Divine Comedy

Structure and story

The Divine Comedy consists of 14,233 lines divided into three cantiche: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each containing 33 cantos. An initial canto, generally considered part of the first cantica, brings the total to 100 cantos. The first two cantos of the entire poem and of each cantica serve as prologues.

The number three is prominent: the verse scheme, terza rima, uses hendecasyllabic lines arranged in tercets with the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC, and each tercet totals 33 syllables, matching the number of cantos per cantica. Written in the first person, the poem recounts Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory, representing human reason; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven, representing divine revelation; and Bernard of Clairvaux guides him through the final three cantos.

The structure of each realm follows a pattern of 9 plus 1, totaling 10: nine circles of Hell plus Lucifer at the bottom, nine rings of Mount Purgatory plus the Garden of Eden at the summit, and nine celestial bodies of Paradise plus the Empyrean containing God's essence. Within each group of nine, seven elements correspond to a moral scheme subdivided into three subcategories, with two additional elements of greater particularity. For instance, the seven deadly sins cleansed in Purgatory are joined by realms for the late repentant and the excommunicated, and the core seven sins correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted into excessive, deficient, or malicious love.

Thematic concerns

The Divine Comedy functions as an allegory, with each canto and episode containing multiple possible meanings. Dante outlines other levels of meaning beyond allegory—historical, moral, literal, and anagogical—in his Letter to Cangrande. The poem's structure incorporates complex mathematical and numerological patterns, particularly threes and nines.

It is noted for its human qualities: skillful delineation of characters encountered in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, as noted by Dorothy Sayers, allows him to avoid descriptive exposition and to discuss many important subjects, widening the poem's range. Dante called the work a comedy because ancient classification divided poems into high tragedy and low comedy; low poems had happy endings and used everyday language.

He wrote on the serious subject of humanity's redemption in the low, vulgar Italian language rather than Latin. Boccaccio's account that an early version was begun in Latin remains controversial. Although primarily religious, the poem also discusses elements of contemporary science, such as the implications of a spherical Earth in the Purgatorio, including different stars visible in the Southern Hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and various time zones.

Influences

Without access to Homer, Dante used Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Statius as models for style, history, and mythology. Virgil appears as a mentor throughout the first two canticles, and his Aeneid is praised with language Dante reserves for Scripture. Ovid is a major source, especially through metaphors and episodes based on the Metamorphoses.

Statius and Lucan are less influential, with Lucan receiving proper recognition as a source only in the twentieth century. Aristotle is the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy; Dante built its philosophy on Aristotle's works, as scholastics did, and knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations and indirectly from Albertus Magnus. Virgil explicitly cites Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to justify the Inferno's structure, and Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of intellect are worse than sins of violence. The poem's language often derives from the Vulgate, the only Bible translation Dante had access to, with about five hundred direct quotes and references.

Dante treats the Bible as a final authority. The Comedy is also a product of Scholasticism, especially as expressed by Thomas Aquinas, most pronounced in the Paradiso, where Aquinas and Bonaventure appear as characters. Despite this, Dante diverges from scholastic doctrine on some issues, such as his praise for poetry.

Criticism and textual history

Critical reception of the Divine Comedy varied considerably before its universal renown. Although recognized as a masterpiece in the centuries after publication, it largely fell into obscurity during the Enlightenment, with exceptions including Vittorio Alfieri, Antoine de Rivarol, and Giambattista Vico, whose work inaugurated the romantic reappraisal. The Comedy was rediscovered in the English-speaking world by William Blake and Romantic writers of the 19th century.

Later authors such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, C. S. Lewis, and James Joyce drew on it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was its first American translator; modern poets including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, John Ciardi, W. S. Merwin, and Stanley Lombardo have produced translations. In Russia, Osip Mandelstam's late poetry bears the mark of a tormented meditation on the Comedy, and he gave a modern reading in his Conversation on Dante. Erich Auerbach said Dante was the first writer to depict humans as products of specific time, place, and circumstance, suggesting the Comedy inaugurated literary realism.

T. S. Eliot stated that Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. Jorge Luis Borges called it the best book literature has achieved. The Comedy has developed one of the most extensive critical traditions of any secular work, with line-by-line commentaries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and was among the first vernacular works to receive serious critical attention.

Did You Know?

• No original manuscript written by Dante has survived; about 800 manuscript copies from the 14th and 15th centuries exist.
• The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, on 11 April 1472 by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi; of 300 copies, fourteen survive.
• The first complete translation of the Comedy was into Latin prose by Giovanni da Serravalle in 1416 for two English bishops and an Italian cardinal during the Council of Constance.