Dante Alighieri Books

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Poet. Born in Florence, Italy. A lawyer's son, he was baptized Durante, later contracted into Dante. In 1274, when he was nine, a meeting with Beatrice (c.1265--90), possibly the daughter of the Florentine aristocrat Folco Portinari, influenced the rest of his life. His platonic devotion to her continued despite her marriage, and despite his own marriage (after her death) to Gemma Donati, daughter of a powerful Guelph family.
In 1300, he became one of the six priors of Florence. His sympathy for the moderate "White Guelphs' led to his exile in 1302, when the Black faction became dominant. His travelling after this date is unclear, but he never returned to his native city. He may have visited Paris and Oxford. Some believe he was recalled to Italy when Henry of Luxembourg became emperor, but when Henry died (1313), he took refuge in Ravenna, where he stayed until his death.
Dante had six sons and one daughter. The dates and sequence of his various works are only vaguely known. La Vita Nuova, which tells of his boyish passion for Beatrice, is probably the earliest. By far the most celebrated is the La Commedia (which came to be known after his death as La Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy)), a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven which gives an encyclopedic view of the highest culture and knowledge of his age. He also wrote several shorter poems, as well as treatises on government and language.
Dante's unparalleled eminence as a poet has perhaps best been expressed in the words of the brilliant littérateur George Steiner, in proclaiming The Divine Comedy as the greatest book of the past millennium: "Dante's totality of poetic form and philosophic thought, of 'local universality'and language, remains unrivalled. At a time when the notion of culture and of European culture in particular, is somewhat in doubt, Dante is the sovereign underwriter. His, says Borges, are 'the solutions beyond logic.'"

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