" Dante's works and life are interwoven as are those of
no other of the poets who have written for all time. No other has so
written his autobiography. With Dante, external impressions and
internal experiences--sights, actions, thoughts, emotions,
sufferings--were all fused into poetry as they passed into his soul.
Practical life and imaginative life were with him one and indissoluble.
Not only was the life of imagination as real to him as the life of
fact, but the life of fact was clothed upon by that of imagination; so
that, on the one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a
part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is
the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his
visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive
external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him
where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world
was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or
his wanderings between Verona and Ravenna. So absolute was his
imagination, that it often so far controls his reader as to make it
difficult not to believe that the poet beheld with his mortal eyes the
invisible scenes which he describes.
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