Hollywood and the Gossip Columnists

Byron’s Catholic Dante

“…Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom as I was able to treasure in my mind shall now be matter of my song. (Paradiso, I, 4-12) 24 Indeed, Byron's religious Dante, who has 'forgotten' the world, is ultimately truer to La Divina Commedia than Ellis's worldly one, for however concerned with the world Dante was, for him 'the end of all desires' (Paradiso, XXXIII, 46) is God, the 'Essence' of whose light 'is of such pre-eminence that every good found outside of it is nothing but a light from its radiance' (Paradiso,XXVI,(31)(32)(33). And Dante's final encounter with God at the end of Paradiso is a complete forgetting of absolutely everything else:…”

“…In all the lower sphere it is the spirits met within them who tell of them; here Beatrice alone is Dante's instructor. 32 Numerous other little details see Byron pushing off from the idea of Beatrice as Dante's 'mistress', and steering instead towards a purely spiritual Beatrice. Ellis takes issue with Byron's 'nought on earth could more my bosom move' because we in fact know very well that other things could Dante's bosom move after he lost Beatrice; indeed this is the entire point of Dante's undertaking his journey in the Commedia, for the pursuit of types of 'falso piacere' ('false pleasures') after Beatrice's death led him into the dark wood that she rescues him from.…”

“…If this un-Byronic voice is an echo of Dante's, 'Shall pour his soul out o'er Jerusalem' is also an echo of Tasso's voice as Byron dramatized this in the earlier 'The Lament of Tasso', where Tasso tells the reader that he has pour'd my spirit over Palestine, In honour of the sacred war for Him, The God who was on earth and is in heaven, For he has strengthen'd me in heart and limb, That through this sufferance I might be forgiven, I have employ'd my penance to record How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored. ('The Lament of Tasso', [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] Byron may be vaguely recalling and lazily repeating himself here, but something more interesting might be going on instead, since this echo signals a samenessor, better perhaps, continuitythat ties Dante and Tasso together not simply as Italian writers but as religious, Catholic ones. This is seen in a shared endorsing of 'the sacred war' of the Crusades but also, and more importantly, in a shared sense of contemplating past or future worlds as essentially a religious activity with spiritual results.…”