"Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them, there is no third." -- TS Eliot.

"[The center of the Western Canon is Shakespeare.:] The second center is Dante." -- Harold Bloom.

"[Dante's aesthetic achievement:] is unparalleled." -- Gary Johnson

Any review of Dante or any great writer is necessarily incomplete. But whew. That was exhausting. And the hardest thing I've ever finished reading.

Very difficult to follow, since I don't know much about twelfth-century Italian politics, but I still got the feeling I get from very few writers [Shakespeare comes to mind:] of meeting an enormous cognition. What a mind! Everything is in here--theology, astronomy, numerology, Greek mythology, Italian history, politics, philosophy, and on and on...It feels like an intimate contact with a wide consciousness, as if Dante were in the room and he were taking up most of it.

That's why I would say, while it's certainly not my favorite, it is the broadest, the most overwhelming thing I've ever read, broader even than Milton, that master, Dante's British Protestant emulator. Milton is far more pleasant to my tongue (as he wrote the most fluid English verses outside of Shakespeare's works), but Dante's imagination, organization, and vision make the Divine Comedy a symphony, a supremely ordered document of the supremely ordered cosmos it describes. Dante, like all great writers, marries the right form to the right content. And, like Milton, he envisions a great cosmic wheel perpetually spinning--God's grace shines down to us, raising us up to that same God, and so on in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Also, I read the Cary translation, which was old-timey and hard to follow because it used the Shakespearean/German S-O-V structure to sentences (is that how Italian is, too? I dunno.) and having to think in S-O-V for 14,000 lines is hard for an English (S-V-O) speaker. It took twice the concentration of prose just to follow the syntax, never mind keep up the allusions, references, etc.

I was told that he was some sort of heretic--though as I recall I was told this BY a heretic--but I, and Catholic Encyclopedia, see no heresy in the Divine Comedy. It is the most Catholic and catholic work of literature ever written, the summit of the Middle Ages (which began with the Catholic City of God). I think people just wish he were a heretic; if you're at all orthodox they call you "narrow-minded" and assume you have never thought for yourself.

I also find it interesting whenever I read really old books how much smarter people were than we give them credit for. We have this mindset now, due to wonderful progress, that everything old is inferior. That is not the case in most things. The Middle Ages, in becoming synonymous with stupidity since the Reformation flooded Europe with anti-Catholic propaganda which is still in currency today (ironically among secularists more than Protestants). But Dante knew about the following things I didn't expect him to: 1) the Earth is round [side note, on page one of Summa Theologia Aquinas makes reference to this. The Columbus thing is a myth.:] 2) you think with your brain [people assume everyone was a Cartesian back then. Maybe there were some, but there was no Descartes yet!:] 3) time zones 4) loads of astronomy except the big famous one (Copernicus). There are probably more but those come to mind now.

As for Dante's centrality to the canon, I cannot agree at this time. I would suggest Cervantes is more central because he is more modern (even post-modern!) and Dante is hopelessly Medieval and Ptolemaic and therefore hasn't aged well. Perhaps if I understood Italian I wouldn't be saying this, but as I must read him in translation (and since poetry in translation is infamously dodgy), I do not expect to see people reading him in the future.