Dante Alghieri Sparknotes

Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) was an Italian scholar, poet, and early humanist during the reformation of the Renaissance period. He was one of the greatest poets of the 14th-16th century, and is regarded as the father of the humanist movement. Petrarch was a prolific writer. Not only was he known for poetry in Italian and Latin, but also hundreds of letters, essays and histories. Like Dante, a generation before Petrarch wrote in a vernacular style to bring Italian a literary language.

Dante Alighieri, a poet of the Renaissance, marked a change in literature from the Middle Ages to a Renaissance through his work The Inferno in which he travels through hell. Throughout this journey, Dante expresses ideas of humanism: a new method of learning that was quickly gaining popularity throughout Italy. He also introduces characters with stories that reflect the political and religious climate of Florence at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance period. During this time, the major division of Florentines coupled with the criticism towards the Catholic Church, as well as the rise of humanism all strongly influenced the production of Dante’s Inferno.

The Great Divorce, by C.S Lewis and Inferno by Dante Alighieri, are great works that describe in significant detail the souls living in hell and how they got there. Lewis and Dante both portray to the reader how to attain Gods salvation by presenting the choices people make and what happens to them when they either become saved or reject God. The books have a distinct parallel between them. This parallel is found in the characters that reside in all nine circles of hell, and the different ghosts found on the bus traveling through heaven. Lewis and Dante characters are extremely similar and this essay will compare those exact characters.

Dante Alighieri was a major Italian poet of the Late Middle Ages, he was born into a family with a complex involvement in the Florence political scene. In the Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Inferno, Dante, the protagonist, witnesses the Circles of Hell, guided by Virgil the character representing Human Reason. Alighieri shows compassion towards different sinners in Hell, which provides an insight on the way he feels about people who do not repent. Although they are illustrated as good people by the poet, they are punished within the different circles of Hell because they did not cleanse themselves of sin. Through the uses of diction, actions of Dante and Virgil, and imagery, Alighieri was able to show readers he felt compassion towards Farinata Degli Uberti, Pier Delle Vigne, and Count Ugliono.

Born and raised in Florence during periods of political instability and fragmentation, Dante Alighieri, a devoted White Guelph and poet, became very familiar with the conflicts rising between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines––and between the Blacks and Whites. When the Blacks eventually overpowered the Whites, Alighieri was exiled and wrote The Inferno, in which he directly described the politics of his life and pressed on the topics of sin, treachery, and loyalty, while mentioning specific Florentine people he respected and others who, he felt, were deserving of harsh punishments because of their actions throughout their lives. In this epic poem, Alighieri writes himself as the main protagonist, Dante, in describing his journey through the nine circles of Hell, while meeting several sinners and witnessing their tormenting punishments along the way. When Dante encounters both loyal and traitorous Florentines, Alighieri uses diction, imagery, and actions to express compassion to three Sodomites––Jacopo Rusticucci, Guido Guerra, and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi––and Farinata Degli Uberti, and hostility to Bocca Degli Abati, revealing that Alighieri’s amount of sympathy and malevolence towards the sinners depended on their loyalty or betrayal to Florence.

Dante’s descent into Hell in Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, tells of the author’s experiences in Hades as he is guided through the abyss by the Roman author, Virgil. The text is broken into cantos that coincide with the different circles and sub-circles of Hell that Dante and Virgil witness and experience. Inferno is heavily influenced by classic Greek and Roman texts and Dante makes references to a myriad of characters, myths, and legends that take place in Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Some of the most important references, however, are the most obvious ones that are easily overlooked simply because of the fact that they are so blatant. Dante is being escorted through Hell by the

Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491), an Italian painter and medieval poet was known best for his epic poem, The Divine Comedy, which includes sections representing the three tiers of the Christian afterlife: Purgatory (Purgatorio), Hell (Inferno), and Paradise (Paradiso). This poem was a great work of medieval literature and was considered the greatest work of literature composed in Italian. The Divine Comedy was a Christian vision of mankind’s eternal fate. When The Divine Comedy was written, Dante made a cathedral painting that represents his poem called Dante and His Poem. In the painting, the Dante shows the 3 tiers related to the Christian afterlife. Dante was standing in a red robed colossus, revealing his poem to the city of Florence. The painting was full of great meaning, inspiring so many artists from Rodin to Robert Rauschenberg.

