Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (1265 –1321), was Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker from Florence. He is best known for the monumental epic poem Divine Comedy. In addition to poetry Dante wrote important theoretical works ranging from discussions of rhetoric to moral philosophy and political thought. He was fully conversant with the classical tradition, drawing for his own purposes on such writers as Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius.

Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns".

Divine Comedy has profoundly affected not only the religious imagination but all subsequent allegorical creation of imaginary worlds in literature. Dante spent much of his life travelling from one city to another. This had perhaps more to do with the restless times than his wandering character or fixation on the Odyssey. However, his Commedia can also be called a spiritual travel book.

La divina commedia was completed just before the poet's death. He probably started to write it in 1307. The Purgatorio was written in Verona, where he stayed more or less continuously from late 1312 to mid-1318. In Ravenna he wrote the final phases of the Paradiso. By the time the first two parts of the Comedy had been sent in circulation, Dante was being acclaimed through much of Tuscany as its greatest poet. Dante's idea was to make the world of his poem a mirror of the world of the Christian God of his era. Written in the first person, it tells of the poet's journey through the realm of the afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The Roman poet Virgil (Vergilius) is the guide through the Inferno and Purgatorio. Dante greets Virgil as "my master and my author". Beatrice, the personification of pure love, has been sent to rescue Dante. She finally leads Dante to Paradiso. Dante is then able to gaze upon the supreme radiance of God. He ends his pilgrimage into vision of "'the Love which moves the sun and the other stars." The dual allegory of Commedia - the progress of the soul toward Heaven, and the anguish of humankind on Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Envy and Arrogance and Avarice
Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled."
(Canto VI, lines 74-75, page 33

Love, which absolves no beloved one from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet. 
Canto V, lines 103-105

“This shall be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow and in darkness because of the old sun, which does not enlighten them.”

Autumn Song

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems--not to suffer pain?

Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

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Inferno

I think he thought that I perhaps might think
So many voices issued through those trunks
From people who concealed themselves from us

Therefore the master said: if thou break off
Some little spray from any of these trees
The thoughts thou hast will wholly be made vain.

Then stretched I forth my hand a little foward
And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn,
And the trunk cried,Why dost thou mangle me?

After it had become embrowned with blood
It recommenced its cry:Why dost thou rend me
Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever?

Men once we were, and now are changed to trees;
Indeed, thou hand should be more pitiful,
Even if the souls of serpents we had been.

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