Dante in Gabriele D’annunzio’s Poetry and Prose: From Mystical Lover to Poeta Vate

Dante is a recurring presence in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s prose and lyric works, both as a literary echo and as the object of creative refashioning. One only needs to think of the innumerable more or less literal quotations from the medieval poet that D’Annunzio inserts into his poetry, novels, and personal diaries. Dante inhabits D’Annunzio’s imagination from his early poetic production to his theatrical work Francesca da Rimini, a retelling of Canto 5, his war prose, and his prose poem Il Notturno, which in its structure repeats the three cantiche of the Divina Commedia. In this article, I do not discuss Dante’s literary influence on D’Annunzio—a topic on which much scholarship has been produced—but present D’Annunzio’s reinvention and representation of the character of the Florentine poet. Drawing on Paolo Valesio’s theoretical premise in Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame, I consider Dante in D’Annunzio’s literary production as a “cultural sign,” that is, “some–body who finds himself or herself in the process of sign production set into motion by somebody else.” The sign Dante appears in a multiplicity of contexts, as throughout the centuries many authors have used both the life of the poet and the theme of the Commedia to comment upon their own existential or political situation, or else they have made Dante a trope for specific elements in the cultural discourses of their time. For instance, nineteenthcentury European Romanticism, in particular Thomas Carlyle in his Hero and Hero Worship, made Dante a crucial element in the creation of the myth of a “national genius.” Indeed, the manipulation of a given “body” results in a cultural operation that turns that body into a sign. Here, I show that D’Annunzio’s use of Dante reflects his relationship with the political establishment of post-unification Italy and his