DANTE ALIGHIERI, whom Yeats called “the chief imagination of Christendom,” has become for the Western world the poet of the Commedia (only later characterized as “divine”). But Dante’s verse was born ...

The great books of the Western canon rest on the presupposition that all the books contained therein are ipso facto “great.” But what happens if you encounter a book from one of the authors that seems ...

Dante Alighieri, trans. from the Italian by David Slavitt, Harvard Univ., $18.95 (156p) ISBN 978-0-674-05093-8 Before he wrote the Inferno and the Paradiso, Dante Alighieri wrote some of the world's ...