biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1265–1321)
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| biography:
| Poet, prose writer, literary theorist, philosopher, and political thinker, born in Florence, NC 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 early death in 1290, aged barely 20) 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 not known. The lyric poems, Vita nuova, which tells of his boyish passion for Beatrice, are probably the earliest. By far the most celebrated is the Divina commedia (1307–21, 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. Of the latter, his Eloquence in the Vernacular Tongue was of major importance in establishing the Italian vernacular in place of Latin as the literary language, which in turn was to revolutionize the literary tradition of other European cultures. |
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