Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/143

Rh It is said that great poets are always before or behind their ages; Dante was no exception, Dante. yet he preëminently lived within his time. Above all else, his epic declares the intense personality that must have voice; not merely expression of the emotion that inspired his minor numbers—themselves enough for fame—addressed to Beatrice, but also of his insight concerning the master forces of human life and faith and the historic turmoil of his era. It was composed when he had matured through knowledge and experience to that ethical comprehension which is the sustaining energy of Job, of the Greek dramatists, of Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. Then he cast his spirit, as one takes a mould of the body, in the matrix of the "Divina Commedia." In this self-perpetuation he interpreted his own time as no modern genius can hope to do,—and this is the achievement of personality at its highest. That he might succeed, he was disciplined by controversy, war, grief, exile, until the scales fell from his eyes, and he saw, within the glory of his Church's exaltation, the vice, tyranny, superstition, of that Church at that time, of his people, of his native state. His heart was strengthened for judgment, his manhood for hate, and his vision was set heavenward for an ideal. His epic, then, while dramatically creative, is The man, the age, and the poem. at the apex of subjective poetry, doubly so from its expression of both the man and the time; hence our chief example of the mixed