Wicksteed, P. H., Dante and Aquinas (London, 1913); From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, two essays on the vital relations between Dante’s successive works (Manchester University Press, 1922).
Witte, K., Essays on Dante: selected, translated and edited, with introduction, notes, and appendices, by C. M. Lawrence and P. H. Wicksteed. London, 1898.
Besides Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola, the modern editions of the other early commentators, Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli (Udine, 1892), Jacopo della Lana (Bologna, 1866, etc.), the Ottimo (Pisa, 1827-29), Pietro Alighieri (Florence, 1845), Francesco da Buti (Pisa, 1858-62), are worth consulting. Extracts, with notably better texts, are given by Biagi in La D.C. nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento.
For the question of the Letter of Frate Ilario, see P. Rajna, Testo della lettera di frate Ilario e osservazioni sul suo valore storico, in Dante e la Lunigiana (Milan, 1909). On the date of composition of the Divina Commedia, cf. Parodi, Poesia e storia nella D.C.; Ercole, Le tre fasi del pensiero politico di Dante, in the Miscellanea dantesca of the Gior. stor. della lett. ital., and D’Ovidio in the Nuova Antologia, March, 1923. In addition to the works already cited, published for the sexcentenary of 1921, may be particularly mentioned the sumptuous volume Dante e Siena (Siena, 1921), and Dante, la Vita, le Opere, le grandi città dantesche, Dante e l’Europa (Milan, 1921).
The Giornale Dantesco, the Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, and Studi danteschi diretti da Michele Barbi (Florence) are invaluable periodical publications.
Of the numerous English translations of the Divina Commedia, besides those of Cary and Longfellow, may be mentioned that of C. E. Norton in prose; Haselfoot and M. B. Anderson in terza rima; G. Musgrave of the Inferno in Spenserian stanzas, and H. J. Hooper in amphiambics; C. L. Shadwell of the Purgatorio and Paradiso in the metre used by Andrew Marvell in his Horatian “Ode to Cromwell.” The terza rima is a measure not easily adapted to English speech. First introduced into English by Chaucer, with the modifications which the difference of our prosody from the Italian requires, in two fragments of A Compleint to his Lady (Minor Poems vi. in Skeat’s Student’s Chaucer), it was used by Wyatt and Surrey, by Sir Philip Sidney and other Elizabethans, and even once by Milton (in his paraphrase of Psalm ii.). Among the few notable English poems in terza rima written during the nineteenth century, Shelley’s unfinished Triumph of Life stands supreme, and in it we may in very truth:
Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme
Of him who from the lowest depths of hell,
Through every paradise and through all glory,
Love led serene, and who returned to tell