the Inferno, it implies not just doubt about progress, but also a willful transgression of moral

limits that dangerously reasons that any experience is good: “O daring joy, but safe! Are they

not all the seas of God?” Ulysses, when he spots Mount Purgatory, exclaims the same

sentiment. “We joyed,” he tells Dante, but this emotion is quickly dashed: “and soon our joy

turned to grief; for a tempest rose from the new land, and struck the forepart of the ship”

245 See, for example, Erkkila in Whitman the Political Poet 272-273.
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(318). “Passage to India” therefore recreates a similar tension that many Drum-Taps poems

exhibit, one between progression and regression. While the speaker’s exhortations at the

end of “Passage to India” may sound optimistic and exhilarating, the allusion to Ulysses

suggests that the speaker may in fact be leading the Soul to its ultimate destruction. The

poem ends in a deceptive ambiguity. The kind of progress that the poem praises, whether

historical or spiritual, is left dangling in optimistic uncertainty, with the looming possibility—

given the precedent of Dante’s Ulysses—that progress ends in destruction. Just as he used

the “flame” of Ulysses in Drum-Taps, Whitman called upon Dante’s Inferno in “Passage to

India” to chant the complexities of the human subject in relation to time and history.
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POSTSCRIPT:

DANTE IN MODERN AMERICAN POP CULTURE

Year after year, Dante continues to have new lives in American culture. His Inferno, as

I mentioned in the introduction, is the foundational text for many popular books, video

games, and movies from the last several decades. Intriguingly, the Inferno’s relative popularity

is based not just on its sensational depictions of the terrors of hell, but also on its usefulness

to comment on contemporary wars. Just as Whitman’s wartime poetry and Longfellow’s

wartime translation work used Dante to respond to the American Civil War, so do many of

these popular texts allude to and incorporate the Inferno as a response to modern American

wars. One text, for example—Matthew Pearl’s bestselling 2003 mystery novel, The Dante

Club, which I’ll return to in a moment246—even foregrounds Longfellow’s act of translating

the Inferno as a plot device to comment subtly on contemporary U.S. wars in Afghanistan and

Iraq. What’s fascinating is that the antebellum and Civil War-era interest in associating Dante

with American political turmoil, as described in the preceding chapters, has never quite

ended. Longfellow, Whitman, and others in the mid-nineteenth century inaugurated a kind

of literary tradition in which Dante is evoked to describe the anxieties and horrors of

modern wars and the apparent moral and social degeneracy resulting therefrom—a tradition

now stretching into new genres and new media, making it stronger than ever.

The tradition takes many fascinating twists and turns. Modernist poets, who publicly

denounced Longfellow, nevertheless shared his enthusiasm for Dante as a wartime voice and

therefore ended up borrowing from Longfellow. Both Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s serious

interest in and overt references to Dante in their First World War-era poetry are traceable to

246
On a personal note, Pearl’s novel is the gateway that has allowed several people—from family members to
college presidents—to become interested in this dissertation .
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Longfellow’s and Whitman’s Civil-War-era interest in Dante. The Waste Land and Pound’s

Cantos famously foreground the Comedy, partly to point to the Comedy as a seminal text that a

degenerate, war-embittered culture must revive and reread. One of the most frequently

taught poems in American colleges and high schools, “The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock,” used so often as the representative modernist poem, opens with an epigraph

from Inferno XXVII—a canto, as we’ve seen, that contains one of Whitman’s “fitful flames.”

Interestingly, during World War I, Dante’s influence reached beyond literary

modernism. While Eliot and Pound were producing their poetry, the United States chartered

an Italian cruise ship, the SS Dante Alighieri, as a troop transport. By maintaining the ship’s

name, the United States Navy literally used Dante to make war. The postwar fate of the SS

Dante Alighieri, however, exemplifies the bitter ironies of twentieth-century warfare. The U.S.

