“As a Leaf on a Branch …”: Dante's Neologisms

Abstract

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in theCommedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in theArs poetica(The Art of Poetry[18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language inParadiso26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration inParadisothat joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

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