Contro il disordine del mondo: Paul Claudel lettore di Dante

This paper investigates the relationship between Claudel and Dante by examining two texts written by the French poet in 1921, on the occasion of the sixth centenary of Dante’s death. Claudel’s lectura Dantis is based on a need for rationality, order and peace that became acute after the traumatic shock of the First World War. Claudel was particularly attentive to Dante’s Paradise and Monarchy; in these works he found a rational theory to juxtapose to the tendency towards abstraction and the unconscious that characterised French poetry from Baudelaire to the 20th century