Navy sold the ship to Japan after the war. It was renamed, then commissioned for use as a

hospital ship by the Japanese navy when Japan attacked China in 1937. Then in 1942, less

than two months after the U.S. declared war on Japan, the ship was hit (but not sunk) by an

American destroyer, even though hospital ships were not legitimate targets; it was attacked

because its status as a hospital ship was, apparently, “obscured by darkness.”247 In 1944, it

was damaged by a bomb dropped by a B-25, then collided with an oiler one month later, was

beached, and ultimately abandoned. It is as if, in this story, the SS Dante Alighieri was

consigned to increasingly worse circles of hell, as it participated in one horrible battle in one

horrible world war after the other.

The literary Dante-in-war tradition continued through the twentieth century, boosted

by World War II and Vietnam. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s acclaimed 1976 novel,

Inferno, contemporizes Dante’s poem by placing it in the genre of science fiction and

247See Bob Hackett, Sander Kingsepp and Peter Cundall, “IJN Hospital Ship ASAHI MARU: Tabular Record
of Movement,” combinedfleet.com, <http://www.combinedfleet.com/Asahi%20Maru_t.htm>.
 211

highlighting the devastation of twentieth-century warfare. The novel’s main character, Allen

Carpentier, is led through hell by a character named Benito (Niven and Pournelle’s substitute

for Virgil), whom Carpentier eventually discovers is none other than Benito Mussolini, the

key figure of modern fascism and ally of Hitler during World War II. In writing their novel,

Niven and Pournelle relied heavily on a translation of the Divine Comedy by the American

poet and Dante scholar John Ciardi, who had his own personal connections to modern war.

Ciardi flew numerous missions as a gunner in a B-29 during World War II, then published

war memoirs and poems, before being drawn to the work translating the Comedy in the early

1950s.248 Like Longfellow, Ciardi’s reactions to war helped initiate his project; the spectre of

war thus haunts his translation. His Inferno first appeared in 1954, and in his introduction to

the Comedy he notes that the Inferno is the most popular canticle because it is the “most

starkly dramatic” and that it “deals with coarseness and depravity.” He cautions his readers

(“the modern humanist”) to resist the temptation to view the Inferno as a “travelogue of a trip

through a concentration camp, in which the author sympathizes with the keepers.” 249

Readers, he suggests, who are agnostics and care nothing about Dante’s theology should

therefore read the poem as a “treatise on self-destructive behavior,” a moral warning that

could just as easily apply to nations as to individuals.

All of these examples provide a literary precedent for Pearl’s The Dante Club, which

brings into the twenty-first century the tradition of associating Dante with American wars. A

novel of historical fiction, The Dante Club turns Longfellow and his club into detectives

responsible for solving murder mysteries and finding a serial killer. This killer, who terrorizes

postwar Boston in 1865, murders his victims by mimicking punishments in the Inferno—a

248 Robert I. Boorstin, “John Ciardi, Poet, Essayist and Translator, 69,” New York Times (April 2, 1986), B6.

249 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), x-xv.
 212

plot very much like David Fincher’s 1995 Inferno-influenced movie Se7en. Pearl astutely

connects Longfellow’s translation work to the Civil War. The killer, Dan Teal, is a deranged

ex-Union soldier who attempts to cleanse Boston of sin and vice. At the end of the novel,

Teal goes after Longfellow for translating, and thus degrading, Dante’s poetry. Pearl

indicates that Teal is probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; he describes

Teal as a “permanent soldier” in whom “there was no one left beneath.”250 The novel’s

release in 2003 coincided with the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, warning and

reminding readers of the harmful psychological effects of war on soldiers. This theme later

was a major part of other cultural texts about these wars, such as the movies The Hurt Locker

and In the Valley of Elah, but The Dante Club deliberately and overtly employs Dante and the

Inferno in the exploration of this complex topic, one that emphasizes—as did Dante—the

eternally recurring effects of violence, the ways that killing never totally dies in the minds of

those who took part in it. PTSD, Pearl reminds us, is a kind of psychological Inferno.

