SOURCE: "The Significance of Terza Rima," in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983, pp. 3-16.

In the following essay, Dante's terza rima is seen as a model for the "synthesis of time and meaning into history."

The perennial problem in literary interpretation is the problem of the relationship of form to content, or of poetics to thematics. In recent years, there can be little doubt that formalism has occupied our attention, both in linguistics and in criticism, with Russian formalism, American New Criticism and the formalism of the French Structuralists. The proper concern of poetics, according to Roman Jakobson, for example, is metalinguistic: not with the message itself, but rather with the message's awareness of itself as message. The most creative and interesting critical developments of the past few decades have been characterized by a concern for poetics, in Jakobson's sense, at least in the...