Almost three months ago, precisely on 1st of June, The famous Italian writer would complete 750 years old, so this post is a tribute to him, for his pioneer work to aware the citizens about the danger of unchecked power and the evil and injustice of tyranny. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri. The second was published athttp://www.biography.com/people/dante-9265912. The third was published at http://www.britannica.com/biography/Dante-Alighieri/Exile-the-Convivio-and-the-De-. The monarchia#toc22150. The fourth was published at http://www.italymagazine.com/news/celebrations-dantes-750th-birthday-begin-italy. The fifth was published at http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/DivineCom.html#Comedy
The writer Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was a Italian poet of the late Middle Ages. His book originally called Comedia and later called Divina by Boccaccio is widely considered the greatest literary work in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literatura. In Italia he is called "the supreme poet". He is also called "Father of the Italian language" Dante was born in Florence. With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the range both stylistic and thematic, of its content, the comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature and a unified language. In that sense, he is a forerunner of the renaissance.
Dante was arranged that he would marry Gemma Donati, but Dante was in love with Beatrice Portinari, who would be a huge influence on Dante and whose character would form the backbone of Dante's Divine Comedy. Beatrice died unexpectedly in 1290, and Dante began to immerse himself in the study of philosophy and the machinations of the Florentine political scene. Florence was then a tumultuous city and Dante held important public posts. In 1302, however he was forced to be exiled by the Black Guelphs, the political faction in power at the time, ( figures from Florentine politics finds a place in the hell that Dante creates in Comedy, and an unpleasant one). Dante may have been driven out of Florence, but this would be the beginning of this most productive artistic period. In 1304, he seems to have gone to Bologna, where he began his Latin Treatise "The Eloquent Vernacular", in which he urged that courtly Italian, used for amatory writing, be enriched with aspects of every spoken dialect in order to establish Italian as a language in a one to unify the divided Italian territories. The Divine Comedy is an allegory of human life presented as a visionary trip through the Christian afterlife, written as a warning to a corrupt society to steer itself to the path of righteousness: "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity." The poem is written in the first person (from the poet's perspective) and follow Dante's journey through hell and purgatory guided by the Roman poet Virgil, and Beatrice, representing divine enlightenment, leads Dante trough the Paradiso. Along the way, Dante encounters those who on earth were giants of intellectualism, faith, justice and love, such as Thomas Aquinas, King Solomon and Dante's own great-grandfather, who is represented as three concentric circles, which in turn represent the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The journey ends with true heroic and spiritual fulfillment. Divine Comedy has flourished for more than 650 years and has been considered a major literary work since Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a biography of Dante in 1373. The work is a part of the Western canon an put Dante in a class with only one other poet, Shakespeare.
Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about the life of Dante and then in 1374 delivered the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy. Which means that Dante was the first whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course. Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other art forms (the novel, and then the drama) Dante's 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. Later readers have been eager to show the epic to be a polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as a mighy work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way, respond to one another. Dante created a repertoire of types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great stylistic artistry in its prefigutations 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.
The celebrations for the 750th birthday of Dante, the Florentine poet, begins with a series of events, including exhibits, concerts, publications, new translations, performances, conferences and readings. Pope Francis had a message to deliver regarding Dante, describing him as a "prophet of hope". He also said that Dante was an "artist of the highest universal values who still has much to say and to give through his work, inviting us to find again the lost meaning of the human condition."
Earlier epics, such as Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey and the English work Beowulf, focus on individual heroes and specific locales. The main stories in these epics generally borrow from myths and legends handed down from generation to generation. The Divine Comedy, on the other hand, gets its story mainly from the author's own imagination. In addition, it encompasses heroes and villains from everywhere, including material and spiritual world. The Divine Comedy presents life as a journey in which one man (representing all human beings) must overcome obstacles to achieve the goal. Therefore, unlike epics such as The Odyssey, Divine Comedy, focuses mainly on life as a spiritual journey. The climax of a literary work can be defined as the turning point at which the conflict begins to resolve itself for better or worse, or the final event in a series of events. According to the first definition, the climax of The Divine Comedy occurs in Purgatory. According to second definition the climax occurs in Paradise.