Dante’s Inferno, the 2010 videogame, is even more explicitly about the Afghanistan

and Iraq wars than Pearl’s novel is. The game rewrites the Inferno’s backstory so that Dante is

a soldier in the Third Crusade, fighting in Saracen territory and occupying Muslim land. As

the game reveals through cutscenes, Dante has been a sort of warden at a military prison in

which Westerners have unjustly and indefinitely incarcerated men, women, and children. The

cutscenes emphasize the injustice of the Crusaders’ occupation of medieval Palestine, and

Dante the imperialist participates in several atrocities. In the Crusade, Dante commits all of

the seven deadly sins as a soldier and prison guard. (The gameplay involves the character

fighting his way through hell in part to atone for Dante’s wartime sins.) The game’s

emphasis on the imperialism of the Crusades is an obvious commentary on the imperialism

250 Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 406.
 213

of modern American and European foreign policy; Dante’s role in a military prison, for

example, echoes the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal in which U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners.

Moreover, Dante’s Inferno dramatizes the political theory of “blowback” by showing Dante as

a victim of his own foreign meddling. When he returns to Florence, he finds his lover

Beatrice dead, killed by an Arab assassin, who was the husband of a woman whom Dante

forced to be his lover during the crusade. It is this act of personal and political blowback that

initiates Dante’s descent into hell to rescue Beatrice and to atone for his imperialist sins.

Remarkably, Dante’s Inferno incorporates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, bringing to

gamers the poetry of a once-famous American poet who has long been ignored by many

critics and academics. Longfellow has experienced something of a revival in popular culture,

as we have seen exemplified in the commercial and popular success of The Dante Club. In the

videogame, not only does Virgil speak in paraphrases of Longfellow’s poetry, but each time

the avatar of Dante dies, a quotation from Longfellow’s translation appears prominently on-

screen. While playing, I counted thirteen different quotations from Longfellow’s Inferno, after

dying a few dozen times. The quotes are short and tend to sensationalize the horrors of hell.

For example, one line quotes Virgil from Inferno I: “Thou shalt hear the desperate

lamentations,” or “This way there never passeth a good soul” from Inferno III. More

sensational is this description from the beginning of Inferno XVIII: “Upon my right hand I

beheld new anguish / New torments, and new wielders of the lash.” Even though most

gamers probably wouldn’t notice it, I like this particular quote because it pays fleeting

homage to Longfellow and his historical context. The phrase “wielders of the lash” is one of

Longfellow’s overdetermined oddities, chosen to connect the Inferno to mid-nineteenth

century U.S. culture. The “lash,” as is well known, was a key image in abolitionist rhetoric,

used to describe the horrors of southern slavery. Here Longfellow went out of his way to
 214

describe the demons in Inferno XVIII as whip-wielding slavedrivers; Dante doesn’t mention

the demons holding whips until much later in the canto, and Longfellow’s contemporaries

used phrases much more generic than “wielders of the lash,” such as “executioners of

wrath” and “tormentors.” Whether deliberate or not, the videogame’s use of this quotation

honors Longfellow’s commitment to revive Dante for the important events of his day—

much like the videogame employs Dante to comment on modern warfare.

Recently, walking through Barnes and Noble, I saw a copy of the Inferno at the front

of the store, a copy apparently meant for curious, literary-minded individuals who have

heard of Dante’s importance but have never read him. The translation was, of course,

Longfellow’s. Why did they choose this particular translation, and why does it still survive, I

wondered? Part of the reason for its survival, I think, is its powerful evocation of the literary

tradition it helped start, a tradition that links Dante’s Inferno to modern warfare. Even before

I started this project, I played Fallout 3, a game which depicts the aftermath of global nuclear

war, and I walked into a bar filled with disfigured mutants called “The Ninth Circle.” And I

played Rainbow Six: Vegas, in which my swat team had to find a group of terrorists hiding in

an Inferno-themed casino called Dante’s. The Inferno’s continuing presence in games like these

and in American culture is, I think, linked to its historical introduction in the United States

and its surge of popularity during the Civil War. Beginning with Longfellow and Whitman,

Americans have used Dante in imaginative ways to deepen the horrors of modern war, both

to educate readers, viewers, and gamers and to entertain them. In contemporary works like

The Dante Club and Dante’s Inferno, we see Longfellow’s nineteenth-century endorsement of

Dante and the origins of Dante’s emergence into American culture quite clearly, and these

works tell us that we should see them quite clearly. Not only has this tradition perpetuated
 215

Longfellow’s literary survival, it has reintroduced Dante to a new generation interested in

new media—most notably video games.

