Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich Book

After p. 250
I am determined to complete Dante's Divine Comedy. Apart from the poetry of certain individuals, John Keats, for example, the only poetry that I can read is epic poetry. Homer, Virgil and Milton are miracles. I have made several attempts upon Mt. Inferno, but haven't read beyond the first ten or fifteen cantos of about six or seven translations. So obviously I must be missing something.

I've gotten over/under/around/beyond other obstacles of this kind by reading as many biographies of a poet or novelist as I can tolerate - and I love biography -, and if I find the subject appealing and the biographies fully illuminating of the writer's life and projects, then incomprehension vanishes.

I'm approaching Reynold's biography of Dante from this perspective. As biography Reynold's book is hardly worth the effort of slogging through her tedious writing. And I'm managing only because Dante, it seems to me, survives Reynold's presentation - somehow. And so I persevere.

At End.
When I was tempted to shelve her book (yet once more), I took heart from my recollection that despite the best efforts of Proust's biographers to reduce his life to dinner engagements and the contents of his address book, they couldn't obliterate altogether intriguing impressions of this highly interesting person. In this way they prepared me to read his marvelous novel straight through after twenty years of aborted assaults on Mt. Proust.

I finished Reynold's biography almost with regret. I did wish it longer, but as Reynolds says there are only 423 documents to draw from - a miracle in itself if one considers that Dante died in 1321, but still an insufficient basis for a door-stop of a book.

In any case, quite enlightening, especially when read in conjunction with Eric Auerbach's, Dante: Poet of the Secular World - the first book of my favorite critic/cultural historian.