Dante and the Night Journey

“Alan Williamson, a notable poet, has an unparalleled feel for Dante’s great work. His book is an adventure—a marvelous and learned guide for the descent into shadowed places and for the gradual ascent from despair into illumination. Through his own deep sympathy and excellent writing, Williamson is marvelous company on that celebrated road. His work deepened my understanding of Dante and of my own life.” – John Tarrant, Director, Pacific Zen Institute, and the author of The Light Inside the Dark and Bring Me the Rhinoceros

“The poet-scholar Alan Williamson’s Dante and the Night Journey takes us on a poet’s psychological, personal, and spiritual journey through Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s own anxiety, affliction, and failure parallel modern psychological despair, but recovery is possible with hope and love. This book points to how “Dante tells us some-thing about the deepest levels of the human mind.” – Brenda Deen Schildgen, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis

“The genius of Alan Williamson’s Dante and the Night Journey is not only in his masterful reading of the Comme-dia but in his accurate reading of our need, across seven centuries, for it. Our night journey, like Dante’s, finds a path from exile and dread to recovery and reinvention.” – David Shaddock, PhD, author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field

Dante and the Night Journey articulates a psychological approach to the Commedia, based on the Jungian concept of the descent into the darkest possibilities of the self and of human nature, which is necessary for spiritual progress. Different chapters explore Dante’s growth in the problematic areas of love, anger, and ambition, and analogies between his journey through Purgatory and contemporary experiences of recovery. The last chapter, “Identity in Paradise,” examines telepathic communication there in the light of Object Relations work on intersubjectivity. The book emphasizes Dante’s universality and takes issue with the tendency among professional dantisti to read him exclusively in terms of the theology of his time. It will be of particular use to those who teach Dante to undergraduates, allowing students to connect their reading with their own lives. The personal side of the book will also speak to those who have undergone their own night journeys, or embarked on a spiritual path.

Alan Williamson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Franciscan Notes (2019), and five books of literary criticism. He is the co-translator, with Jeanne Foster, of The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bi-anca Tarozzi, which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Poetry in Translation. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is retired from the University of California, Davis, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.