The translation, imitation, and contestation of Dante in English shows no signs of abating after six hundred years. The waning of scholasticism, the Reformation, the rise of new nation-states (including Italy, Ireland, and the United States), the two World Wars, the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland, and the struggles of African-Americans have all been articulated through readings and rewritings of Dantean texts. The first part of this history is easy to narrate: the painstaking intelligence with which Chaucer, Milton, and Shelley respond to Dante is easily distinguished from the general ignorance and imaginative feebleness that prevails in the first four centuries. Thereafter things become more complicated: an American Dante comes into being; Pound and Eliot connect American, English, and continental traditions; an Irish Dante (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney) achieves things that are beyond the grasp of the English or Americans. Interest in Dante has, if anything intensified in the last few years. This survey begins with a secure origin - Chaucer's De Hugelino Comite de Pize - and works forward to an imperfect, Farinata-like vision of our own immediate future.

Chaucer's decision to lift the Ugolino story from Inferno 33 for his Monk's Tale set a trend that has never been broken: the Ugolino episode has been translated into English more times than any other Dantean passage (Paolo and Francesca run a poor second).