Italian · 1265–1321
Dante created the Italian literary language and Western literature's most ambitious poem. Exiled from his beloved Florence for political reasons, he spent his final two decades wandering Italian courts and composing the Divine Comedy, a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that encompasses all human knowledge and experience. He chose to write in Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, proving that the language of ordinary people could achieve the highest literary art. His vision of the afterlife, with its precisely calibrated punishments and rewards, shaped Christian imagination for centuries. T.S. Eliot considered him the greatest poet who ever lived.