The Divine Comedy
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise
This poem follows Dante from a dark wood down through Hell, up Mount Purgatory, and into the heavens, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice. At the end, he glimpses God as three circles of light.
427 pages 8h 18m reading time
- One of the greatest long poems ever written, and the most famous work in Italian literature.
- Imagines Hell as a pit of nine circles where each sin gets a punishment that fits it, Purgatory as a mountain where souls work off their sins together, and heaven as glowing spheres rising toward God.
- Argues that love drives everything people do, and that sin is love aimed at the wrong things, too weak, or too strong.
- Helped make the everyday Italian spoken in Florence the basis of the modern Italian language, at a time when serious books were usually written in Latin.
- Shaped how Western art pictures the afterlife, inspiring works from Botticelli's drawings and Rodin's sculpture "The Gates of Hell" to Liszt's "Dante Symphony" and T. S. Eliot's verse.
Written in exile
Dante wrote it after Florence banished him in 1302 and sentenced him to burn if he ever returned.
Predicting the past
The journey is set in 1300, so Dante could "predict" events he had already lived through, including his own exile.
Not originally "Divine"
Dante named it simply "Comedy," and the word "Divine" was added later by admirers, starting with Boccaccio.
Found through a dream
Boccaccio wrote that the last thirteen cantos went missing until Dante's son dreamed where they were hidden.
Translated from Italian by Charles Eliot Norton