Reading and collecting Dante in America: Harvard College Library and the Dante Society The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Dupont, Christian Y. 2012. Reading and collecting Dante in America: Harvard College Library and the Dante Society. Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (1): 1-57. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42669225 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Reading and Collecting Dante in America: Harvard College Library and the Dante Society Christian Y. Dupont t took the better part of a morning to move it, but no more.1 By noon, on Friday, October 18, 1912, building supervisor Frank Carney could Irecord in his pocket diary that the last of the 2,907 volumes comprising the Dante Collection had been crated, passed through a chute down to a waiting truck, and carried of to temporary storage in Randall Hall.2 In a few short weeks, the remaining bookshelves would be emptied and the hollowed carcass of Gore Hall torn down so that a new library of titanic dimensions could be erected in its place, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. At the time, the Dante Collection at Harvard was neither the only nor the largest such collection in America. Te distinction for having the most extensive collection had belonged to Cornell for nearly two decades.3 Meanwhile, the University of Notre Dame had quietly begun assembling a collection on the poet that would soon grow to several thousand volumes,4 and other institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, 1 Much of the research for this essay was conducted while I was a Joan Nordell Visiting Fellow at Houghton Library in 2002–2003. For their generous support and assistance, I wish to express my gratitude to William P. Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, and his staf, especially Dennis Marnon, as well as to the staf of the Harvard University Archives. I also thank Anita Israel, Archives Specialist at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. I am indebted to James Turner and Linda Dowling for reading and commenting on earlier drafs. 2 Harvard University, Library, Records, Frank Carney, Diary of moving books from Gore Hall, 1912, Harvard University Archives, UA III 50.29.12.3, entry for October 18, 1912. 3 For a history of the Fiske Dante collection at Cornell, see my essay “Collecting Dante from Tuscany: Te Formation of the Fiske Dante Collection at Cornell University,” Studies in Bibliography 58 (2007–2008): 185-210. 4 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Reverend John A. Zahm, C.S.C., began assembling a similarly comprehensive Dante collection at the University of Notre Dame, though it remained at the time little known and little used; see Christian Y. Dupont, Louis Jordan, and Teodore J. Cachey Jr.,“Te John A. Zahm Dante Collection,” in What is Written Remains: Historical Essays on the Libraries of Notre Dame, ed. Maureen Gleason and Katharina J. Blackstead (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, Christian Y. Dupont 1 Figure 2. Detail of illuminated initial N from the opening of the Inferno from the copy of the 1481 Florentine edition of the Commedia purchased by Charles Eliot Norton while he was in Venice in 1871. Norton was as much a connoisseur of Italian art as he was of Dante. Dante Alighieri, Comento di Christophoro Landino forentino sopra La comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta forentino (Florence: Niccolò della Magna, 1481), fol. ai recto. Houghton Library, pf Inc 6120 (A). Detail 13 x 10 cm; letter 8 x 8 cm. 1994), 85-104; Christian Y. Dupont, “Collecting Dante in America at the End of the Nineteenth Century: John Zahm and Notre Dame,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 95, no. 4 (2001): 443-481; and Christian Y. Dupont, “Giulio Acquaticci e John Zahm collezionisti di Dante,” in ‘Quei battenti sempre aperti’: Gli Acquaticci e Treia nella cultura marchigiana. Atti del Convegno di Studi, 4 novembre 2000 (Treia: Accademia Georgica, 2002), 99-154. 2 Reading and Collecting Dante in America the University of Vermont, and the Providence Public Library (Rhode Island), had received substantial donations of Italian literature from private collectors.5 As early as 1892, when Harvard librarian William Coolidge Lane and Charles Knowles Bolton published their Notes on Special Collections in American Libraries—the frst directory of its kind—a handful of libraries reported having thematic collections on Dante numbering in the hundreds of volumes. Tese included the Peabody Institute Library (now part of Te Johns Hopkins University), the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Columbia College (later Columbia University), St. Vincent College, and the Newberry Library.6 Harvard’s Dante Collection was, however, the frst such collection to be established at an American institution and the one that gave rise directly or indirectly to those that would follow. It sprang up from the roots laid down during the course of the nineteenth century by George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and especially Charles Eliot Norton.7 Tose roots nourished the reading and collecting of works by and about Dante, and brought forth translations, commentaries, and interpretative essays. Tese activities, in turn, were nurtured through the foundation of the Dante Society, which provided the impetus and the means to form a distinct Dante Collection in the Harvard College Library designed to support the burgeoning American interest in the poet’s works, life, and infuence. In this manner, a muted yet noteworthy revolution was wrought, as Dante—and Italian literature, art, and culture more broadly—gained appreciation in the maturing United States, overcoming the dismissive and even despising prejudice against modern languages and literatures that was characteristic of the early federal period and its 5 Te University of Pennsylvania received the Francis Macauley collection of Italian literature between 1901 and 1903; see Teodore Wesley Koch, Dante in America: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (Boston: Ginn and Co., reprinted from Fifeenth Annual Report of the Dante Society, May 19, 1896), 63. Te George P. Marsh Library, presented to the University of Vermont, included some 2,400 volumes of Italian literature and philology according to William C. Lane and C. K. Bolton, eds., Notes on Special Collections in American Libraries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Library, 1892), 15. Lane and Bolton also noted that the Providence Public Library had received a gif of 670 volumes of Italian literature from Albert Jenkins Jones together with funds to support further acquisitions (61). Harvard University Archives has an interleaved working copy of Notes that includes annotations, clippings, and other inserts about additional special collections, including the Fiske Dante Collection at Cornell University (UA III.50.28.92). Lane had apparently planned to issue an updated edition of the volume. 6 Lane and Bolton, Notes, 4, 60, 42, 4, and 24, respectively. 7 I examine from a more critical and interpretative perspective Norton’s central role in the American reception of Dante and Italian studies in “Charles Eliot Norton and the Rationale for American Dante Studies,” in Aida Audeh and Nick Havely, eds., Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 248-265. Christian Y. Dupont 3 pervasive spirit of Neoclassicism. As demonstrated by Angelina La Piana’s seminal study8 and more recently by Kathleen Verduin,9 Dante was introduced through currents of British Romanticism and then transmuted by Transcendentalism. From there, the American appropriation of Dante proceeded through a dynamic interplay of reading and collecting that is strongly evidenced in the formation of the Dante collection at Harvard and the related establishment of the Dante Society.10 In order to read Dante, the key fgures involved in those enterprises devoted eforts to acquiring works by and about the poet, sharing them with one another, spreading their enthusiasm to their students and other readers, and then, in several cases, placing the fruits of their collecting in Harvard College Library, thereby opening them up to more readers and inspiring other collectors. George Ticknor Prior to leaving for his frst European trip in 1815, George Ticknor, the pioneering historian and critic of Spanish literature who was soon to become the frst professor of modern languages and literatures at Harvard, complained that he had “made several attempts to read Dante, and found it not only difcult to get a copy, but impossible to get 8 Angelina La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage, 1800–1944 (New Haven, Conn.: Published for Wellesley College by Yale University Press, 1948). 9 See Kathleen Verduin, “Dante in America: Te First 100 Years,” in Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 16-51, as well as her two more recent essays: “Grace of Action: Dante and Longfellow,” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 128 (2010), and “Emerson, Dante, and American Nationalism,” in Audeh and Havely, Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century, 266-283. For a literary- critical perspective on the fourishing of Dante Studies in the United States, particularly during the twentieth century, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Refections on Dante Studies in America,” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 118 (2000): 323-330. 10 Te historical perspectives on the establishment of the Dante Society ofered here are meant to complement the treatment of the subject by George H.