SOURCE: Mandelbaum, Allen. Introduction to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, pp. viii-xxi. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1982, Mandelbaum praises Dante's “poem of spectacle,” commenting on the poet's ability to traverse, in his mind, dizzying cosmic expanses and deep recesses of his soul.

Paradiso is a poem of spectacle, of wheeling shapes that enter and exit, form, re-form, and dis-form; of voices that discourse out of their faceless flames; of letters and words spelled out across the heavens by living lights in flight; of flames that shape the remarkable Eagle; of the vast amphitheater of the Celestial Rose in the tenth and final heaven, the Empyrean, where the blessed range in carefully orchestrated ranks.

That expanse is such that when, some two-thirds of the way through Paradise, the voyager turns his gaze back and downward toward the...