In brief
In the spring of 1300 a man of thirty-five finds himself lost in a wood. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil, sent on behalf of Beatrice, a Florentine woman the man loved and who is now dead, leads him down through the nine circles of Hell to Lucifer, frozen at the centre of the earth. They climb out on the far side of the globe at the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, where the saved dead work their way up seven terraces, each one purging a fault of love. At the summit Virgil vanishes and Beatrice arrives. She takes the traveller up through the spheres of heaven to the Empyrean, where for one flash he understands God. The trip takes about a week. The traveller is named exactly once, when Beatrice addresses him: “Dante, because Virgilius has departed” (Purg. 30).
Most people who have heard of the poem know its first third and have been told it is about punishment. It is about love, and it is vindictive and tender, often in the same canto. The author wrote it as a convicted exile, and he filled Hell with people his readers had met.
The argument
Dante’s theory of everything sits in the middle of the poem. On the terrace of the slothful Virgil explains that “Neither Creator nor a creature ever” lacked love, and that love can only go wrong in three ways: by choosing a bad object, “Or by too much, or by too little vigour” (Purg. 17). All sin is therefore a fault of love, and the whole moral map follows from that. Pride, envy and anger love the wrong thing. Sloth loves the right thing too faintly. Avarice, gluttony and lust love good things too hard.
The hardest claim follows from this, and the poem puts it on the gate of Hell. The gate says it was made by “The highest Wisdom and the primal Love” (Inf. 3). If love moves everything, love also built the torture chambers. I find that repellent, and I think the poem knows it is, because it spends the whole of the Inferno training its hero out of his own decent reaction.
The training begins with Francesca. She tells her story in the language of the love lyrics Dante himself wrote as a young man: “Love, that on gentle heart doth swiftly seize” (Inf. 5). The pilgrim faints with pity, and that faint is self-recognition, because what she is using to excuse herself is his own early style. By the frozen lake he has learned something else. He tears hair from a traitor’s head (Inf. 32), and when another traitor begs him to open his iced-up eyes he refuses: “And to be rude to him was courtesy” (Inf. 33). Readers are meant to wince at that progress and to see its logic. In Dante’s scheme, pity for the damned is an argument with God.
The poem finally lands somewhere gentler. In the lowest heaven the nun Piccarda, asked if she minds her low place, answers: “And his will is our peace” (Par. 3). The rest of the Paradiso tries to make that sentence feel like an ecstasy and not a surrender.
The shape of the poem
There are 14,233 lines in a hundred cantos: thirty-four for Hell, one of them a prologue, and thirty-three each for Purgatory and Paradise. The stanza is the three-line terza rima, which Dante invented, and each canticle ends on the same word: “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars” (Inf. 34), “Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars” (Purg. 33), and “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Par. 33).
The three realms are organised differently. Virgil gives the plan of Hell in Inf. 11: it sorts acts, with the sins of appetite near the top, then violence, then fraud and treachery at the bottom. Coldness is lowest, and the last circle is ice, not fire. Purgatory sorts dispositions, and it is the only realm with time in it: the dead wait, walk, sing, and move on when they are ready. Paradise sorts almost nothing. Dante learns that “everywhere / In heaven is Paradise” (Par. 3), and the souls he meets in the planets are only showing themselves there for his benefit.
Setting the journey in 1300 let the dead predict what Dante already knew had happened, including his own banishment (Par. 17). It also let him reserve a place in Hell for a living pope: Nicholas III, upside down in a hole, mistakes the pilgrim for his expected successor, “Dost thou stand there already, Boniface?” (Inf. 19).
The voice
There are two Dantes. The pilgrim is frightened, slow and sometimes wrong. The poet, writing years later, knows how it ends, and the distance between them is the source of much of the poem’s irony.
