Hermes' Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella by Sherry Roush (review)

230 Reviews and in Dante's lyric poems, the central part of the book examines Dante's metapho? rical language in the three cantiche, but focuses primarily on the Paradiso. Gibbons attributes the high incidence of metaphors in the Paradiso to the religious and spiritual nature of its subject matter. Collectinga number of pertinent references, he maintains that Dante renewed traditional Christian metaphors in ways that affect the linguistic and metric structure. Gibbons hypothesizes that to rejuvenate his sources the poet employed three strategies or techniques: the selection of uncommon words, the extension of the metaphor by means of grammatical construction based on neologisms, and the search forrimas caras. He then analyses with convincing precision what he calls the 'grammar' of metaphor, that is to say 'the syntactic formin which the various elements are juxtaposed' (p. 81). Gibbons finds that Dante achieved striking effectsby combining the two terms of the comparison with a copulative verb ('e letizia era ferza del paleo' (Par. xvm. 42)), or through the use of a genitive link ('la punta del disio' (Par. xxn. 26)), or through the accumulation of adjectives, pronouns, and relative clauses that qualify individual metaphorical words. More commonly, in Gib? bons's view, Dante employed verb metaphors. The verbs he selected are traditional, but 'familiar ideas are revitalized simply by the brevity with which they are restated* (p. 85). The variety,the expansion, and the repetition of terms employed by the poet also contribute to this process of renewal of the common stock of imagery. Chapter 6 is a case study of metaphors in Canto 28 of the Paradiso. But in fact metaphoric pas? sages from the whole of the Divine Comedy are taken into account, thus transforming this brief but dense chapter into a reading that reveals the complexity and the level of formal elaboration of Dante's language which 'encourage the reader to re-evaluate a mode of expression that might otherwise have been taken forgranted' (p. 114). The closing section of the volume is perhaps less compelling but no less useful. It concentrates on the reader's response to Dante's metaphoric language. Three kinds of readers are considered: Dante's ideal reader, the Trecento and Renaissance com? mentators, and finally Petrarch. In the firstof these chapters, Gibbons examines the reactions that Dante expected from the model readers of his works, in particular the Vita nuova, the Convivio, and the Comedy, and concludes that Dante's model reader 'will use literal improprieties as signals to interpret the text metaphorically rather than resist the poetic driftand make carping criticisms' (p. 130). In the chapter dedicated to the medieval and Renaissance commentators' reading of the Comedy, Gibbons highlights how none of the early exegetes matches his own interpretation of Dante's use of metaphor. The only exception appears to be, at times, Benvenuto da Imola, whose appreciation of the stylistic features ofthe Comedy is well known. In the closing chapter of his book, Gibbons invites the reader to a deeper understanding of Dante's metaphors through their reception in Petrarch's poetry. Gibbons argues that Petrarch felt the violence with which Dante's metaphors 'disrupt the logic of semantics' as well as 'the formal experimentalism with which they challenge the reader's preconceptions' (p. 174). Metaphor in Dante is an important and noteworthy contribution to the understand? ing of Dante's use, creation, and renewal ofthe poetic language. University of Reading Paola Nasti Her mes' Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella. By Sherry Roush. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. ix + 249 pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8020-3712-7. This book examines six authors who, as poets, comment on their own work; the Hermes ' lyre of the title corresponds to the view that poetic self-commentary combines MLR, ioo.i, 2005 231 both hermeneutic and lyric dimensions. The authors selected are paired (DanteBoccaccio ; Lorenzo de' Medici-Girolamo Benivieni; Giordano Bruno-Tommaso Campanella) and located within three broad historical contexts (late Duecento to mid-Trecento; late Quattrocento Florence; and the milieu of Catholic Reformation at the turn of the seventeenth century). Each pairing involves contrasting forms of self-commentary (prosimetrical and self-gloss), and while individual authors are...

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