The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time by Britannica Educational Publishing Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Dante was of noble ancestry, and his life was shaped by the conflict between the papal and imperial partisans called, respectively, Guelfs and Ghibellines. When an opposing political faction within the Guelfs (Dante’s party) gained ascendancy in Florence, he was called in January 1302 to appear before the new government and, failing to do so, was condemned for crimes he had not committed. Again failing to appear some weeks later, Dante and others within his party were condemned to be burned to death. He soon after went into exile and never again returned to Florence.
    His great friendship with the poet Guido Cavalcanti shaped Dante’s later career. More important, however,was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women in all of literature.
La vita nuova
(
c
. 1293;
The New Life
) tells a simple story: Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death, and finally the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic
donna gentile
(a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice),Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman.” Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the
Vita nuova
is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice).
    Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri’s
Divine Comedy,
an imagined journey through heaven, hell, and purgatory, is a finely crafted rumination on humankind’s existence on Earth and what lies beyond death
. David Lees/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
    Vita nuova
is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the
Il convivio
(
c
. 1304–07;
The Banquet
). Each is a
prosimetrum
, that is, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The
Vita nuova
brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the
Convivio
, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of
The Divine Comedy
.
    The
Convivio
was among the works he wrote during his difficult years of exile. In it Dante’s mature political and philosophical system is nearly complete. He makes his first stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He introduces the crucial concept of
horme
, that is, of an innate desire that prompts the soul to return to God. The soul, however, requires proper education through examples and doctrine; otherwise it can become misdirected toward worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. Through the
Convivio
Dante felt able to explain the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task of
The Divine Comedy
. During this time Dante also began work on the unfinished
De vulgari eloquentia
(
c
. 1304–07;
Concerning Vernacular Eloquence
), a companion piece to the
Convivio
; written in Latin, it is primarily a practical treatise in the art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language and is one of the first great Renaissance defenses of vernacular Italian.
De monarchia
(
c
. 1313;
On Monarchy
), one of Dante’s greatest polemical treatises, expands the political