Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence

Dante sInferno: Critical Reception and InfluenceDavid LummusDante and theDivine Comedyhave had a profound Influence on theproduction of literature and the practice of literary criticism acrossthe Western world since the moment theComedywas first read. Al-though critics and commentators normally address the work as awhole, the first canticle, inferno , is the part that has met with the mostfervent Critical response. The modern epoch has found in it both amirror with which it might examine the many vices and perversionsthat define it and an obscure tapestry of almost fundamentalist pun-ishments that are entirely alien to it. From Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, andOsip Mandelstam in the early twentieth century to Seamus Heaney,W. S. Merwin, and Robert Pinsky at century s end, modern poets ofevery bent have been drawn to theInfernoand to the other two canti-cles of theComedyas an example of poetry s world-creating powerand of a single poet s transcendence of his own spiritual, existential,and political them Dante was and is an example of how apoet can engage with the world and reform it, not just represent it,through the power of the poetic imagination.

The modern epoch has found in it both a ... “When Israel went out of Egypt, ... center of culture to rival ancient Athens and Rome. For Landino and the centuries that followed, Dante and his poem were pillars of Floren-tine civic identity. The connection between language and politics was

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  Serial, Egypt, Modern, Ancient, Inferno

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