Why Dante MattersJohn 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