In scenes of adrenaline-quickening horror as well as great lyric beauty, the Divine Comedy fused Roman Catholic doctrine with Classical philosophy and contemporary politics. All life is written in its burning pages. If any work has a claim to the universal, it is the Divine Comedy.
Another tenacious dantista, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, never left his Moscow flat without a paperback Dante. Samuel Beckett, an apparent atheist, kept a copy of the Divine Comedy by his bedside as he lay dying in a Paris hospice in 1989. People of all faiths and backgrounds continue to respond to his great work. If Dante speaks to our present condition, it is because he wrote the epic of Everyman in search of salvation. As a singer of other-worldly horror, the Florentine belongs to a medieval world of infernal retribution, when people feared damnation. How has the poem managed to survive for so long? The boil and hiss of the first part of Dante's masterwork – the Inferno – is impossible for us to imagine today. In spite of our distance from medieval theology, Dante's allegorical journey through sin and salvation known as the Divine Comedy endures as one of the essential books of mankind. Dante Alighieri was born 750 years ago this week in Florence.
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