{ The Divine Comedy Honors World Studies Mrs. Steinke

The Divine Comedy  Have you ever visited a haunted house or a house of horrors?

The Divine Comedy  Dante is about to take you on a journey that is in some way comparable to such an adventure.

The Divine Comedy  Dante Alighieri, whose visions of Hell have haunted readers for centuries, is widely considered one of the greatest poets of Western civilization.

The Divine Comedy  Dante was born into a poor family in Florence, Italy. At the time Italy was not a unified country but a collection of city- states.

The Divine Comedy  The city states were marked by fierce political turbulence and power struggles between ruling families. The states were constantly at war with each other.

The Divine Comedy  As a member of the nobility, Dante became an elected official. Along with six other officials, he ran Florence's government.

The Divine Comedy  In 1300 there was a street accident that led to a skirmish, which escalated into a full blown civil war. Dante’s political party and all its representatives were over thrown. Dante was exiled from Florence.

The Divine Comedy  It is believed that Dante studied law and rhetoric at Bologna University, which has a great poetic reputation.

The Divine Comedy  It was there that Dante met other writers who sought to free poetry from the limitations imposed by the church and government.

The Divine Comedy  At the time, most writers wrote in Latin, the language of scholars. But Dante believed that poets should write in the language of the people—in this case Latin.

The Divine Comedy  His epic poem, the Divine Comedy, has come to be considered one of the masterpieces in all of literature.

The Divine Comedy  Divided into three sections, Inferno, Purgatory and Paradiso, this poem is the story of a journey through the three places of the next world.

The Divine Comedy  In Roman Catholic belief, these places are hell, where the damned are suffering;

The Divine Comedy  Purgatory, the place where repentant sinners are purified ;

The Divine Comedy  And heaven, where the righteous are rewarded.

The Divine Comedy  The poem is elaborately planned organized: there are exactly 100 parts, called cantos; one introductory canto then 33 Cantos in each of the three sections.

 In Italian, the cantos have a complex rhyme scheme, called terza rima, in which the first and third lines of each three line stanza rhyme, and the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next stanza. In addition, Dante’s journey takes three days, beginning on Good Friday and ending on Easter Sunday. The Divine Comedy

 Dante’s emphasis on threes reflects the Christian concept of the Trinity, in which God is three persons (Father, Son and Holy Ghost).

The Divine Comedy  The poem is an allegory, a literary form in which characters and actions represent abstract concepts. It is important to remember, that although Dante is the wanderer, he represents all humans on a spiritual journey.

The Divine Comedy  Guiding Dante on his pilgrimage is his beloved Beatrice, whose name means “she who blesses.” Beatrice is seen throughout Dante’s works.

The divine Comedy  In the first canto, from the vivid and gripping part one of the Inferno, Dante describes the horrors of hell. The poet is beginning his journey from despair to hope, as he confronts the nature and the consequences of sin.

The divine Comedy  Canto I relates how the middle aged poet, having lost faith, finds himself lost and alone in a dark wood. There he finds a guide, the Roman poet Virgil, who will lead him out of his errors and back onto the path of hope.

The Divine Comedy  In Canto III, Dante and Virgil meet the boatman Charon and see the multitudes of the damned. As might be expected, the journey is full of macabre images.