That citizens of the United States think at all about the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is astonishing. Americans prefer the useful to the theoretical, the modern to the medieval, the plain sense to the allegorical, the unencumbered to the embellished. We are everything Dante is not. And yet Dante is widely read here, especially in our leading colleges and universities.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the principal founder of Dante studies in the United States. He brought Dante scholarship to Harvard College and became, in 1867, the first American to translate the whole of the 14th-century Divine Comedy’s three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Longfellow also established the Dante Club and convened its meetings in Cambridge, inviting fellow scholars of Italian to review his translation as it was proceeding. Later, he became the first president of the American Dante Society.

Longfellow died in 1882, but Dante still made it into the Harvard Classics’ “five foot shelf of books” in 1909 (although in English cleric Henry Francis Cary’s blank-verse translation). Today, accomplished faculty read and write on Dante throughout Ivy League universities. In our online age, we can consult the Princeton Dante Project, the Dartmouth Dante Project, and Digital Dante, hosted by Columbia University. Nevertheless, if Carnes