The language was the bigger gamble. Dante wrote philosophy, theology and astronomy in Tuscan, not Latin, and he let it range from the gutter to the Trinity. Its greatest effects are often its plainest. Francesca’s story stops at a kiss and one line: “That day no farther did we read therein” (Inf. 5). Ugolino of Pisa, who gnaws the skull of the archbishop who starved him and watched his sons die beside him, ends with a line commentators still argue over, since it may or may not mean he ate them: “Then hunger did what sorrow could not do” (Inf. 33). On seeing Beatrice, Dante turns to Virgil with a phrase translated from the Aeneid, “I know the traces of the ancient flame” (Purg. 30), and finds him gone. He quotes his master at the instant he loses him.
What Joyce took
James Joyce read Dante in Italian, and read him early. At University College Dublin the priest Charles Ghezzi taught him the poet, according to Chiara Valcelli for RTÉ, and her longer essay, citing Ellmann, reports that Oliver Gogarty nicknamed him after the poet. The standard study is Mary Reynolds’s Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (1981).
The joke comes first. The first Dante in A Portrait of the Artist is the fierce Catholic woman of Stephen’s household: “Dante had two brushes in her press” (chapter 1), and she storms out of the Christmas dinner over Parnell. Joyce gave the great judge’s name to the small one who judged his family.
Next comes the structure of a story. “Grace” opens with Tom Kernan at the bottom of a pub’s lavatory stairs, moves to his sickbed, and ends in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street, where a priest calls himself “their spiritual accountant” (Dubliners). Joyce told his brother Stanislaus the story was based on the Comedy, and Stanislaus called it a parody, as Cleta Jones’s essay records. Reynolds went further and assigned the stories of Dubliners to Dante’s circles, and she derived the title “A Little Cloud” from the rising flames of the false counsellors, in Longfellow “Even as a little cloud ascending upward” (Inf. 26). The scheme is arguable. The method is not: name real streets and real neighbours, and judge them.
The sharpest borrowing is about sound. In the newspaper office in Ulysses, Stephen broods on rhyme, “two men dressed the same”, and sets beside his own “mouth south: tomb womb” the rhyme words of Francesca’s speech, “la tua pace” and “che parlar ti piace” (episode 7). Dante’s rhymes come to him as girls “three by three”, in phrases from Inferno 5 and Paradiso 31, and his own as old men. Nothing else in Joyce shows so exactly how he read: he was listening to how the terza rima is built.
In the library episode Stephen’s Shakespeare, at thirty-five, is “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”, and Stephen silently salutes Dante’s old teacher, “Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word” (episode 9). The address echoes the pilgrim’s “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” (Inf. 15). Exile is the last and largest debt. Cacciaguida prophesies Dante’s: “Thou shalt abandon everything beloved”, and he says how “savoureth of salt / The bread of others” (Par. 17). Stephen’s “silence, exile and cunning” (Portrait, chapter 5) is a young man’s version, chosen where Dante’s was imposed on pain of burning, and Joyce’s only play, Exiles, gives its writer hero a reserved admirer named Beatrice Justice. In 1929 the young Samuel Beckett drew the line straight with his essay “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”, which set the invented Italian of the Comedy beside the invented language of Finnegans Wake.
The declared scaffold of Ulysses is Homer, and readings that lay Hell, Purgatory and Paradise over its three parts are readers’ schemes, not Joyce’s plan. On one point the two writers part company outright. Dante, who had no Greek and did not read Homer, sends his Ulysses out past the Pillars of Hercules because “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes”, and drowns him: “Until the sea above us closed again” (Inf. 26). Joyce’s Ulysses goes home to bed. Stephen has the first man’s ambition, and Bloom has the second man’s patience.
The people
Virgil
The pilgrim greets him with “Thou art my master, and my author thou” (Inf. 1), and for sixty-odd cantos he is the wisest being in the book. He is also shut, as a pagan, in Limbo. When Statius tells him in Purg. 22 that his own verses made a Christian of him, Virgil gets no credit for it himself, and at the top of the mountain he hands over and vanishes.
Beatrice
Beatrice Portinari was a real Florentine who married someone else and died in 1290; Dante says he first saw her when he was nine. On arrival in Eden she does not comfort him. She says “Look at me well; in sooth I’m Beatrice!” (Purg. 30) and reproaches him for his infidelity to her memory. She is teacher, theologian and judge. At the end she too is replaced, with no warning: the pilgrim turns to speak and finds an old man, Bernard (Par. 31).
