Would Dante host a creative writing workshop?
Whatever his claims, or the modern scholars’ views as to his claims to authentic vision, Dante remains the most creative of the most creative writers the written word has ever known. A kind of exuberance of creative spirit that has on occasion prompted experts, such as Barbara Reynolds and Giulio Leoni, to speculate that Dante was actually under some kind of psychoactive influence as he wrote his Commedia, facilitated by his membership in the Florentine Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries – a seductive idea overall.
Poets always draw on poetic traditions, and while Dante drew on existing strands of European creative legacies, he produced something not just sui generis, but mind-boggingly otherworldly.
And if he wrote the world’s first comparative linguistic treatise (De Vulgari Eloquentia), he didn’t leave us a similar textbook on how to write fiction that is not quite fiction, fantasy that is not quite fantasy, unclassifiable poetry in mixed or novel genres and prosodical forms. In other words, he didn’t write or give a masterclass on creative writing.
But would he have endorsed our own tradition of ‘anything can be taught and anything can be learned’, especially when conveyed propositionally, as in a creative writing class?
Because of his thunderous personality and disposition (Dante was by all accounts a stern, severe and difficult man), he would likely have shunned any workshop-based collaborative approach to poetic writing – the closest approximation to ‘creative writing’ the 14th century would’ve known. He would’ve protested that writing is a solitary act, learning is prosecuted silently, and process-driven literate creation is the very antithesis of the effort where the mind communes directly and without mediation with the divine. And, if my reading of Dante the man is at any rate correct, he would’ve told everyone to bugger off.
A more charitable Dante would, however, have pointed out that writing is fundamentally meditative, divine turtles all the way down. And the only way to approach the written word is by ruminating the divine ideas in the mind and by succumbing to the rapture of transcendental vision. If there is a creative writing workshop to attend, there is one in the Empyrean, and it can be reached by a kind of ineffable embodied-disembodied experience, the kind of stuff he claimed Paradiso was made of – a beatific vision that transforms the mind and the body into a receptacle primed for creative generation.