Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) was an Italian poet of Florence, the author of the Divine Comedy and often called “the Father of the Italian language.” His youthful love for Beatrice Portinari inspired La Vita Nuova, and after her early death she became for him a symbol of grace leading the soul to God. Active in civic life, he served as one of Florence's priors in 1300, but in 1302 he was exiled amid factional conflict and never returned. Exile became the turning point of his life: moving among Italian courts and finally settling in Ravenna, he composed the Comedy, a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise guided by Virgil and Beatrice that ends in a vision of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Written in Tuscan rather than Latin, it helped form literary Italian and remains a cornerstone of Christian literature.
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The Epic Tradition: Homer to Longfellow
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey set the pattern for epic poetry in the West. In the Divine Comedy, Dante honors Homer as the foremost of the ancient poets and journeys toward the vision of God. Milton took up the epic form for a Christian theme in Paradise Lost, telling of the fall and the promise of redemption. Longfellow published an English translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867 and wrote long narrative poems such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha.
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