Tweeting Dante

Seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri’s poetry continues to intrigue and move us. Donald Carlson invites us to relive the journey of The Divine Comedy in one hundred excerpts, one from each canto of the poem, that he tweeted over the course of one hundred days in observation of the septicentennial of Dante’s death. He accompanies each excerpt with a reflection based on his own experiences of having studied and taught the poem for thirty-plus years. This reimagining of Dante’s poem helps to underscore that the journey is not just Dante’s, but that it is truly ＂our life’s journey.＂

Donald Carlson lives and teaches in North Texas. His poems have appeared in a number of journals. He has also published essays on the plays of William Shakespeare. In 2015, he collaborated on a volume of poetry, Road Frame Window, with two friends and fellow poets, Timothy Donohue and Dennis Patrick Slattery.