jamesgray2

No cultural shift has been more consequential than when some societies decided that the ideal way to prepare an individual for social life is to keep her in school for 15 years of her life or more.

Modern society prizes cognitive development more than any other type of human development. We are not deemed ready to live with others until we’ve spent a big chunk of our lives rearing our brains. And for most of us in the West, it means spending many years of our lives surrounded by books and people who point us to more books.

The book experiment is extremely recent at the scale of human evolution. Yet the acceleration of visual learning in our culture is remarkable. Five hundred years ago, having access to a book was expensive at best and exceptional at worst. Today, most of us could afford putting together a small private library…

Surely there must be a circle in Hell reserved for literary critics who maliciously misread Dante.

John Carey’s discussion of Dante Alighieri in his latest book, A Little History of Poetry (Yale, 2020) has little on fairness, while being quite big on latter-day moralism. To wildly paraphrase Ben Johnson, A Little History has, at least in its depiction of the Florentine poet, small balance and lesse grace.

This is by no means a review of A Little History but simply a response to Carey’s cursory treatment, or shouldI say, mistreatment of Dante in the book (pp. 25-8). Chapter 5, ‘Continental Masters of the Middle Ages, Dante, [Arnaut] Daniel, Petrarch, Villon’, to which the discussion of Dante is confined, begins ex abrupto:

“Of all world-famous poets, none is less likely to appeal to the modern reader than Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321). This is not just because his poetry is soaked…