Poets - 04 - Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Born in Florence Dante Alighieri received a traditional medieval education in the city of Florence, Italy. Then he entered the University of Bologna and spent few years there studying copiously.

As was customary those days, he married Gemma Donati at a very young age and the couple had three children.

After few years he met the true love of his life Beatrice Portinari, who would become the poet’s life long inspiration.

Dante fought at the battle of Campalido in 1289. In 1295, he held a public office and in 1300 served as an ambassador for Florence. After a time Dante was exiled by a rival faction that came into power. He left Florence never to return.

For the next twenty years he moved all over Italy spending time in Verona with a close friend named Bertholomeo and his son.

Of all medieval literature Dante’s epic poem ‘The Divine Comedy’ is the best known and the most dearly loved. Few other poems of anytime have had so much influence or have been the subject of such thorough study. The modern poet T. S. Eliot said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.”

‘Divine Comedy’ (earlier ‘The Comedy’) begins in misery and ends in happiness. It is divided into three parts of three cantos each – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise).

The poem is composed in the difficult Italian verse form ‘terza rima’. Dante has explained that the first meaning of ‘The Divine Comedy’ was the literal one: The cantos tell the story according to the beliefs of medieval Christianity, of the state of soul after death, brought to that point by choices made during life.

The ‘Divine Comedy’ may also be read on other levels; on an allegorical level its purpose is to turn the living to the path of Salvation. The ‘Divine Comedy’ ends with the vision of human’s attainable unity with God, which is the final destination of the entire journey of the soul.

Dante’s minor works alone would have assured him a place in literary history. His first work ‘La Vita Nuova’ (New life) completed around 1293 tells of his great love for Beatrice in a series of poems with prose introductions. Beatrice is represented alternately as an ideal woman – an angel sent by God to comfort men – and as a very lovely, desirable human women. His another works ‘Il Convivio’ and ‘De Monarchia’ written in order to inform and to persuade fellow Florentines of the virtue of knowledge and restraint of power, are works in which logic and reason prevail.

Dante died a pauper in 1321 in Ravenna and was buried there.

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