Francesca
Francesca da Rimini was killed with her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, by her husband. She blames a book. “Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it” (Inf. 5), she says, and the words hurt a poet who has written such books.
Brunetto Latini
Dante’s old teacher runs among the sodomites on the burning sand. The pilgrim is as tender with him as he is anywhere, thanking the “dear and good paternal image” who taught him “how a man becomes eternal” (Inf. 15), and the poem still leaves him in Hell. The canto ends with Brunetto running off like “The one who wins, and not the one who loses”.
Cacciaguida
Dante’s crusader great-great-grandfather holds the centre of the Paradiso, tells him the truth about exile and orders him to write everything down.
How it was made
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence around 1265, fought at Campaldino in 1289, and entered politics with the White Guelphs. In 1301, while he was on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII, the Black Guelphs took the city, and in 1302 they condemned him. He did not pay the fine, and the sentence became death by burning if he returned. He never went back. He moved between northern Italian courts and died at Ravenna in September 1321, shortly after finishing the poem, which he had begun around 1308.
His sources were Virgil above all, then Ovid, Lucan and Statius, the Vulgate Bible, and Aristotle read through Aquinas. He called the work simply Comedìa, for its happy ending and its low language. Boccaccio added “divine” in his life of Dante, and the title stuck after a Venetian edition of 1555. The poem was first printed in 1472.
Readers and critics
Dante was public property almost at once. Florence, which had banished him, heard Boccaccio lecture on the poem in 1373. The Enlightenment largely neglected him, Vico excepted, and the English Romantics brought him back, helped by Henry Francis Cary’s blank-verse translation of 1805–14. Longfellow’s circle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the “Dante Club”, met weekly from 1864 to go through his version, published in 1867.
Erich Auerbach read Dante as the poet who put real, secular human history into the afterlife, an idea that went on to shape Mimesis. T. S. Eliot’s 1929 essay contains the famous line “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third”. Teodolinda Barolini’s The Undivine Comedy (1992) warns against taking the poem’s self-description as simple truth.
Afterlives
Botticelli drew it in the 1480s, Blake left his watercolours unfinished at his death in 1827, and Gustave Doré’s plates of the 1860s still fix most people’s idea of Hell. In poetry Eliot took a line from the third canto into The Waste Land, and Pound built Hell cantos of his own. Beckett’s first hero, Belacqua, is named after Dante’s lazy lute-maker (Purg. 4), and Seamus Heaney translated the Ugolino episode. The most serious reading of all may be Primo Levi’s chapter in If This Is a Man, where he tries to recite Ulysses’s speech to a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz, on the way to fetch the soup.
How to read it
- Know what the free text is. The link here is Longfellow’s complete translation of 1867, in unrhymed lines that follow the Italian almost word for word. It is exact and often beautiful, but its inversions and Latinisms (“the city dolent”) can make it heavier than the original. Cary’s 1814 blank verse, also free, reads like Milton and is further from Dante.
- Buy a modern one if you can. Robert and Jean Hollander’s has the best notes, Robin Kirkpatrick’s Penguin is the most alive, and Robert Durling’s Oxford version faces the Italian. Dorothy Sayers rhymes, and Clive James’s quatrains read fastest.
- Use the free scholarship. Digital Dante has Mandelbaum’s translation with Barolini’s commentary, and the Princeton Dante Project has the Hollanders’.
- Do not stop in Hell. The Purgatorio is the most human part, and the last cantos of the Paradiso repay everything that came before them.
- For Joyce, read Inferno 5, 15 and 26. Then read the Aeolus and library episodes of Ulysses.
Read next
- Virgil, The Aeneid (about 19 BC). Book 6 is the descent Dante rewrote, by the guide he chose.
- Dante, La Vita Nuova (about 1294). The earlier book about Beatrice, in poems and prose, that the Comedy sets out to outdo.
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). Another book that damns and blesses a real city’s neighbours by name, in one day.