Yet the cultural use of Dante in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems

hopelessly stuck on the Inferno. We’re fixated on the horrors and tortures of Dante’s first

canticle, even though Dante himself (and Longfellow) did not want us to fixate on them, but

instead wanted us to move beyond them. What we can hope, I suppose, is that someday the

popular understanding of Dante will come to embrace the Purgatorio and Paradiso as well,

once the culture finds itself again at the end of war, instead of stuck seemingly forever in the

midst of it. Longfellow, after all, found a cultural use for the Paradiso as the nation entered

Reconstruction. If anything, the Paradiso offers us peace in community and reconciliation

with God—messages that our contemporary fixation on the Inferno shows us that we need. It

has been far too long since Dante’s book of redemption has had the cultural resonance that

his book of excruciating horror continues to command.

 216

APPENDIX A. TABLES
 217

Table A1. A Comparison between Cooke and Cary.

From Cary’s translation Cooke’s revision of Cary

. . . Oh, thou Pisa! Shame Pisa! Thou burning shame of all who be
Of all the people, who their dwelling make Dwellers within that region of delight,
In that fair region, where the Italian voice Where sweetest is the voice of Italy!
Is heard; since that they neighbors are so slack Since man is slow to punish thee aright—
To punish, from their deep foundations rise May firm Capraia and Gorgona rise
Capraia and Gorgona, and dam up From their isled roots and dam to drowning height
The mouth of Arno; that each soul in thee The waves of Arno—till thy perishing cries
May perish in the waters. What if fame Prove that thou payest to the last bloody mite,
Reported that thy castles were betray’d Even pang for pang, thy debt of cruelties!
By Ugolino, yet no right hadst thou
To stretch his children on the rack. For them, Thou vile! Thou murder-fronted! What if fame
Brigata, Uguccione, and the pair Reported that thy castles were betrayed
Of gentle ones, of whom my song hath told, By that fierce sire? Doth it abate the shame
Their tender years, thou modern Thebes, did make Leprous upon thee for his children dead?
Uncapable of guilt. Brigata, Hugo, and the sweet ones—twin
In gentleness—of whom my song hath said,
If sin there were, how might these join therein?
Thou modern Thebes! Their very childhood made
These tender ones incapable of sin!

Note: This table displays a selection from Inferno XXXIII in Henry Cary’s translation of the
Divine Comedy and a selection from Cooke’s revision of Cary in The Southern and Western
Magazine and Literary Review (1846). I have placed additions made by Cooke in italics.
 218

Table A2. A Comparison of Longfellow’s Translation to Rossetti’s and Carlyle’s.

Longfellow’s translation of Inferno I, lines 21-36 Rossetti’s translation of Inferno I

And even as he, who, with distressful breath, And like as he is who with panting breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore, Issued from out the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes; Turns to perilous water, and doth gaze:
So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward, So did my spirit, which was fleeing still,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass Turn itself round to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left. That never any living person left.
After my weary body I had rested, After I had reposed my weary frame,
The way resumed I on the desert slope, I took new way along the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower. So that the firm foot was the lower still;
And lo! almost where the ascent began, And lo! nigh at beginning the ascent,
A panther light and swift exceedingly, A panther, light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er And which was covered with a spotted hide:
And never moved she from before my face, And from before my face she would not go;
Nay, rather did impeded so much my way, Nay, rather, she impeded so my path
That many times I to return had turned. That I was many times turned to turn back.

----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------

Longfellow’s translation of Inferno XXXIII, Carlyle’s translation of Inferno XXXIII

lines 64-75

I calmed me then, not to make them more sad. Then I calmed myself, in order not to make them
That day we all were silent, and the next. more unhappy. That day and the next were all mute.
Ah! obdurate earth, wherefore didst thou not open? Ah, hard earth! why didst thou not open?
When we had come unto the fourth day, Gaddo When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo
Threw himself down outstretched before my feet, threw himself stretched out at my feet,
Saying, 'My father, why dost thou not help me?' saying, 'Father! why don't you help me?'
And there he died; and, as thou seest me, There he died; and even as thou seest me,
I saw the three fall one by one, between saw I the three fall one by one, between
The fifth and the sixth; whence I betook me, the fifth day and the sixth, when I betook me,
Already blind, to groping over each, already blind, to groping over each;
And three days called them after they were dead; and three days called them, after they were dead;
Then hunger did what sorrow could not do." Then fasting had more power than grief."

