The Structure and Content of Dante's Inferno Essay

Death, Demons, and Hell: The Early Renaissance Addresses Sin and the Afterlife Throughout Italian Renaissance history, religion served as a structure and basis for moral behavior as well as a belief system to understand how and why the world worked the way it did. Religious institutions were powerful structures that kept order over the people: inextricably intertwined with the functioning of the government and public attitude. Last Judgment scenes in religious art served the role of keeping good

Every arrangement of words seems to be an understatement when mentioning the success and influence of Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy. “An allegory is a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one” (Oxford Dictionary). The Divine Comedy has provided inspiration for a large body of Western Art. Originally published in the 14th century, his medieval poem written in the vernacular language of the people has been the material for

literature in general attempted to do this and Dante was no different with regard to this in his copying of Virgil and the Aeneid in their depictions of hell in pagan mythology. Analysis There are a host of specific examples from pagan mythology in the Inferno. For instance, in Canto 15, we see Dante leaving the wood of suicides. The people there do not have a chance to assume a new metamorphosis form due the heinousness of the crime of suicide (Aligheri and Lombardo 72). In Canto 14, we further see that

and Purgatory.  Since the poet Virgil lived before Christianity, he dwells in Limbo (Ante-Inferno) with other righteous non-Christians.  As author, Dante chooses the character Virgil to act as his guide because he admired Virgil's work above all other poets and because Virgil had written of a similar journey through the underworld.  Thus, Virgil's character knows the way through Hell and can act as Dante's knowledgeable guide while he struggles alongside Dante

Infernal Struggle in Dante’s Inferno and Book VI of The Aeneid Does hell have its own history? For Dante, the structural and thematic history of ‘hell’ in the Inferno begins with the Roman epic tradition and its champion poet, Virgil. By drawing heavily from the characteristics of hell in Book VI of The Aeneid, Dante carries the epic tradition into the medieval world and affirms his indebtedness to Virgil’s poetry. Moreover, Virgil becomes a central character in the Inferno as he guides Dante

The first passage is probably the most famous in the whole work, that of Francesca da Rimini, in Canto V of the Inferno . Condemned for her inconstancy, that is to say her lust, Francesca is contained in the eternal whirlwind of the `bufera infernale', alongside her lover, Paolo. In a clear parallel to her sin, she is buffeted by the inconstant wind. Although unceasing

Francesca's Style in Canto V of Dante's Inferno Canto V of Dante's Inferno begins and ends with confession. The frightening image of Minos who «confesses» the damned sinners and then hurls them down to their eternal punishment contrasts with the almost familial image of Francesca and Dante, who confess to one another. In a real sense confession seems to be defective or inadequate in Hell. The huddled masses who declare their sins to Minos do so because they are compelled to declare

principles most important to an understanding of the whole of the Comedy. Because our modern novelistic tradition of structure has led us to expect our plots to be arranged climactically, we tend to find this kind of geometric construction artificial and surprising, even though the practice was fairly common in medieval literature. Dante had himself already experimented with this kind of structure in La Vita Nuova. La Chanson of Roland, to cite another well-known example, seems by our standards to drag on

T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem “The Wasteland,” a grim picture of post-war London is analyzed as being the most important poetic work of the twentieth century. The first glance at this poem leads one to the conclusion that the content of this piece is bleak and depressing. The assumption can be made that Eliot has diagnosed his society with a terminal disease, which he chooses to describe through his poem. After further analyzing “The Wasteland” it can be seen that out of the dust of this barren place

The reader must participate in the making of the poem or story by digging the structure out and create coherence out of the seeming incoherence. Therefore, the search for meaning, even if it does not succeed, becomes meaningful itself. Modernism is also characterized by the use of fragmentary techniques. Compared with earlier writing