Dante

Poet Will Durant returns to repeatedly in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time as a fixture of the Western canon. Durant pairs him with Aquinas — “What Dante did to the hopes and fears of the Catholic Renaissance, Aquinas did for its thought” — and uses him as the exemplar of beauty and truth merged in one person: “Nothing so cleanses the dross out of a man as the creation of beauty or the pursuit of truth, and if the two are merged in one with him, as they were with Dante, he must be purified.” Dante recurs in Durant’s lists of the world’s greatest poets and in the “Hundred Best Books” reading program (the Divine Comedy), and stands as Italy’s national poet in the Homer-to-Greece, Virgil-to-Rome, Shakespeare-to-England lineage Durant invokes.

Context: Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) was the Florentine poet whose Divine Comedy — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — is foundational to the Italian language and Western literature, often read as an allegory of the soul’s journey toward God.

Where this appears

• The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time — Will Durant gives him extended treatment as a canonical poet, merging beauty and truth, with the Divine Comedy in his recommended reading program.