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Dante's Impact on Vernacular Literature

The document summarizes key aspects of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It discusses how the Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, guided by Virgil and Beatrice. Purgatorio is described as the most lyrical while Paradiso contains Dante's most beautiful passages. The Comedy helped establish Italian as a literary language. While honored after his death, it later fell out of fashion among Renaissance humanists who found its style too medieval.

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192 views1 page

Dante's Impact on Vernacular Literature

The document summarizes key aspects of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It discusses how the Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, guided by Virgil and Beatrice. Purgatorio is described as the most lyrical while Paradiso contains Dante's most beautiful passages. The Comedy helped establish Italian as a literary language. While honored after his death, it later fell out of fashion among Renaissance humanists who found its style too medieval.

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Mc Praxis
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Most of Dante's literary work was composed after his exile in 1301.

La Vita Nuova ("The


New Life") is the only major work that predates it; it is a collection of lyric poems (sonnets
and songs) with commentary in prose, ostensibly intended to be circulated in manuscript
form, as was customary for such poems.[61] It also contains, or constructs, the story of his love
for Beatrice Portinari, who later served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy, a
function already indicated in the final pages of the Vita Nuova. The work contains many of
Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been
regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. However, Dante's
commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular—both in the Vita Nuova and in the
Convivio—instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.[citation needed]

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory
(Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso); he is first guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then
by Beatrice. Of the books, Purgatorio is arguably the most lyrical of the three, referring to
more contemporary poets and artists than Inferno; Paradiso is the most heavily theological,
and the one in which, many scholars have argued, the Divine Comedy's most beautiful and
mystic passages appear (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui
mancò possa"—"at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso,
XXXIII, 142).

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 than most early Italian writers of the
variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature and a unified literary language
beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time; in that sense, he is a forerunner of the
Renaissance, with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical
writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the limits of his time) of Roman antiquity, and
his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome, also point forward to the 15th
century. Ironically, while he was widely honored in the centuries after his death, the Comedy
slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragic, and not
stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late Renaissance came to demand of
literature.

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