Again, in the Purgatorio, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII, occur passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools.
Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma l’altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore....
We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre....
It is one of the greatest merits of Dante’s poem that the vision is so nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as “poetry,” is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole.
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry’s “modern poet” who attempts “to produce in us a state.” A state, in itself, is nothing whatever.
M. Valéry’s account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and with the tendencies of such a work as William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader’s particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.