Dante's Influence On Society

Whether Dante’s Divine Comedy has made a lasting impression on society is not an interesting debate. Dante’s work continues to inspire new generations studying the words almost 700 years after they were written. But how Dante’s work is used today has changed from his purpose for the Comedy. Dante wrote that the purpose of the Divine Comedy is “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss” in his letter to Cangrande, his patron. However, the general public today has a different idea of the Divine Comedy. Dante’s work is world renown. T. S. Elliot, a 20th-century poet, said “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” The poems influence has been recognized
In pop culture, the Divine Comedy has become a reference often used when facing certain death or Hell itself. In TV and movies, references to Dante’s circles of hell are a common theme. Films such as Pirates of the Caribbean to children’s cartoons like Ice Age have made references to Dante's Inferno when characters are facing monsters or the underworld. In other aspects, Inferno, as the most popular part of the comedy, is used in art as inspiration for horror and hellish. Special edition playing cards featuring Dante and other characters as the faces , to graffiti around underground tunnels and caves , the first third of the trilogy has cemented itself as our collective concept of hell in modern
Clive James, a translator of the Comedy, describes the work as rather than “an abstruse theology wonk full of long-obsolete ideas, was in fact the great precursor of the modern scientific attitude. His concentrated gaze was everywhere, and a mile deep.” James describes the detailed structure of the comedy and praises the mind that created it. Dante's work exemplifies the starting trend scientific thinking and discovery. As part of the university system of the medieval world, Dante “was surely aware also of a “radical” Aristotelianism centered in Bologna, where masters … were affirming the autonomy of human reason and its capacity to attain happiness through its own powers” Dante was in the middle of new thought and discovery just as scientists today strive for. James compares the Divine Comedy to Shakespeare, as T.S. Eliot did. "The Divine Comedy was aimed straight at the reader. Italian readers of Dante hear their own language at its intoxicating best, the way we hear ours when we read Shakespeare. " The Comedy encourages learning and self-improvement but also entertains the