Friday, March 20, 2015
Q3B3 INFERNOOO
One of the poems Dante is most famous for is his epic, three part poem, Divine Comedy. The part I read and annotated for my essay was the first several cantos of Inferno, the first cantica. In the part I read after reading it for the paper, Dante, led by Virgil, has begun traveling into the depths of Hell.
One device that Dante really likes to use is allusion. Throughout the inferno, Dante meets many people, historical and fiction, suffering in the inferno for the respective sins. He meets the ancient poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucian in limbo, because they died before they could be baptized into the Christian faith (as it did not exist at the time they were alive). There is supposedly a hidden allusion to Dante's benefactor Cangrande della Scala, whose name could mean "great dog," hidden in the great hound that is destined one day to chase back to hell the she-wolf that confronts Dante in the forest. There are also allusions to characters from Virgil's Aeneid, mythological figures like Charon, Minos, and Cerberus; and biblical and religious figures like St. Lucia and the Virgin Mother. The purpose of these allusions might be to make the poem more contemporary to people reading around the time of its writing because of its contemporary allusions, as well as to people of any age because of its ageless biblical and mythological allusions.
Something that interested me was the title, Divine Comedy. Usually when I think of a piece of literature as comedy, I think it would be humorous is some way. I knew what this work was about, so I was confused why Dante would call it Comedy. I looked it up and it turns out that comedy back then meant a less formal tale with a happy ending written in the vulgar, as opposed to the high "tragedy," written about more formal topics in Latin.
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