Dante’s Footsteps: Poems and Reflections on Poetry
By Paul Krause.
Stone Tower Press, 2025.
Paperback, 104 pages, $19.95.
Reviewed by Raleigh Adams.
Dante’s Footsteps, a new collection of poems and reflections from Paul Krause, offers a winding and artful overview of poetry’s place in the contemporary world. His erudition and clarity largely keep the work compelling. The book includes his own poems and four reflective essays on poignant poetry. Krause underscores in the collection’s introduction that “poetry is at the heart of human nature and civilization,” and that “the very apogee of the civilization in question inevitably converges with the age of poetic acme,” a posture toward the arts that may be essential for the revival of Western life.
Building on this framing, Krause traces the historical roots of poetry and its enduring significance across civilizations. The rise of Hellenic civilization, Krause claims, began not with philosophy but with Hesiod, Homer, and Sappho. He sees the same pattern in Rome and in the flowering of English letters. This historical framing is persuasive, highlighting how poetry has shaped civilizations in ways that philosophical discourse alone could not.
For Krause, poetry has always been about love—about the heavens and the burning passion of the human heart that thirsts after the embodiment of Love itself. This longing, he argues, anticipates the coming of Christ, as books like Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, and Sirach proverbially announce the Word made flesh. All of literature and poetry, in this view, gesture toward incarnation: “it has long been the desire for Love that has moved the poets to capture the universal yearning of the human heart.”
From this historical perspective, Krause argues that poetry’s true purpose lies not merely in artistic expression but in orienting the human heart toward Love and the Divine. Krause further insists that language not oriented toward Love is a dead language, one destined to dissipate. While this assertion may strike some readers as idealistic, it underscores the spiritual and moral stakes Krause attaches to poetic practice. If there is to be a spiritual resurrection, it will come through this literary orientation to Love, which alone can heal the modern malaise. Such, he says, is the pattern of history: “a poetic civilization aimed at Love flourishes.” For Krause, the task of Christians is to reclaim this poetic truth of Love as the key to cultural renewal: a compelling claim.
Having established his vision of poetry in the essays, Krause turns to his own verse to embody these convictions. His poems consist of the categories nature, ballads, culture, and metaphysical. Throughout the poems, Krause’s fixation upon the Heavens and embodiment of love sing through. For example, in Dance of the Sky, Krause writes that:
As I look up at the stars
That sing to me from afar
I dwell in that spirit divine
Giving life to this soul of mine
Krause similarly retells the glory of the Trojan War in The Myrmidon. Throughout his poetry, be it of the night sky or glorious friendship and battle, Krause is oriented to the higher things: to the good, true, and beautiful. Perhaps the pinnacle of his poems, and the one from which the collection takes its name, is Dante’s Footsteps. The poem reads as a retelling of Dante’s journey unto the Heavens, of “Climbing towards Mother Mary.” However, the journey is treacherous, and the speaker’s “painful days never end Trapped in darkness without friends, Underneath rock and thunder, Wailing screams without wonder.” The poem not only succeeds aesthetically but also embodies the trials and transgressions—like Dante’s arduous climb up the mountain—that define the human struggle toward the Divine.
After exploring his own verse, Krause returns to reflective essays, connecting his poetic vision to broader literary and spiritual questions. The book concludes with four essays reflecting on Homer and Love, Virgil and Christian Imagination, Dante and the Digital Inferno, and the Politics of Romantic poetry. What most stands out among these essays is Dante in the Digital Inferno. This essay is particularly engaging, as it creatively bridges medieval literature with contemporary digital culture, demonstrating Krause’s ability to make classical texts relevant today. As the title suggests, the essay revolves around the question of how “Dante is once again journeying through hell. This time without Virgil as a guide or a literate audience knowing his references, allusions, and cultural inheritance.” Rather, “the inferno of social media has Dante wandering astray, lost, in the digital forest of ignorance and animosity.” In the essay, Krause defends the poet’s maligned name online: the ridicule that Dante invented hell of his own accord, and the poor biblical education that proliferates across social media. Why, then, read Dante and the Inferno if it is so misunderstood and out of time? Krause posits that it is because Dante, through his journey, teaches us to pity the damned and find our own salvation within that experience.
Krause continues to explain that Dante is an exile, both in actuality, spirituality, and poetry. His epic is one into a misaligned heart, misguided in its direction to true Love. Krause goes forth to dissect the first layers of hell and Virgil’s relationship to Dante. Through Virgil’s guidance, Dante learns to embody forgiveness and compassion—not only for sinners, but for all people. Continuing to play upon the theme of ultimate Love, Krause concludes the essay that “If we cannot love and cannot forgive then we really will entrap ourselves in hell, for hell is a loveless place created by the pride, passion, and deceit of the self which reign supreme at the expense of all others.” It is through learning to love, Krause compellingly argues, that we may escape our self-made hells.
Dante in the Digital Inferno brilliantly situates Dante within the disorienting landscape of modern digital life. By comparing the social media “forest of ignorance and animosity” to Dante’s inferno, Krause highlights how timeless human struggles—pride, deception, and the difficulty of moral discernment—are amplified in our contemporary, hyperconnected world. The essay suggests that Dante’s guidance toward compassion and forgiveness remains urgently relevant: even in the swirl of online misinterpretation and hostility, the cultivation of love and moral clarity can rescue us from the self-made hells of modernity. In this way, Krause draws a compelling line from the medieval poet’s vision to our present digital condition, showing how the spiritual and literary imagination can illuminate contemporary cultural challenges.
Overall, Dante’s Footsteps is a thoughtful and ambitious work that bridges the reflective and the poetic. Though ambitious in scope, the book succeeds in marrying reflective insight with poetic execution, offering both intellectual stimulation and aesthetic pleasure. Krause’s essays articulate a compelling vision of poetry as a moral and spiritual force, while his own verse enacts that vision with consistent attention to love, beauty, and transcendence. The collection demonstrates how classical, biblical, and contemporary texts intersect to illuminate human longing and the pursuit of the Divine. Though at times the arguments are sweeping, Krause’s synthesis of scholarship, reflection, and artistry makes the book both intellectually engaging and emotionally resonant. For readers interested in the enduring power of poetry to shape the human heart—and, as Krause insists, to guide civilization itself—Dante’s Footsteps offers both inspiration and challenge. In particular, it reminds us that the pursuit of love, forgiveness, and beauty remains at the core of human flourishing.
Raleigh Adams is a graduate student at Yale Divinity School studying ethics, political theology, and the liberal tradition. Her work has appeared in the Front Porch Republic, VoegelinView, and The National Review Online. She is also the host of the podcast Faithfully Feminist.
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