one step farther. In 1292, as he tells us in Convivio, to
console himself for the death of Beatrice, he began at-
tending lectures in philosophy. His concept of poetry
thus came to include a notion of the poet as teacher
and even as seer, a fi gure combining art and learning.
Separating him even farther from his Florentine teach-
ers and his compeers was his later insistence on Italy’s
need for a single ruler—an emperor. In all these ways,
Dante separated himself from much of contemporary
Florentine opinion. Indeed, we can see that Dante’s
evolving attitude toward politics, philosophy, and poet-
ics was setting the stage for the Commedia. At the same
time, though, we can also see that little in Dante’s earlier
career prepares us for the scope and poetic reality of
the Commedia; it has the sheer unpredictability that is
a prime quality of any work of genius.
The Commedia uses a relatively simple storytelling
device: an extraordinary visit by a living human being
to the three realms of the afterlife. There is much that
is fantastic in this conception, and much that shows
Dante’s extensive powers of invention as he works out
its details. But what is even more important is that this
fi ction allows an extraordinarily rich panorama, the full-
est imaginable account of the people, manners, ways,
issues, and thought of his time. One of the earliest crit-
ics of the Commedia, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444),
who had himself inherited and shaped Florentine civic
humanism, praised the freedom and range that Dante’s
structure permitted. Bruni doubted that anyone else
ever “took a larger and more fertile subject by which
to deliver the mind of all its conceptions through the
different spirits who discourse on diverse causes of
things, on the different countries, and on the various
chances of fortune.”
Within this larger structure, the primary unit of the
poem is the canto—itself a major poetic device and one
of Dante’s most important inventions. The cantos are
powerfully condensed segments varying in length from
about 115 to 150 lines, and they allow Dante to do two
things: vary his landscapes and engage a remarkable
array of different individuals in discourse. In fact, the
meaning of a canto derives partly from an interaction
between landscape and personal exchange. The canto
has scope and yet compactness, so that it is a dense,
complex dramatic unit in which simple or sometimes
elliptical phrases can have extraordinary powers of
reference. In modern times, the study of individual
cantos—letture dantesche—has become a favored and
rewarding approach to the poem.
In fact, the study of individual cantos has become
so valuable that it has had the unfortunate side effect
of hindering fuller study of another quality of Dante’s
imagination: his network of imaginative-cross refer-
ences. There are larger connections between cantos,
startling juxtapositions, suites of cantos, and parallel
placements of individuals in the various canticles, all of
which invite comparison. Appreciating Dante’s archi-
tectonics is one of the genuine pleasures of reading his
text. The superabundance of Dante’s imagination gives
his enormous poem some of the qualities of a medi-
eval cathedral; but we can also see that the Commedia
reveals the higher function of literature—its coherent
power—that Dante had tried to make his own as early
as Vita nuova.
All great poets discover their own forms, and another
important invention in the Commedia is the canticle,
a set of cantos. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are
surprisingly similar in structure. Each has a prologue (in
Inferno, introducing the entire poem, there are two such
cantos), followed by preliminary cantos: in Inferno the
cantos preceding the city of Dis; in the second canticle,
the ante-Purgatorio; and in Paradiso, those under the
shadow of the earth. Approximately one-third of the
way through, the purpose of the canticle is intensi-
fi ed. In these long middle sections, the heavy work is
done. The canticle culminates in the fuller meaning of
its experience in the nadir of hell or at the heights of
Purgatory and paradise. In Inferno, after the Malebolge,
this climax is the Cocytus, beginning in Canto 31; in
Purgatorio, the climax is the Earthly Paradise, begin-
ning in Canto 27; in Paradiso, a new tone and intensity
of experience are gained beginning with the address to
Mary in Canto 23.
In the mysterious and miraculous circumstances
of Inferno 1, the long-absent spirit of Virgil returns
to prevent Dante from backsliding and to redirect his
energies. The specifi c itinerary involving this change
of direction brings back to western literature a central
theme of classical epics, the visit to the underworld.
However, this itinerary is itself revised: Dante quite
consciously alters the pattern of the classical epic. In
classic examples such as The Odyssey and The Aeneid,
the visit to the underworld occupies the middle books
(Book 11 in The Odyssey and Book 6 in The Aeneid); and
these episodes are central not only in placement but also
because they communicate essential wisdom. Dante’s
Christian itinerary is different. Hell is not the pivot but
rather a preliminary episode, in which Dante encounters
not the true values of his culture but rather the gods that
failed. Dante’s motive is not to take on the wisdom of
the place but rather to unlearn the values that failed to
serve him in his travail. He must be disabused of false
notions, and consequently hell is a place of disaffection.
For this reason, hell is the initial experience, not the
median (in this schedule, Dante and another Christian
poet, Milton, are perfectly in stride).
To be sure, we encounter in hell imposing and memo-
rable characters such as Francesca, Farinata, Brunetto
Latini, Ulysses, and Ugolino. Their stories, their fates,
and their agonies are so inventive and so powerful that itDANTE ALIGHIERI