[New-Poetry] Dante on drugs

[Anny Ballardini]

This is all very interesting. About 2 or 3 years ago at a meeting on Dante, the speakers were able to show that he was in contact with secret sects that studied Eastern mysteries, that he made use of drugs, and so many other things. As it often happens when we support our thesis, the examples quoted fit like a glove, the ones we omit are the disturbing points. 
I was recently surprised (through the study of Canto XXV by Pound) to notice that he put Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell, and as Wikipedia recites:
"(the circle is for perpetrators of fraud and the fourth pit being the location for soothsayers or diviners.) He was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back; while in life he strove to look forward to the future, in Hell he must only look backward. Tiresias' daughter Manto is also assigned her punishment here."

Tiresias in my imagination is one of the sweetest characters. Something like this disturbs me and I have no idea of his reasons for doing so.

  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 7:49 PM


  http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2409872,00.html
  Dante on drugs
  Peter Hainsworth

  Barbara Reynolds
  DANTE
  The poet, the political thinker, the man
  488pp. I. B. Tauris. £20.
  1 845 11161 3

  In many ways, we think we know where we are with Dante. As a writer who is eager to give his readers a moral education, he spells out intelligibly and forcefully what he thinks about a whole range of issues – human responsibility, the proper relations between Church and State, what is wrong with contemporary society, and so on. Nor has he any hesitations about telling us about himself – his love for Beatrice, his feelings at being exiled from Florence, his friends and enemies, his aims as a writer. The works and the personality may be rich and complex, and there is an obvious chasm between the early fourteenth century and the early twenty-first, but on the whole we feel that we are reading him right, or at least that with appropriate efforts on our part we should be able to do so.

  Then we reach a limit and the picture begins to crumble
   

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