Dante’s Divine Comedy has served generations of poets as a model of religious poetry at its best, not only because of the sublimity of its spiritual vision but also its ability to involve human society within a vision of the relation between Heaven and Earth. This mixture of the religious, political, and poetic within Dante’s work informs the responses of subsequent poets to the great crises of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance from Petrarch’s Avignon papacy to the reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many poets from this period make use of various medieval and classical models to cry out against perceived political and religious abuses with the goal of restoring the shattered unity of the Christian world. Each approaches the problems of their age from their own personal temperaments and allegiances, but they all share a sense of the importance of the sacred and express regret for its loss or corruption.