Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Filed under the name Dante · July 8, 2026
I never made it past a few excerpts of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy myself in my community college night classes, but even secondhand you can tell you're dealing with something built to last — one of the greatest works in all of world literature, still taught and argued over seven hundred years later. That's the kind of staying power I associate with Scripture more than most literature, honestly, something meant to wrestle with the biggest questions a person can ask about right and wrong and what comes after. I always told my third graders that the books worth rereading are the ones that give you something new each time, and I suspect the Divine Comedy is exactly that sort of book for people who've spent a lifetime studying it. It humbles me a little, thinking about a poet writing something that would still matter this deeply centuries past his own lifetime. Most of us are lucky if our words outlast the newspaper column they were printed in, so I try not to take that kind of legacy lightly.