Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill examines the link between Koch's poem and Dante's much older work of the same title, suggesting their connection is much stronger than a shared name.
Little is gained by calling a poem the same name as an easily recognizable, virtual icon of literary history if there is no connection whatsoever between the two. Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy, the third part of which is titled "Paradiso," has undoubtedly inspired countless poets, writers, playwrights, painters—artists of all kinds, for hundreds of years. Koch is likely no exception. But the twentieth-century poet's "Paradiso" does not overtly mention an inferno or a purgatory to go along with paradise, nor.....
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