The greatest artists dominate and define their age, even as they are defined by it. Dante is such an artist. He towers over the Middle Ages as its consummate literary figure, creating out of medieval beliefs poetry that has claimed our attention ever since. Even as Dante’s faith and theology may fail the modern reader, the sheer majesty of Dante’s vision and the coalescence of human thought and experience into visionary poetry continues to delight and inspire. With Dante, hyperbole is inevitable. He remains a touchstone for Western civilization, and The Divine Comedy is one of the most revered and influential literary works in history, perhaps the greatest single poem that has ever been written. According to T. S. ELIOT [19], Dante’s style is “the perfection of a common language,” and after SHAKESPEARE [1] and Dante, “there is no third.” With this ranking, I obviously contradict Eliot’s assertion with 123 candidates for consideration beyond Shakespeare and Dante, although I concur with Eliot’s placement of the initial pair.
With Dante one has the sense of the literature of Homer, the epic of a culture’s values, restored in the vernacular Italian that Dante legitimized in the poetic legacy he passed along to Shakespeare and the Renaissance. No modern writer seems as central to his age as Dante is to the Middle Ages. He is the essential visionary and conscience of his era.Although Dante’s greatest poetic works concern the private life of the soul and the world of the afterlife, an understanding of his age and the forces that shaped his thoughts is essential in tracing his development and uniqueness.
At the center of Dante’s public life was the political turmoil of his native city of Florence: the factional conflict between its status as an independent, republican city-state and the power of the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. In the Inferno, Dante reports that his ancestors were among the first Romans to colonize Florence, and he was educated to play an important role in Florence’s public and cultural life. In his early biography of Dante, BOCCACCIO [68] states that as a young man, Dante studied poetry, painting, and music. His early poems indicate that he was influenced by French Provençal poetry, the classics known at the time, and by Italian vernacular poetry, just beginning to flourish. After military service, Dante held a series of increasingly prominent political offices, becoming one of the chief magistrates of Florence in 1300.
Two years later, while he was in Rome on a diplomatic mission, he was unjustly accused of graft, fined, and banished for two years. When he refused to pay the fine, he faced a sentence of execution at the stake, and never saw Florence again. He spent his remaining years on the move, dependent on a series of patrons in various Italian cities, hoping for a political regeneration that never came. Although his poetry is intensely private, concerned with the self and the soul’s redemption, the political struggle of his time is reflected in his art and sets the basic framework for the urgency of his meditations on moral and spiritual issues.
On a personal level, the defining moment of Dante’s life was his encoun-ter at the age of nine with Beatrice Portinari, for whom he conceived a lifelong idealistic passion. Though his contacts with Beatrice were few, her death in 1290 provided him with the inspiration to write La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a psychological and spiritual autobiography that blends sonnets and odes with prose commentary to trace the development of his love for Beatrice. The work is unique in medieval literature, combining the lyrical and the philosophical into a narrative of the poet’s growth. Dante’s other important works include the philosophical Convivio (Banquet), significant for its use of Italian prose instead of Latin for serious reflection; De Vulgari Eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular Tongue), which set forth the goals and means for achieving a vernacular literature; and De Monarchia (Monarchy), his political theories on good government, which radically suggest the separation of church and state.
Dante became one of the most learned men in Europe, whose reflections about his world and scholarship were synthesized in his monumental Com-media, written between 1308 and 1321 (Divina was added to its title in the 16th century). The scope of Dante’s plan was unprecedented: to dramatize in intensely personal terms, in a single poem, the Christian cosmology and doctrines that shaped the medieval worldview. His work is called a comedy, reflecting both the process of the poem from sin to redemption and Dante’s style, which differed from the formal grandeur of the epic and tragedy. Written in direct and colloquial language, the poem is expansive enough to include all aspects of human experience—the tragic and the comic—in a manner that redefines the epic as the inward, spiritual journey toward full understanding of God and the universe.
Although the Commedia can be read as both an allegorical and theological treatise, its principal power derives from the personal narrative of Dante the pilgrim lost in a dark forest in search of the straight path. His journey takes him through the three regions of the Christian afterlife—hell, purgatory, and heaven—in a story that is at once a great adventure tale and the inner journey of a soul’s struggle toward redemption. What separates the Commedia from other religious meditations is the clarity of Dante’s vision, populated by actual historical figures. Their stories, narrated sympathetically with humor as well as awe, establish the Commedia’s humanity and social themes that are joined to the inner drama of the poet’s progression toward enlightenment.
In arguing that Dante should rightly be regarded as the father of all modern literature, Erich Auerbach writes:Dante was the first to configure what classical antiquity had configured very differently and the Middle Ages not at all: man, not as a remote legendary hero, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness; and in that he has been followed by all subsequent portrayers of man, regardless of whether they treated a historical or mythical or a religious subject, for after Dante myth and leg-end also became history. Even in portraying saints, writers have striven for truth to life, for historical concreteness, as though saints too were part of the historical process. . . . Christian legend came to be treated as an immanent historical reality; the arts have striven to represent a more perfect unity of spirit and body, spun into the fabric of man’s destiny, and despite changes of taste and differences in artistic technique, this striving has endured, through many perils and darkenings, down to our day.
Despite the allegorical tendency to see Dante in the poem as an every-man, his linking of the spiritual and the divine to the recognizable world is the source of the poem’s great power. On his journey, led first by the spirit of VIRGIL [9] and then by Beatrice, Dante confronts the essential moral and human issues of sin and belief in a larger power that orders human destiny, beyond that of the individual. The Commedia extends itself to the limit of artistic imagination captured in poetry that is in turns clear, precise, serious, and sublime.
Dante’s structural genius, his development of a flexible poetic style capable of a great range of effects, and his placement of human experience at the center of his poem while contemplating the essential questions of existence, have exerted their influence on all subsequent literature in the West. He was, as Boccaccio rightly points out, well named the Giver.
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