LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Call number: PS 3519.O4545 S95 (Main Library)
On the Column: “Appropriations of the Divine Comedy in Other Media, Languages, and Cultures”
LeRoi Jones was defined as a “poet laureate of the Black Revolution” and wanted to be known as the Black Pound. His The System of Dante’s Hell takes a “hard look at the author’s world between the 1930s and the early 1960s, recasting it from the autobiographical perspective of the narrator, Roi, and juxtaposing it with Dante’s hell” (Looney, Freedom Readers, p. 107 in this exhibit). Jones’s text is both fragmented and modeled after Dante’s organization and ethical conception of the afterworld. These elements shape Jones’s experience of the African American culture, which the author considers more challenging than Dante’s Hell. As the book’s incipit states, “[B]ut Dante’s Hell is heaven” if compared to Jones’s hellish descriptions. The challenge for the reader is to see things in the dark and perceive things that are dark, literally and figuratively speaking, in a different way.