Dante Alighieri, known simply as Dante, was born
in Florence, Italy, to Alighirro di Bellincione d’Alighiero,
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 Trivium
(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
publisher 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.
(Canto XXXIV)
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
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selveggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinolva la paura!
(Canto I)
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.
Quinones, Ricardo J.Dante Alighieri. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1979.