(1265-1321) poet,philosopher
Dante Alighieri, known simply as Dante, was born in Florence, Italy, to Alighirro di Bellincione d’A-lighiero, a notary, and his wife, Donna Bella, who died during her son’s childhood. Although details of Dante’s youth in Florence are scarce, it is likely that during his early years he received a standard Latin education, including schooling in the Triv-ium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). Dante eventually engaged in the advanced study of grammar and rhetoric under the tutelage of Brunetto latini, a renowned philosopher, poet, and politician.
Among his most well-known works are La vita nuova (The New Life, ca. 1292), Convivio (Banquet, 1304-1308), Monarchia (Monarchy, 1309-1312), and La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321). Banquet was a philosophical piece comprised of 14 treatises containing the author’s opinions on his own works. Monarchy, another Latin treatise, concerned Dante’s views on the Roman Empire, the emperor, and the pope. Dante’s greatest works, however, were The New Life and The Divine Comedy, the first of which was inspired by a childhood event.
When he was nine years old, he met a young girl named Beatrice Portinari (1266-90). This meeting would prove to be one of the two most important events in Dante’s life—and an equally important event in the history of world literature. In an early collection of autobiographical poems and prose commentary entitled The New Life Dante describes the profound impact that meeting Beatrice had on him. “[From] that time forward,” Dante reflects in that work’s opening prose section, “Love ruled over my soul. . . .” Dante’s love for Beatrice became a guiding force in his life and is considered the inspiration for his greatest sonnets and odes.
Dante and Beatrice were not destined to be together, however. On January 9, 1277, when Dante was only 11 years old, his father arranged for him to marry a nobleman’s daughter, Gemma Donati, whose considerable dowry Dante’s family received when the marriage ceremony finally took place, probably around 1285.
In 1290, when Dante was 25, Beatrice died. Despite having met her only twice, Beatrice’s death propelled Dante into a state of profound despair. In The New Life the poet laments:
To weep in pain and sigh in anguish destroys my heart wherever I find myself alone, so that it would pain whoever heard me: and what my life has been, since my lady went to the new world, there is not a tongue that knows how to tell it.
In a way, the remainder of Dante’s life as a poet would be devoted to finding the “tongue” to describe both the impact that Beatrice had on his life and the state of his soul after she died. Although The New Life ends on a note of failure, because it closes with Dante’s decision “to write no more of this blessed one until [he] could more worthily treat of her,” he ultimately finds the language worthy of his subject in his greatest poetic achievement, The Divine Comedy.
Before writing The Divine Comedy, however, Dante endured a second life-altering loss, this time losing his status as a citizen of his beloved Florence. Dante belonged to the Guelphs, the party that controlled Florence at the time, but it was divided into two factions, the Blacks and the Whites, who constantly battled for political control. Dante was a member of the Whites, and in 1301 he went to Rome as part of a delegation to regain the support of Pope Boniface VIII. While Dante was away, the Blacks regained power in Florence and subsequently banished many of the Whites (including Dante) from the city. When the Blacks decreed that he would be executed if he returned to Florence, Dante went into permanent exile, leaving his wife, his four children, and his birthplace behind. He spent the rest of his life in different cities in Italy and other countries, and he died at Ravenna.
Critical Analysis
As scholar Robert Hollander notes, the premise on which Dante’s poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy is founded would be a difficult one to sell to a developer today: “Take a not-very-successful (though respected), soon-to-be exiled civic leader and poet, then send him off to the afterworld for a week.”Yet this is, succinctly put, the plot of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s great poem is the fantastic story of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. And while Hollander’s plot summary makes it sound like an unlikely candidate for inclusion among the world’s greatest works of literature, The Divine Comedy is a poem of such power and beauty that critic Harold Bloom has been moved to rank Dante second only to Shakespeare among the Western world’s literary figures: “When you read Dante or Shakespeare you experience the limits of art, and then you discover that the limits are extended or broken.”
Dante’s ability to transcend the traditional limits of art derives from his strength in three areas. First, as the The Divine Comedy illustrates, Dante is a master storyteller. The poem, divided into 100 cantos, takes the reader on a journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). The reader encounters various figures from the Christian religious tradition, history, literature, and Dante’s own life, all of whom are woven into a compelling narrative structure. Even if a reader chooses to interpret The Divine Comedy primarily as a Christian allegory, he or she can hardly deny the allure of the literal level of the story. On this level, the poem is a spellbinding journey that rivals the great epics of homer in plot, characterization, and imagery. All of these narrative elements come together at the end of “The Inferno,” as readers find themselves climbing with the poet and his guide, a shadow of the poet virgil, through the afterworld, over the disgusting body of Satan. To escape Hell and enter Purgatory, Dante and Virgil must literally and figuratively surmount the beast who … wept with six eyes, and the tears beneath Over three chins with bloody slaver dropt. At each mouth he was tearing with his teeth A sinner, as is flax by heckle frayed.
This vivid description is just one example of Dante’s power as a poet. Not only is his language rich and vivid but he also maintains an elegant and challenging poetic structure throughout his long poem. Dante composed his verse in terza rima, an interlocking rhyme scheme in which the last word of the second line of each tercet (a group of three lines) rhymes with the first and third lines of the preceding tercet. In the original Italian, the opening lines of The Divine Comedy read:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura esta selva selveggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinolva la paura!
According to Robert Hollander, “Dante’s invention of terza rima was, as Erich Auerbach observed, a brilliant solution for a narrative poem, for it both ‘looses and binds,’ at once bringing the verse to momentary conclusion and propelling it forward.”
In addition to the poem’s structure, Dante’s use of an Italian vernacular (as opposed to Latin) was a significant poetic achievement because he demonstrated that a vernacular language could be a suitable vehicle for great literature. He makes this argument more completely in an unfinished work entitled De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular, 1303-07). The fact that he did use an Italian vernacular is one of the reasons that Dante called his work a “comedy”; this term distinguishes the poem from the tragic literature generally composed in Latin.
The third distinguishing strength of Dante’s masterpiece is its spiritual vision. This is without question a Christian (specifically a Catholic) poem, and any reader must be impressed by the power of Dante’s faith. The work opens with Dante lost in a dark wood at the midpoint of his life’s journey, and it is ultimately Virgil and Beatrice (who takes over as his guide in Purgatory) who lead him from darkness and despair to the light and hope offered by God. (This upward, positive trajectory is the second reason the poem is called a “comedy.”) The journey to salvation—in both a literal and an allegorical reading of the poem—is an arduous one that takes great strength, determination, and conviction. By the end of the poem, however, we, as readers, are thankful that Dante had the courage to undertake it and to allow us to share his experience. It is a testament to his brilliance as a poet that even those who do not share his religious convictions can appreciate the power and the beauty of his Divine Comedy, a work that is truly one of the landmarks of Western and world literature.
English Versions of Works by Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. 6 vols. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997-2003.
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, The Paradiso. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: New American Library, 2003.
The Portable Dante. Edited by Paolo Milano. New York: Penguin, 1975.
Works about Dante Alighieri
Auerbach, Erich. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Hollander, Robert. Dante: A Life in Works. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.
O’Cuilleanain, Cormac, et al., eds. Patterns in Dante. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004.
