Legacy and influence of Dante

The recognition and the honor that were the due of Dante’s Divine Comedy did not have to await the long passage of time: by the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy (which means that Dante was the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course). Dante became known as the divino poeta, and in a splendid edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple Commedia became La divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy.

Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other art forms (the novel, primarily, and the drama) Dante’s own fame continued. In fact, his great poem enjoys the kind of power peculiar to a classic: successive epochs have been able to find reflected in it their own intellectual concerns. In the post-Napoleonic 19th century, readers identified with the powerful, sympathetic, and doomed personalities of the Inferno. In the early 20th century they found the poem to possess an aesthetic power of verbal realization independent of and at times in contradiction to its structure and argument. Later readers have been eager to show the poem to be a polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as a mighty work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way, respond to one another. Dante created a remarkable repertoire of types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great stylistic artistry in its prefigurations and correspondences. Moreover, he incorporated in all of this important political, philosophical, and theological themes and did so in a way that shows moral wisdom and lofty ethical vision.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished for more than 700 years. In the simple power of its striking imaginative conceptions it has continued to astonish generations of readers; for more than a hundred years it has been a staple in all higher educational programs in the Western world; and it has continued to provide guidance and nourishment to the major poets of our own times. William Butler Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” and T.S. Eliot elevated Dante to a preeminence shared by only one other poet in the modern world, William Shakespeare: “[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” In fact, they rival one another in their creation of types that have entered into the world of reference and association of modern thought. Like Shakespeare, Dante created universal types from historical figures, and in so doing he considerably enhanced the treasury of modern myth.