In the note to Canto V regarding Francesca and Paulo, the Hollanders exclaim that “Sympathy for the damned, in the Inferno, is nearly always and nearly certainly the sign of a wavering moral disposition” (112). Indeed, many of the touching, emotional, or indignation rousing tales told by the souls in Hell can evoke pity, but in the telling of the tales, it is always possible to derive the reasons for the damned souls’ placement in Hell. However, there is a knee-jerk reaction to separate Virgil and, arguably, some of the other souls in limbo from this group of the damned, though, with careful perusal of the text, the thoughtful reader can discern the machinations behind their damnation.

Alighieri, Dante. "The Divine Comedy, Inferno." Rpt. in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Mack Maynard. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1995. 1703-1829.

The beginning lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri indicate a pragmatic journey through the dark woods. It is soon evident that The Divine Comedy is in terms of an allegory. Midway through his life, Dante finds himself lost and in darkness. He is confused and unaware of how he has ended up in these dark woods. Dante soon comes across Italian poet Virgil, who will guide him through the Nine Circles of Hell. Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy: Inferno portrays Dante’s life and adventure through Hell which allegorically represents a much broader subject: man’s journey through life to salvation.

His most famous piece of literature, The Divine Comedy, is said to be important also because of “It’s place in the history of the development of the Italian language'; (Dante: The Divine… Internet). To understand this we need to look at the language and writings at that time in history. During Dante’s lifetime different dialects of Italian were spoken in different parts of the country (Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 Internet). Dante was a very skilled writer who wrote in both his Florentine Italian dialect and Latin, which was unusual since most scholarly writings at that time were in Latin (Dante Internet). Dante however believed that the language of one’s family was noble and he broke the traditions of those before him.

Dante's `Divine Comedy', the account of his journey through hell, purgatory and heaven is one of the worlds great poems, and a prime example of a most splendidly realized integration of life with art. More than being merely great poetry, or a chronicle of contemporary events, which it also is, the `Comedy' is a study of human nature by a man quite experienced with it. The main argument I will make in this essay is that Dante's `Comedy' is chiefly a work of historical significance because in it lies the essence of human life across all boundaries of time and place. I feel that such a reading is justified, nay invited, by Dante himself when he says;

During the Renaissance, the ideology of humanism became extremely popular. After the black plague people presumed that God had abandoned them. As a result, they began to search for their own answers through observation and experimentation; this method was called empiricism. Through this, man began to place himself at the center of the universe instead of God. Individuals began to embrace their own talents and spend less time worrying about the next life and more living in the current one. Humanism was also developed from a desire to re-live the Classical time period, or the golden age; therefore, the humanistic education consisted of studies of Greek, Latin, art, music and philosophy. This contemporary way of thinking inspired many philosophers and writers. Throughout Dante’s work he emphasizes the concept of humanism, and it is this work that influenced many other philosophers including Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Dante was a poet in Italy in the 13th century and the events in Dante's life shape Dante's Inferno. There were political problems in Florence, Italy, and there were two groups, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

Throughout the Middle Ages, art and philosophy has been lost in darkness, but with the reintroduction of ideas that came with the Renaissance in Italy, brought about a literary revival. One of the writers that influenced this revival is Dante Alighieri, a 13th century poet from Florence, Italy. His world famous epic, La Commedia, or more commonly known as The Divine Comedy remains a poetic masterpiece depicting truth and sin. The Divine Comedy, through the journey into the three hells, expresses a universal truth of good versus evil. Alighieri’s life of heartbreak with the influences of other famous poets like Homer and Virgil has affected his writing style, and through reviews by literary experts and their interpretation of Alighieri’s