What Influence Dante's Works

In reading Dante's works, a thoughtful reader can easily understand how deeply the poet felt the social role of the artist and how deeply he felt involved in the political-philosophical debate of his century. Consequently, it is known that both, Dante's literary style and his political thought greatly influenced the works of other authors during several centuries up to the present day.
If it is true that Dante's popularity is due to all his works, it is also true that Dante acquired a huge popolarity for Divine Comedy which is said to be: "the literary work that in absolute has in its structure the greatest presence of different layers of speech, largely, but not completely and not always intentional and well-controlled by the author. Of these …show more content…
Subsequently, some modern poets among whom Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, took as model for their own works Dante's oeuvre. In fact, Ezra Pound mentioned in his poem titled “Sestina: Altaforte” the Medieval nobleman Bertran de Born (lived in the late 12th century), who was put by Dante in the hell (Inferno Canto XXVIII) as he was suggested to be the one who turned Prince Henry against his father, King Henry II; while T.S. Eliot, in asserting that both: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them...” (Eliot, 1934: 266), he argued that: "Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly the Comedy is in some way a "moral education." The question is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Convivio we are seriously informed that the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them; and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical." (T.S. Eliot