A Short Biography Dante Alighieri
Who is Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)?
Italian poet. For Dante, the role of
the poet included the moralist, the philosopher and, in his Divine
Comedy, the prophet. Convinced by his brief but traumatic political
career in his native Florence that the society which it represented
required fundamental moral reform Dante, in the last twenty years of
his life, gradually arrived at a vision of an ideal society where
individuals would be free to follow the path of virtue leading to
ultimate salvation, and it is in this essentially religious context
that his political thought must be seen.
