Dante invented the three-line rhyme scheme he used in The Divine Comedy. It is called terza rima, a form that consists of 10- or 11-syllable lines in tercets (three-line stanzas) using the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded, and so on. Later English poets who used terza rima include Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and W. H. Auden.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
Aside from writing the first formal life of Dante, from 1373 to 1374 Boccaccio’s commentaries on The Inferno were the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy. Effectively, as a result of these lectures, Dante was the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course.
The subtitle of Boccaccio’s famous framed narrative The Decameron (1350-53) is Prencipe Galeotto, or Galeotto, the middle man in Lancelot and Guinevere’s tragic love. Boccaccio is referencing Dante’s allusion to Galeotto, who was blamed for the arousal of lust in the episode of Paolo and Francesca in The Inferno.
Throughout The Decameron there runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune and how quickly one can rise and fall under the influence of the Wheel of Fortune or Destiny. Boccaccio was educated in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which we know used allegorical techniques to show connections between literal events within the story and the Christian message Dante wished to portray. However, The Decameron uses Dante’s allegorical model not to educate the reader but to satirize this method of learning. This was part of a wider historical trend at the time that openly criticized the powers of the church after the estimated 1.5 million deaths from the bubonic plague (“Black Death”) (1348-50) were attributed to unanswered prayers of deliverance.
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)
A large portion of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, including “The Monk’s Tale,” were written in the 1370s, shortly after Chaucer’s visit to Italy, where he was exposed to Boccaccio’s Decameron and Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men. In “The Monk’s Tale,” Chaucer hails Dante: “the grete poete of Itaille that highte Dant” (“The great poet of Italy who was named Dante”). Additionally, one eight-line stanza of Chaucer’s “A Complaynt to His Lady,” an early short poem, is written in terza rima. His House of Fame, a dream vision in which the narrator is guided through the heavens by an otherworldly guide, is a parody of The Divine Comedy. The beginning of the last stanza in his Troilus and Criseyde is modeled after a passage in The Paradiso.
Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552-1599) and John Milton (1608-1674)
Though neither necessarily admitted to being influenced by Dante in their two most famous poems, it is clear that they were both aware of him and his works. Each wrote one epic poem that just happened to carry similar allegorical themes to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Though written to celebrate Queen Elizabeth I and the Tudor dynasty, Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen is an extended allegory about the moral life and what makes for a life of virtue. With its themes of Man’s Creation, Fall, and Salvation, Milton’s epic allegorical poem Paradise Lost (1657) is perhaps most closely associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy by means of comparison.
Milton put Dante’s insistence on the separation of worldly and religious power to use in his treatise Of Reformation (1641), where he explicitly cites The Inferno. Additionally, Beatrice’s condemnation of corrupt and neglectful preachers, found in The Paradiso (“so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance, / return from pasture, having fed on wind”), is translated and adapted in Milton’s lyrical poem Lycidas (1638): “The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,” when Milton condemns corrupt clergy.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Lord Byron employed terza rima in his “Prophecy of Dante” (1821). Through the main character, Dante, Byron ponders what it means to be a poet and all of the social and political aspects that go along with that title. Its central theme is the relationship between life and art.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley pays tribute to Dante in his “Epipsychidion”(1820), the “Triumph of Life” (1822), and “A Defence of Poetry” (1840). In “Epipsychidion” he drew creatively upon Dante’s celebration of eternal, constant love in The New Life. “Triumph of Life” is a terza rima poem and Shelley’s most obvious adaptation of Dante, borrowing not only his verse form but also a Virgil-like figure in Rousseau and a parade of souls in death. In his prose work “A Defence of Poetry,” written in 1821 and published posthumously in 1840, Shelley’s intent was to demonstrate the similarities and to resolve the differences between Dante and himself. It is in this work Shelley made his famous claim that the “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—similar to Dante’s thoughts on philosophers.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Although the character of Ulysses (Odysseus) has been widely explored throughout classical literature (most notably in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, ca. 800-700 bce), Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” (1833) is the first modern account and seems to draw most closely on Dante’s Ulisse from his Inferno. In Dante’s retelling, Ulisse is condemned to Hell among the false counselors, both for his pursuit of knowledge beyond human bounds and for his adventures in disregard of his family.
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Browning admired Dante and his work, and his influence or name is seen in several of Browning’s poems, including “One Word More” (1855), “Ixion” (1883), The Ring and the Book (1868), and most notably “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855). The “Childe Roland” landscape has been described as Hell-like either as a place embodying the possibility of eternal damnation or as a projection of the poem’s traveler’s state of mind (a psychological Hell). Several critics have noted “Childe Roland” as an adaptation of The Divine Comedy.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, on his art and in his published works he placed the name Dante first, in honor of the great Italian poet. He worked on translations of Dante’s New Life and adopted some of Dante’s stylistic characteristics in his own writing.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Yeats referred to Dante as “the chief imagination of Christendom.” The first two stanzas of Yeats’s poem “Byzantium” (1928) closely echo Canto VIII of Dante’s Purgatorio.
E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
In Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), the character Gino Carella, when first introducing himself, quotes the initial lines of Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope all ye who enter here”). This novel also includes several references to Dante’s New Life.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Pound’s epic poem The Cantos (1915-62) (consisting of 120 sections, or cantos) takes as a direct model Dante’s Divine Comedy. The opening canto echoes Dante’s opening and the poet Pound also descends into Hell to interrogate the
Dead. Here are some of the more prominent mentions. Cantos 14 and 15 conclude with a vision of Hell, using the convention of The Divine Comedy to present Pound moving through a Hell populated by bankers, newspaper editors, hack writers, and other “perverters of language” and the social order. In Canto 15, Plotinus takes the role of a Virgil-like guide. In Canto 16, Pound emerges from Hell into an earthly paradise where he sees some of the people he encountered in earlier cantos. Canto 38 opens with a quote from Dante in which he accuses Albert of Germany of falsifying money. Canto 93 looks at examples of benevolent action by public figures, including Dante and his writing On Monarchy. The Cantos close with a reference to the following lines from Dante’s Paradiso:
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,
Tornate a riveder li vostri liti: non vi mettete in pelago, che forse, perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.
O ye who are in a little bark, desirous to listen, following behind my craft which singing passes
On,
Turn to see again your shores: put not out upon the deep, for haply, losing me, ye would remain astray.
This reference to Dante’s Paradiso signaled Pound’s intent to close his poem with a final volume based on his own Paradise-like vision.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Modernist poet Eliot elevated Dante to a preeminence he felt was shared by only one other poet, William Shakespeare: “[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” Eliot declared that Dante’s poetry exercised a persistent and deep influence on his work. The spiritual quest in Dante’s Divine Comedy greatly influenced the central theme of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), the individual’s quest for spiritual meaning through a kind of psychological hell. Eliot uses allusions to The Divine Comedy, specifically The Inferno, throughout “The Waste Land.” Eliot also cites The Inferno as an epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). He also cites heavily from and alludes to Dante in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and “Ara vus prec” (1920).
World History
