In his historical account of the modern privileging of silence as the asymptotic point to which poetic discourse tends, George Steiner writes: "The election of silence by the most articulate is, I think, historically recent. The strategic myth of the philosopher who chooses silence because of the ineffable purity of his vision or because of the unreadiness of his audience has antique precedent. ... But the poet's choice of silence, the writer relinquishing his articulate enactment of identity in mid-course, is something new" (Steiner, 68). Steiner relegates Dante to the former category--where silence is just a trope of ingegno (60-2)--whereas he allows Mallarmé and Joyce, among others, the discovery of silence as the subversive mark of an insufficiency of language (48-53). In chapter 2, we will argue that Dante's tendency towards silence does not necessarily operate with reference to an autotelic presence that authorizes a purity of vision.