Last night’s post discussed ways of draining the world of meaning.
For some tastes, poets like Dante do the opposite, supplying too much meaning.
See a New Republic review, dated Oct. 5, in which Harvard atheist Helen Vendler discusses Dante’s
“… assertion that Beatrice herself ‘was this number [nine],’ since nine is the square of three, the number belonging to the Trinity. Dante’s fantastic reasoning requires pages of annotation, which Frisardi, drawing on a number of commentators, furnishes to the bewildered reader. The theological elaboration of the number nine— merely one instance of how far from our own* are Dante’s habits of thought— will convince any doubting reader that the Vita Nuova requires annotation far beyond what its pages might seem to demand.”
Related material— Ninefold in this journal, and remarks by Joseph Campbell in a post, Plan 9, from Sept. 5.