“Now he is scattered among a hundred cities,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.” Auden was ruminating on the recent death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, but the words could serve as an epitaph for any great author. Poets like to imagine that their creations confer afterlives—for themselves and their subjects—impervious to the assaults of “wasteful war” and “sluttish time” so ruinous to monuments of marble or metal (see Horace’s Ode 3.30 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55). But as Auden recognized, the moment an author dies, his or her legacy is on the loose. Any chance those poems have of a future depends on what readers make of them: “The words of a dead man,” Auden continues, “Are modified in the guts of the living.”
In Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi, literature professor at Bard College, offers a vivid account of this process of cultural digestion, and, at times, indigestion, from the Middle Ages to the present day. At first glance, such a slim book—little more than two hundred pages, including notes—would hardly seem adequate to the task, given the number, ardor, and productivity of Dante’s devotees over the centuries. Yet, as Luzzi argues in the introduction, those are exactly the reasons against attempting a truly comprehensive reception history of the Comedy (as Dante called it—Divine was added later by a Venetian printer). Such a study’s girth would be measured in hundreds of thousands of pages. No one would read it.