Dante in the Modern World

T.S. Eliot called Dante and Shakespeare the two poets who "divide the modern world between them." James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Borges all acknowledged Dante's influence. Dan Brown's Inferno brought Dante to thriller audiences, and video games regularly adapt the Inferno's structure. His decision to write in vernacular Italian rather than scholarly Latin was a democratizing act — every writer who chooses their own language over a prestige tongue follows his example, whether they know it or not.