Erich Auerbach'sDante: Poet of the Secular Worldis an inspiring introduction to one of world's greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of hisDivine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel First took imaginative form. Auerbach's study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement toMimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante's work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redeFined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity. CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy" IV. The Structure of the "Comedy" V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index

ERICH AUERBACH (1892-1957) was born in Berlin into a upper-middle class Jewish family. He received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Heidelberg, served in in the German army during World War I, then earned his doctorate in Romance philology from the University of Greifswald. Serving as a librarian for many years at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he then became a professor of Romance Philology at the University of Marburg.

In 1929, he published Dante, Poet of the Secular World to much acclaim, however after Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, he fled to Istanbul. There he worked as a professor at Istanbul State University, writing his famous work, Mimesis. In 1947 Auerbach moved to the United States, where he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and then professor of Romance Philology at Yale University. He died in Connecticut in 1957.

MICHAEL DIRDA is the winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He has been an editor and writer for The Washington Post Book World for the past twenty years.He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Translated by RALPH MANHEIM