Dante Alighieri

V

Last Years

In 1316 the city of Florence invited Dante to return, but the terms offered him were those generally reserved for pardoned criminals. Dante rejected the invitation, maintaining that he would never return unless he were accorded full dignity and honor. He continued to live in exile, spending his last years in Ravenna, where he died on September 13 or 14, 1321, and was buried. His remains have been kept there despite appeals over the centuries from the Florentines, who have maintained a cenotaph for him in the Church of Santa Croce.

Among the minor works written during the last years of Dante’s life are the Quaestio de Acqua et Terra (Question of Water and of Earth) and two Latin eclogues. The former is a cosmological treatise, in Latin, dealing with a matter of great concern to contemporary thinkers: whether the surface of the sea or of any body of water is higher at any point than the surface of the earth. The eclogues are modeled after those of the Roman poet Virgil, whom Dante considered one of the most important influences on his thought.

VI

The Divine Comedy

Dante’s epic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, was probably begun about 1307; it was completed shortly before his death. The work is an allegorical narrative, in verse of great precision and dramatic force, of the poet’s imaginary journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. It is divided into three sections, correspondingly named the Inferno (Hell), the Purgatorio (Purgatory), and the Paradiso (Paradise). In each of these three realms the poet meets with mythological, historical, and contemporary personages. Each character is symbolic of a particular fault or virtue, either religious or political; and the punishment or rewards meted out to the characters further illustrate the larger meaning of their actions in the universal scheme. Dante is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil, who is, to Dante, the symbol of reason. The woman Dante loved, Beatrice, whom he regards as both a manifestation and an instrument of the divine will, is his guide through paradise.

Each section contains 33 cantos, except for the first section, which has, in addition, a canto serving as a general introduction. The poem is written in terza rima (third rhyme), a three-line stanza rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. (see Versification). Dante intended the poem for his contemporaries and thus wrote it in Italian rather than Latin. He named the poem La commedia (The Comedy) because it ends happily, in heaven, his journey climaxed by a vision of God and by a complete blending of his own will with that of the deity. The adjective divina (divine) was first added to the title in a 1555 edition.

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The work, which provides a summary of the political, scientific, and philosophical thought of the time, may be interpreted on four levels: the literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical. Indeed, part of the majesty of this work rests on its multiplicity of meaning even more than on its masterfully poetic and dramatic qualities. It is supreme as a dramatization of medieval Christian theology, but even beyond that framework, Dante’s imaginary voyage can be understood as an allegory of the purification of one’s soul and of the achievement of inner peace through the guidance of reason and love.

VII

Influence and Inspiration

By the 15th century many Italian cities had established professorships for the study of The Divine Comedy; in the centuries following the invention of printing, almost 400 Italian editions were published. The poem has always inspired artists. Editions have appeared illustrated by the Italian masters Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo, the English artists John Flaxman and William Blake, and the French illustrator Gustave Doré. The Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky set parts of the poem to music, and it formed the subject of symphonies by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the Italian composer Giovanni Pacini. It has been translated into more than 25 languages. Among the many notable translations into English are verse renditions by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867), and, in the 20th century, by the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers and the American poet and critic John Ciardi.

The work of modern poets throughout the world has been inspired by Dante and imbued with Dantean imagery, especially that of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Paul Claudel, and Anna Akhmatova.

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