The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (8 page)

R
Å«
m
Ä«
lived for a short while after completing the
Ma
nav
Ä«
. He always remained a respected member of Konya society, and his company was sought by the leading officials as well as by Christian monks.
Ḥ
us
ā
m al-D
Ä«
n was his successor and was in turn succeeded by Sul
á¹­
ā
n
Walad, who organized the loose fraternity of R
Å«
m
Ä«
's disciples into the Mawlaw
Ä«
yah, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes because of the mystical dance that constitutes their principal ritual. Sul
ṭā
n Walad's poetical accounts of his father's life are the most important source of knowledge of R
Å«
m
Ä«
's spiritual development. His mausoleum, the Green Dome, today a museum in Konya, is still a place of pilgrimage for thousands of all faiths from around the world.

(b.
c
. May 21–June 20, 1265, Florence, Italy—d. Sept. 13/14, 1321, Ravenna)

D
ante Alighieri was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker who is best known for the monumental epic poem
La commedia
, later named
La divina commedia
(
The Divine Comedy
).

Dante was of noble ancestry, and his life was shaped by the conflict between the papal and imperial partisans called, respectively, Guelfs and Ghibellines. When an opposing political faction within the Guelfs (Dante's party) gained ascendancy in Florence, he was called in January 1302 to appear before the new government and, failing to do so, was condemned for crimes he had not committed. Again failing to appear some weeks later, Dante and others within his party were condemned to be burned to death. He soon after went into exile and never again returned to Florence.

His great friendship with the poet Guido Cavalcanti shaped Dante's later career. More important, however,
was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women in all of literature.
La vita nuova
(
c
. 1293;
The New Life
) tells a simple story: Dante's first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18, Dante's expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante's anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady's virtues, anticipations of her death, and finally the death of Beatrice, Dante's mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic
donna gentile
(a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice),
Beatrice's final triumph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante's determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman.” Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the
Vita nuova
is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice).

Vita nuova
is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the
Il convivio
(
c
. 1304–07;
The Banquet
). Each is a
prosimetrum
, that is, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The
Vita nuova
brought together Dante's poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the
Convivio
, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante's most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of
The Divine Comedy
.

The
Convivio
was among the works he wrote during his difficult years of exile. In it Dante's mature political and philosophical system is nearly complete. He makes his first stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He introduces the crucial concept of
horme
, that is, of an innate desire that prompts the soul to return to God. The soul, however, requires proper education through examples and doctrine; otherwise it can become misdirected toward worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. Through the
Convivio
Dante felt able to explain the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task of
The Divine Comedy
. During this time Dante also began work on the unfinished
De vulgari eloquentia
(
c
. 1304–07;
Concerning Vernacular Eloquence
), a companion piece to the
Convivio
; written in Latin, it is primarily a practical treatise in the art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language and is one of the first great Renaissance defenses of vernacular Italian.
De monarchia
(
c
. 1313;
On Monarchy
), one of Dante's greatest polemical treatises, expands the political arguments of the
Convivio
.

Dante's years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations from one place to another. Throughout his exile he nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem.
The Divine Comedy
was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain.

The Divine Comedy
consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into three sections, or canticles,
Inferno, Purgatorio
, and
Paradiso
. There are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the
Inferno
, which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151 lines. The poem's rhyme scheme is the terza rima (
aba, bcb, cdc
, etc.).

The poem's plot can be summarized as follows: a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake a journey that leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him through the
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
, and Beatrice, who introduces him to
Paradiso
. Through these fictional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already occurred at the time of the writing). The exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the Fall of Man.

The Divine Comedy
is a profoundly Christian vision of human temporal and eternal destiny. By writing it in Italian rather than Latin, Dante almost singlehandedly made Italian a literary language. By the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first public lectures on
The Divine Comedy
, making Dante the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course. Dante became known as the
divino poeta
, and in an edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem's title; thus, the simple
Commedia
became
La divina commedia
, or
The Divine Comedy
.

In his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy, most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca, in Ravenna. There, at his death, Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.

(b. July 20, 1304, Arezzo, Tuscany [Italy]—d. July 18/19, 1374, Arquà, near Padua, Carrara)

P
etrarch, an Italian poet and humanist, was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age. His poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry, and his consciousness of the Classical past as a source of literary and philosophical meaning for the present was of great importance in paving the way for the Renaissance.

Petrarch, whose Italian name was Francesco Petrarca, undertook his first studies at Carpentras, France, and at
his father's insistence he was sent to study law at Montpellier, France (1316). From there he returned to Italy with his younger brother Gherardo to continue these studies at Bologna (1320). After his father's death, in 1326, Petrarch took minor ecclesiastical orders at Avignon and entered the household of the influential cardinal Giovanni Colonna.

Petrarch had during his early youth a deep religious faith and a love of virtue. There now followed the reaction—a period of dissipation—which also coincided with the beginning of his famous chaste love for a woman known now only as Laura. Petrarch himself kept silent about everything concerning her civil status. He first saw her in the Church of St. Clare at Avignon on April 6, 1327, and loved her, although she was outside his reach, almost until his death. From this love there springs the work for which he is most celebrated, the Italian poems (
Rime
), which he affected to despise as mere trifles in the vulgar tongue but which he collected and revised throughout his life.

During the 1330s, which were years of ambition, unremitting study, and travel, Petrarch's reputation as a scholar spread. He was crowned as poet on the Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341, afterward placing his laurel wreath on the tomb of the Apostle in St. Peter's Basilica, a symbolic gesture linking the Classical tradition with the Christian message.

He subsequently became enthusiastic for the efforts of Cola di Rienzo to revive the Roman republic and restore popular government in Rome—a sympathy that divided him still more sharply from the Avignon court and in 1346 even led to the loss of Cardinal Colonna's friendship. The Plague of 1348, known as the Black Death, saw many friends fall victim, including Laura, who died on April 6, the anniversary of Petrarch's first seeing her. Finally, in the jubilee year of 1350 he made a pilgrimage to Rome and later
assigned to this year his renunciation of sensual pleasures. The time in between these landmark events was filled with diplomatic missions, study, and immense literary activity.

In 1351 he began work on a new plan for the
Rime
, which he had begun writing two decades earlier. The project was divided into two parts: the
Rime in vita di Laura
(“Poems During Laura's Life”) and the
Rime in morte di Laura
(“Poems After Laura's Death”), which he now selected and arranged to illustrate the story of his own spiritual growth. The theme of his
Canzoniere
(as the poems are usually known) therefore goes beyond the apparent subject matter, his love for Laura. He also continued work on the
Epistolae metricae
(66 “letters” in Latin hexameter verses), begun in 1350; he embarked on a polemic against the conservative enemies of his new conception of education, which rejected the prevailing Aristotelianism of the schools and restored the spiritual worth of Classical writers. He also began work on his poem
Trionfi
, a generalized version of the story of the human soul in its progress from earthly passion toward fulfillment in God.