...udies to the Commedia should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante 's own heavens, giving and receiving light. Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame for this. The form or mode of treatment, he says, is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive, an...