First Things RSS Feed - Robert Hollander https://www.firstthings.com/author/robert-hollander en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:57:30 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/robert-hollander 60 Dante: A Party of One https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/04/dante-a-party-of-one https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/04/dante-a-party-of-one Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500 Rarely has a writer left a more indelible mark—and under less favoring circumstances—than Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). His major work is considered one of the crowning achievements of human expression. It lives even today, nearly seven hundred years after its making, as one of the two or three greatest poems ever written. Its author was born in Florence into a family of minor nobility, Guelph in its political alignment and thus siding with the popes in the city’s political tensions (as opposed to Ghibellines, at the time mainly banished from Florence, who favored the imperial cause). The struggle between the two largest political forces in medieval Europe (a struggle delineated in Robert Louis Wilken’s essay on Gregory VII, FT, January) had not abated in Dante’s time.

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