SOURCE: “The Analogy of a Poem: Dante's Dream,” Sewanee Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, April-June, 1966, pp. 438-49.

In the following essay, Baker explores how Dante sought to represent pure beauty through images that function allegorically.

We should perhaps begin our reading of the Divine Comedy by keeping in mind Aristotle's dictum that poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history because it tends to express the universal rather than the particular. By the universal, the philosopher meant “how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act according to the law of probability or necessity and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to personages”. One need not read many pages of the writings of a medieval historian like Gregory of Tours or Geoffrey of Monmouth to recognize that history then was the study of character as it...