Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person's Guide

John Took provides an entirely original view of one of the most important poets and thinkers in all of Western literature, Dante Alighieri. The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, a poet who, as T. S. Eliot put it, 'divides the world with Shakespeare, there being no third'. His, like ours, was a world of moral uncertainty and political violence, all of which made not only for the agony of exile but for an ever deeper meditation on the nature of human happiness. In Why Dante Matters, John Took offers by way of three in particular of Dante's works – the Vita Nova as the great work of his youth, the Convivio as the great work of his middle years and the Commedia as the great work of his maturity – an account, not merely of Dante's development as a poet and philosopher, but of his continuing presence to us as a guide to man's wellbeing as man. Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those 'who will deem this time ancient', Dante's is in this sense a discourse overarching the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Preface: Preliminary Confession Introduction: Dante and the Existential Point of View Dante at the Point of Ultimate Concern Dante: Who, What, Where and When? Course of the Argument 1 Dante, Self and Selfhood Love-Procession and the Love-Imperative: Preliminary Considerations in the Areas of Theology and Ethics Patterns of Self-Relatedness: Being as Ahead of Self, as Away from Self and Alongside Self A Phenomenology of Being 2 The Vita Nova Preliminary Considerations: New Life and a New Book Love and Love-Understanding: The Pilgrim Way A Commedia a minore 3 The Convivio Far-wandering and Friendship: The Courage of the Convivio Feasting and Faring Well: A Guide for the Dispossessed Problems of Perspective and a Civic Ontology 4 The Commedia Preliminary Considerations: Spiritual Journeying and the Courage to Be A Song of Ascents: The Commedia à la lettre Journeying under the Aspect of Seeing (Inferno) Journeying under the Aspect of Striving (Purgatorio) Journeying under the Aspect of Surpassing (Paradiso) 5 The Power of the Word: Issues in the Area of Language and Literature Being, Becoming and the Sanctity of the Word The Triumph and the Image and a Writerly Text Conclusion: In Conversation with Dante Further Reading Index of Names

About the Author :
John Took is Professor Emeritus of Dante Studies at University College London. Prominent among his books and articles on Dante – many of them turning on the poet's significance as a leading representative of what Paul Tillich calls the 'existentialist point of view' in philosophy and theology – is his recently published intellectual biography of Dante entitled simply Dante (Princeton University Press, 2020).