SOURCE: Jacoff, Rachel. “‘Shadowy Prefaces’: An Introduction to Paradiso.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, pp. 208-23. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Jacoff defines the Paradiso as an admirable and powerfully suggestive attempt to stretch poetical imagination beyond the conventional limits of language.

The God Invented and gave us vision in order that we might observe the circuits of intelligence in the heaven and profit by them for the revolutions of our own thought, which are akin to them, though ours be troubled and they are unperturbed; and that, by learning to know them and acquiring the power to compute them rightly according to nature, we might reproduce the perfectly unerring revolutions of the god and reduce to settled order the wandering motions in ourselves.

(Plato, Timaeus 46c)

The Paradiso is the continuation and culmination of the earlier canticles, and...