Divine Comedy-I: Inferno Dante Alighieri

Often when we set out to journey in ourselves, we come to places that surprise us with their strangeness. Expecting to see what is straightforward and acceptable, we suddenly run across the exceptions. Just as we as selfexaminers might encounter...

Humanism had a profound impact on European society during the Renaissance. This movement transformed the thinking processes of many Europeans, altering the way these people viewed themselves, their lives, and their place in the world. Literature...

Dante's Inferno, itself one piece of a literary trilogy, repeatedly deploys the leitmotif of the number three as a metaphor for ambiguity, compromise, and transition. A work in terza rima that details a descent through Nine Circles of Hell, The...

Instead of leaving all of Inferno's sinners to burn in the traditional flames of Hell, Dante successfully uses contrapasso to build a world with unique psychological depth, and therefore a deeper potential for suffering. Contrapasso distinguishes...

"What is fame? Fame is but a slow decay Even this shall pass away." Theodore Tilton

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is a poem laden with such Christian themes as love, the search for happiness, and the desire to see God. Among these...

In Canto XI of Dante's Inferno, Virgil carefully explains the layout of hell to his student, Dante. Toward the end of his speech, Virgil says that "Sodom and Cahors" are "speak[ing] in passionate contempt of God," (XI, 50-51), and divine will thus...

To tell a story is to narrate events, or to give an account. Within literature, storytelling becomes a frame within a frame, a story within a story. A character from the outer frame of the book creates a smaller frame in the form of his or her...

The journey of introspection can lead to unbound places and uninhibited realizations. In the course of his travels throughout the Inferno, Dante Alighieri encounters the damned souls of the underworld and experiences their prodigious punishments....

Canto IX of Dante's Inferno is remarkably representative of the work as a whole. It includes a number of prominent themes, among them the role Virgil plays as the manifestation of human reason and the argument that faith can achieve what reason...

Throughout time, men have used previously written literary texts as models for compositions of their own. This borrowing of ideas and concepts can been seen quite clearly in the works of Roman authors, who, for the most part, imitated the style of...

Pity plays a huge role in Dante's Inferno. It is the key emotion that Dante confronts during his passage through hell. Those in hell feel sadness, and this sadness, being an ordinary human emotion, is expected to result in the ordinary human...

In Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno, one of the most pitiful souls that Dante comes in contact with is Piero delle Vigne. Condemned to the second tier of hell for the sin of self-abuse and suicide, the reader, like Dante, is torn between sympathizing...

A number of overlying themes have persisted throughout the three canticles of Dante's Commedia. The politically charged and spiritually passionate Florentine elegantly laced into his masterpiece general topics - affairs of state, religion, and...

Dante's Inferno is a classic work of the Christian author, depicting his fictitious journey through the hierarchical levels of Hell in the year 1300 AD. As Dante travels down through the underworld, he stops at each stage of condemnation, often...

Next to Beatrice, Mary is probably the most important female character in Danteâs Comedy. Maryâs symbolism in relation to the souls of purgatory appears relatively simple at first: her examples of virtue both reprove the penitent sinners for their...

"Here I saw people more numerous than before, on

one side and the other, with great cries rolling

weights by the force of their chests" (Inferno 7.25-27)

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill man's heart. We have to imagine...

In Dante's Inferno, Virgil, the Roman poet, guides Dante through Hell. Virgil first encounters Dante at the beginning of Inferno when Dante strays from the True Way, a term used by Beatrice to represent a righteous and religious life. Beatrice,...

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands

and learned the minds of many...

T.S. Eliot is considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and his poetry was greatly influenced by Dante Alighieri. Eliot's introduction to Dante was in his college years at Harvard, where he studied philosophy. Eliot read...

"Blessed are those in whom grace shines so copiously that love of food does not arouse excessive appetite, but lets them hunger after righteousness" (2.23.150-154). On the sixth terrace of Purgatory, a tree speaks these words, communicating a...

The first U.S. Poet Laureate for three consecutive years (from 1997-2000), Pinsky has succeeded in much more than poetry. In 1984, for example, he was the author of an interactive fiction game called Mindwheel; today, he is the poetry editor for...

The difference between death and dying can often seem minute. The dying are merely those on the way to death. Yet the intrinsic difference between the process of dying and the moment of death is one of great literary obsession, in particular in...

“Love is the seed in you of every virtue and of all acts deserving punishment.”

——Purg. XVII, 104-5

Dante calls his great work a comedy, not for its humor but because it meets the traditional definition of a comedy: a story with a rising plot from...

Galileo Galilei once stated that “all truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” However, in order to understand and discover such truths, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue. In...