![]() Dante takes you somewhere you didn’t previously know. And it has continued to excite the imaginations of more recent poets, from T S Eliot to Clive James, as well as artists from William Blake to my favourite contemporary illustrator, Monika Beisner. ![]() Hundreds of early manuscripts of the work survive, and people were soon demanding public readings of it. The scale of this ambition partly explains why he wrote his three-part narrative journey – through hell ( Inferno), purgatory ( Purgatorio) and paradise ( Paradiso) – in Italian, for a mass audience, not just the Latin-reading literati. He realised that this cosmic vision was being challenged, and he didn’t seek to reject it or restore it, but to remake it. ![]() But Dante was born in a time of troubling transition. It is taken to be a genius expression of a discarded worldview, not the modern one, from an era in which everything was taken to be connected to the supreme reality called God. This might sound surprising, given that his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is often described as one of the most brilliant creations of the medieval imagination. ![]() He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. Dante Alighieri was early in recognising that our age has a problem. ![]()
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