Dante's Metaphors and the Model Reader

Evaluation of metaphor in poetry is inevitably a subjective affair. 1 This is especially clear in the case of Dante, whose use of the trope has provoked some widely divergent responses. T. S. Eliot, for example, declared that Dante ‘employs very simple language, and very few metaphors’, an opinion that can to some extent be explained by his tendency to compare Dante with Shakespeare. 2 More baffling are the comments of Eugenio Montale that Dante used fewer metaphors ‘than Eliot would have us believe’ and progressively fewer metaphors the longer the poem goes on, a statement that misrepresents Eliot almost as much as it does Dante. 3 The response of most readers to literary metaphor remains an individual and private affair; other readers do their responding in public, and it is with some of these public responses that the final section of this book is concerned.