Note: I have broken up Carlyle’s prose rendering so that comparisons can be more easily
made.
 219

Table A3. A Comparison of some of Longfellow’s endnotes to footnotes from Cary’s and
Carlyle’s translations.

Longfellow, Inferno I (pg. 221) Carlyle, Inferno I (pg. 14)

“The action of the poem begins on Good Friday of “The action of the poem begins on Good Friday of
the year 1300, at which time Dante, who was born in the year 1300 . . . and Dante was at that time 35 years
1265, had reached the middle of the Scriptural of age. The Bible, with which he was well acquainted,
threescore years and ten.” says: “The day of our years are threescore years and
ten.” Psalm xc. 10

Longfellow, Inferno I (221-222) Carlyle, Inferno I (15-16)

“Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, which is a kind of “The “Delectable Mountains” of our own Bunyan.”
Divine Comedy in prose, says: “ […] They went til they
came to the Delectable Mountains . . .”

Longfellow, Inferno III (230) Cary, Inferno III (65)

[Quotes Shakepeare’s Measure for Measure III.i.119-127] [Quotes Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure III.i.121-
122]
Longfellow, Inferno VII (249)
Carlyle, Inferno VII (82)
“’Is not this a cursed vice?’ says Chaucer in The
Persones Tale . . . speaking of wrath. . . . “for envie “ Accidie, or slouth maketh a man hevy, thoughtful
blindeth the herte of a man, and ire troubleth a man, and wrawe. Envie and ire maken bitternisse in herte,
and accidie maketh him hevy, thoughtful, and wrawe. which bitternesse is mother of accidie, and benimeth
Envie and ire maken bitternisse in herte, which him the love of alle goodnesse; than is accidie the
bitternesse is mother of accidie, and benimmeth him anguish of a trouble herte.” Chaucer, Persones Tale.
the love of alle goodnesse; than is accidie the anguish
of a trouble herte.”

Longfellow, Inferno XII (269) Cary, Inferno XII (113)

137. Nothing more is known of these highwaymen 2. Two noted marauders, by whose depredations the
than that the first infested the Roman sea-shore, and public ways in Italy were infested. The latter was of a
that the second was of a noble family of Florence. noble family of Pazzi in Florence.

Note: For the translations compared, see the Divine Comedy, Vol. I, trans. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867); and Henry Francis Cary, The Vision; or the
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri (Philadelphia: Appleton, 1845).
 220

APPENDIX B. FIGURES
 221

Figure B1. Page images from Botta’s Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet. These are
examples of Botta’s 265-page presentation of the Divine Comedy in the latter part of his book.
Most of this section simply quotes from Cary’s English translation of the Divine Comedy, and
includes several prose interjections (as on pg. 235 above) that simply summarize the poetic
passages that are not included. While Botta’s biography and commentary in the earlier part
of the book are politically charged, the prose summaries in this section of the book interject
relatively little, if any, commentary.
 222

Figure B2. The page layout of Henry Francis Cary’s 1805-1806 Inferno. Photo courtesy of the
Widener library at Harvard University.
 223

Figure B3. Pages from Henry Francis Cary’s 1819 edition of The Vision of Dante Alighieri.
This is the first edition in which paratextual footnotes become, visually, a key response to
the text itself. Note the inclusion of the canto summary, titled “Argument,” which is
supposed to encapsulate the basic narrative action in each canto, but which also interprets
each canto.
 224

Figures B4. Versions of Cary’s Dante. Henry Francis Cary’s Vision was included in the series
The Works of British Poets, the first American printing of the Divine Comedy. The title page is
pictured left. On many books, Cary’s name took preeminence over Dante’s, as if Cary
owned or possessed Dante. The binding shown (pictured right) is a re-bound version of an
1831 edition. See Dante Alighieri, The Vision, trans. Henry Francis Cary (London: John
Taylor, 1831). The photo on the right appears courtesy of the Widener library at Harvard
University.
 225

