from “In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia” by Vittorio Montemaggi
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“Poetry, for Dante, is one of the highest expressions language. And, give his understand of language as both a physical and a rational phenomenon, one can see why Dante might have regarded poetry, with its conscious foregrounding of the physical as much as the rational features of language, as among the noblest forms of communication. Given the importance ascribed by Dante to the embodied nature of human beings, moreover, one can see why he might have ben profoundly attracted not simply by poetry but specifically by narrative poetry, with the possibility this entails for the representation of the ways in which language not only speaks, but also generates community; and of the ways in which language not only expresses understanding but embodies understanding as individual human beings move and interact in space and time (and, in the Empyrean, even beyond space and time); and finally, of the ways in which language might be related not only to saying and knowing but also to loving. end id]
