La critica dantesca di Harold Bloom

The essay reconstructs Harold Bloom's approach to Dante, placing it within the framework of his theory of the anxiety of influence. Bloom sees in Dante not only the poet of medieval theology and Christianity, but above all an author who wields absolute poetic power over his successors. The Divine Comedy thus becomes an inescapable model, capable of generating in modern poets a tension between admiration and resistance. Bloom emphasizes Dante's visionary power, his mastery of language, and his ability to create characters and situations that transcend historical boundaries, establishing themselves as universal. This makes Dante not only a traditional classic, but a cumbersome presence that forces modern poets to engage with him in terms of struggle. The essay also shows how Bloom, despite being deeply secularized, considers Dante essential not for his doctrinal content, but for his poetic energy, which he compares to that of Shakespeare. Both, in his view, represent the absolute pinnacle of Western literature. In short, Bloom reads Dante as a poet of imaginative power, who dominates posterity more for his art than for his theology, becoming a paradigm for any reflection on literary tradition.