Dante is here the exceptional figure in the tradition of commentary since until the Divina Commedia mere texts were thought unworthy of comment and painstaking gloss as such activity was reserved for the Bible (the word of God!) and secular works in the Classical languages of unquestioned authority (the word of Aristotle!). The commentary tradition then deifies and colors the Divina Commedia by placing it within this highly esteemed tradition. Such enframing has implications for the question of deciding between the allegory of the poets of the allegory of the theologians, for by suggesting a value to the text even roughly analogous to the Bible, one has decided upon the allegory of the theologians.
Rapidly canonized through commentary, Dante suffered critical resistance after an early enthusiastic welcome. "The process by which the Florentine Dante's poem came to be canonized as an 'Italian' classic roughly parallels the process by which the Florentine vernacular came to be adopted as the literary language throughout the peninsula, thus reducing the regional languages of Italy to dialect status. Finally however, the history of the critical reception of Dante's poem during the Renaissance is also a story about the poem's decline in popularity. The prophetic claims and religious fervor of the Divine Comedy, no less than the poem's unorthodox language and style, were incompatible with the neo-classicism of Renaissance literary culture, which preferred the lyric poetry of Petrarch" (Cachey). Ernst Robert Curtius notes that unreserved appreciation for Dante returned only in the latter half of the eighteenth century and cites a less-than-flattering assessment from Goethe as exemplary of Dante's wilderness years: "I had never been able to understand how anyone could spend time over these poems; that, as for me, I found the Inferno monstrous, the Purgatorio ambiguous, and the Paradiso boring" (quoted in Curtius, 348. cf. 348-50).