Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

Famous Italian poet of the European Renaissance; founder of the modern Italian language.

Dante was born in May 1265, in Florence, Italy, into a declining noble family. His father, whose family was in decay, was a merchant during a long period of time. At that time, the town had the Guelphs, which represented the interests of the feudal aristocracy and supported the Pope, and the Ghibellines, which supported the Holy Roman Emperor and represented the interests of the bourgeoisie. Dante’s father embraced the Guelphs, of which Dante himself later became one of the leaders. Dante spent his life actively campaigning for the unification of Italy, which led to his involvement in local political struggles and his exile in 1315. During his exile, he banished his homesickness with his writings and included his enemies and benefactors in his life in his famous work, the Divina Comedia (Divine Comedy). Divina Comedia is divided into three parts: “Hell”, “Purgatory”, and “Paradise”, each of which contains 33 cantos, plus a preface which adds to100 cantos (pieces). In Divine Comedy, an epic poem of more than 14,000 lines, Dante adopted the fantastic literary form popularized in the Middle Ages and described the story of a journey to the triple worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, exposing the evils of the Roman Papacy, sternly condemning the cunning and usurpation of corrupt officials, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the division of the motherland, and also praised the importance of human wisdom and personal experience. He expressed the Enlightenment thought of opposing the obscurantism of the Middle Ages and persistently pursuing the truth, as well as a distinctive spirit of humanism. Divina Comedia had a major impact on the formation of the Italian national language, on the development of the mational literature and art, and the poetic creation of later generations in Europe. Engels made a classic comment about Dante: “The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times.” Dante’s major works include the love poem Vita Nuova (The New Life), the philosophical poem Convivio (The Banquet), the lyrical poems Le Rime (The Rhymes) and De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), the political treatise Monarchia (The Monarchy), the Latin poems The Eclogues and so forth. Dante died in Ravenna, northeastern Italy, in September 1321.