Dante's Influence On The Divine Comedy

I want to talk to you about my favorite author. Dante Alighieri is the most important Italian author and one of the two or three most influential writers in Western literature. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy between 1307 and 1321, nearly all European literature was written in Latin, which meant that it could only be read by the highly educated, representing, at most, a small percent of the population. The Divine Comedy was the first significant literary work to be written in the “vernacular”, the language of the people, giving it an exponentially larger audience. The first important vernacular work in your language, English, is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. There is good evidence that Chaucer, who lived about 80 years after Dante, admired and was heavily influenced by The Divine Comedy.
In Dante’s lifetime, there was no such thing as “Italy”.
The Italian peninsula consisted of 15 or more small “city-states” such as Venice, Florence, and Pisa in the north and Amalfi and Naples in the south, along with Rome, the “papal state”. Although the languages of all of these city-states evolved from the Latin spoken in Roman times, they developed with significantly different dialects. Although the spoken languages evolved, all the legal, commercial, political and literary works were written in classical Latin, unchanged from Roman times. Dante had a strong interest in the concept of the vernacular language as evidenced by his early essay “De Vulgari Eloquentia” (written in Latin), in which he discusses the evolution of language and argues that the commonly spoken dialects should be considered the equal to Latin. Because Dante was born and grew up in Florence, he wrote the Divine Comedy in his Tuscan dialect and this became established as what is now known as
“Italian”.
The Divine Comedy consists of three cantos: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The poem tells the fantastic story of Dante’s journey through the three kingdoms of the dead, set between April 8 and 14, 1300 (Easter). Dante’s descriptions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven have been a dominant influence on Western culture and much of the way we think of and imagine these realms today is inspired by Dante. For example, he conceived the concept the Catholic Church has of Purgatory. The Divine Comedy is not an easy read for modern English speakers. Much of the subject matter is related to mythology and political or religious figures of Dantes’s time and may bore and overwhelm the modern reader. Further complicating its appreciation, the poem is written in“terza rima”, a form created by Dante that uses the rhyming pattern ABA, BCB, CDC, DED – a form that is impossible to translate into English. Despite this, there are many sections of descriptive poetry whose beauty can be appreciated even in translation. Although it will take some work on your part, with some effort you can begin to appreciate the splendor of this poem. I hope that you will give it a try.