Supreme Fiction

Dante and Virgil in the Underworld

By:

Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix

Salon of 1822

        Delacroix was a French Romantic painter at the close of the 18th and into the 19th century. He is known for his expressive brushstrokes and optical effects of shapes and colors. He emphasized color and movement like his predecessors Rubens and other painters of the Renaissance. He was a talented lithographer and illustrated scenes from Shakespeare and Goethe as well as others. It is also mentioned that Delacroix took inspiration from Lord Byron, particularly in their shared interest in the "forces of the sublime...of nature in often violent action."
       I say all this because of the link I found to Stevens. In the final bonus canto at the end of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens' line reads "To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up Down. It is a war that never ends."......Vigilian cadence...this caught my eye because I knew that through this Vigil reference, I could find a painting that might help to encapsulate the rest of the poem. It seems to have been a theme for me through this class that the best way for me to express what I see in one of Stevens' poems is through finding a painting that pairs with it. A sort of combating art with art, for I feel that in a battle of words, Stevens will always win out.
     This painting Dante and Virgil in the Underworld did just that, again it was a painting I had encountered previously and one that exudes tremendous passion and romantic emotion. Stevens final, final cantos in this section addresses a soldier and the war that is going on "between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night." In the painting Dante is in the red cowl, and is attempting to cross the River Styx described in Dante's Eighth Canto, using the guidance of Virgil to steady him as they travel through the water laden with heavy souls of fraud.
      The final stanza of this very last, eleventh cantos, reads:

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

How gladly with proper words the solider dies,

If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

....Words are our guidance, they are a "passion that we feel, not understand" (Cantos IV). Words and poems and art are the supreme ficiton, giving us the guidance with which to live our lives. Virgil guides Dante. Dante gave Delacroix the words with which to paint. Stevens made the reference and I pieced a connection.

The imagination wishes to be indulged.