Geologia e poetica: note sulla ricezione dantesca nel tardo Goethe

Moving from Goethe’s reflections on Dante’s Divine Comedy (1826), the essay analyses Goethe’s translations of selected verses from Inferno XI and XII, in order to address the notion of form and the debate on the poetics of Goethe’s late literary works, a topic which has gathered a lot of attention lately. In this regard, the morphogeologic structure of the «aggregate», as it emerges from Goethe’s translations as well as from his notes on Dante, while opposing the idea of structure, provides an excellent means for the representation of variety, and multiplicity. In this the terza rima plays an important role.