Figure B5. The page layout of Thomas W. Parsons’ 1843 The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno.
Introductions to all cantos include extremely short canto summaries, as compared to Cary’s
Vision, and display both the Italian (“inferno”) and English rendering of “hell.” Parsons
included minimal scholarly commentary in his endnotes, as depicted in a page from his
“Notes.”
 226

Figure B6. Front cover of the 1845 Appleton edition of Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision.
The cover features John Flaxman’s sketch of Dante. This cover was used for the 1850
Appleton edition as well, but it was replaced by a brown, Gothic cover—which had no
image and only the word “Dante”—for Appleton’s 1853 and 1858 editions. Photo appears
courtesy of the Widener library at Harvard University.
 227

Figure B7. Pages from Thomas Aitken Carlyle’s 1849 translation of the Inferno. The leftmost
image shows a standalone canto summary, called “Argument.” The image on the right
shows a typical page from the translation. Note the four layers of text—Carlyle’s translation,
the poem in Italian, footnotes to the poem, and then footnotes to the translation.
 228

Figure B8. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s proof of his 1867 translation of the Divine
Comedy. In the endnotes to Inferno II, Longfellow at first referred to Henry Francis Cary’s
footnotes in Cary’s translation, but then deleted them in the proofing stage. Image appears
courtesy of the Houghton library at Harvard University.
 229

Figure B9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s proof of the endnotes to Inferno XVI. Here
Longfellow deletes a quotation from Carlyle’s Inferno, a statement that gives a confident
interpretation of what has always been a contentious, ambiguous symbol: Dante’s cord.
Image appears courtesy of the Houghton library at Harvard University.
 230

Figure B10. Comparison of two “Table of Contents.” The “Table of Contents” to Henry
Francis Cary’s 1844 The Vision (left) compared to the “Table of Contents” to Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 Divine Comedy (right). While Cary’s “Table of Contents” is
sparse, taking up just one half-page, Longfellow’s describes each canto and takes up thirteen
pages (in the three volumes combined).
 231

Figure B11. The page layout of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 Divine Comedy. The
leftmost image shows a typical page from the three-volume translation, with space between
and around each line. By contrast, the image on the right shows a typical page from the
endnotes; the two-column format in smaller font visually indicates that the notes are of
different importance than the text of the poem.
 232

Figure B12. Modern Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, titled Dante’s Inferno, which
shows the front and back covers. The book was part of the marketing campaign for Dante’s
Inferno the videogame. Image appears courtesy of Del Rey, a division of Ballantine Books and
Random House, Inc., copyright 2010.
 233

Figure B13. Caryle’s influence on Whitman. An example of a page (pictured left) from John
Carlyle’s 1849 translation of the Inferno, compared to a page (pictured right) from Walt
Whitman’s prose-poetry hybrid in Two Rivulets. The image from Carlyle shows the
compactness of the three sections on each page, the prose translation, the poem in Italian,
and the explanatory footnotes. The page layout surely contributed to Whitman’s opinion of
Dante as a poet with a remarkable “economy of words,” short and to the point. Given
Whitman’s fondness for this Carlyle translation, its page layout, along with the layouts of
other poetry translations, quite possibly influenced Whitman’s unique hybrid layout of Two
Rivulets.
 234

Figure B14. Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno XXVI. Walt Whitman examined this
illustration just prior to visiting Falmouth Camp in December 1862. Ulysses and Diomedes
are two spirits in one flame. Virgil and Dante stand while listening to Ulysses, whose speech
is likened to flickering fire. The topics in the canto—flames, war, whirlwinds, progress,
poetry—are all major topics in several of Whitman’s soldier poems in Drum-Taps.
 235

Figure B15. Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno I. Walt Whitman examined this illustration
sometime in late 1862. The image depicts Dante at the beginning of his journey, lost in a
dark wood. The illustration highlights Dante as a lone figure surrounded by the haunting
darkness of the natural world. The tree roots and vines on the ground threaten to grab or
ensnare him. The scene, as I argue in Chapter IV, heavily influenced Whitman’s Civil War
poem “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame.”
 236

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