LetвЂ™s imagine a far-fetched contemporary scenario set in America that would roughly approximate DanteвЂ™s catastrophe. In the space of a few weeks, our man Dante went from being a famous poet and influential citizen in his native Florence to a desperate political exile. ДЇew people in history have fallen so hard and so fast as Dante Alighieri. So how come Dante is more bitter than five-day-old coffee? Well, that brings us to Why You Should Care, Reason #2. You should see what happens to the government officials who take bribes. And that's just beginning-those are the the punishments for the lesser sins of being neutral (!), being gluttonous, and being heretical. and what kind of twisted fate they have to suffer for all eternity.Дante's warped Hannibal Lecter-esque genius thinks up (and describes in great detail) afterlife sentences that include being perpetually stung by insects, lying around in feces, and being trapped in burning tombs. Inferno is also a chronicle of Who Messed Up-it's a gossipy, star-studded tale of famous people who sinned. It's not often that you come across a Great Work Of Poetry that is essentially a list of afterword punishments so sadistic they'd make King Joffrey blush.

The first reason you should care is that this poem is awesomely insane. (We could have used nine as a nod to the nine layers of Hell, but brevity is the soul of wit, y'all.)

We have two layers of why you should care for you, Shmoopers. What is Inferno About and Why Should I Care? And Inferno is widely believed to be his magnum opus. In other words, DanteвЂ™s a big kahuna among poets. So Dante played a major role in standardizing the Italian language, coining new words and paving the way for major works of literature written in the vernacular. Not surprisingly, in this story Dante puts his enemies in Hell and makes 'em suffer the Inferno is heavily populated with corrupt Florentine politicians characterized as sinners.Д«ut more than just a means to get payback, the Divine Comedy is the first Italian epic work of poetry that is not in church Latin but in the vernacular-the language of the common people-the Florentine dialect of Italian. The Divine Comedy is Dante's fictional (shocker, right?) account of himself traveling through the three divine realms: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. A trip through the three layers of Catholic afterlife is actually about (in part) how much its author hates the Pope. His hatred of the Pope can be seen throughout his Divine Comedy. When Pope Boniface VIII schemed with the Blacks to seize power over Florence in a military coup, Dante was exiled. Florence, the richest of the Italian city-states and possibly all of Europe at that time, was divided between two political parties-the Blacks (who supported the Pope) and the Whites (who didnвЂ™t). Written in the early fourteenth century by Italian politician Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy is a literary reaction to the bitterly contested politics of medieval Florence. And- as if you needed a cherry on top of this demented literary sundae-it was totally controversial when it came out. And it's also insanely important and eloquent. A tree being perpetually bitten by harpies. If you're a suicide (if you decided you didn't want life), boom-no humanoid afterlife for you: you spend eternity as a tree. When Dante and his host-with-the-most Virgil take a stroll through the netherworld, he sees that every sinful action has an equal and opposite Hellish reaction-if you're sullen, you spend eternity glubbing in mud like a catfish. Maybe that Disneyland metaphor doesn't actually work.Д«ut you know what metaphors do work? Answer: all of the metaphors in Inferno. Except, you know, replace It's A Small World with a river of boiling blood, Splash Mountain with a desert nightmarescape complete with fiery rain, and The Matterhorn with a harrowing scaling of the legs of Lucifer. This is basically a 14th Century Italian poetry version of getting a VIP day at Disneyland with Donald Duck as a guide. and then gets an all-expenses paid, full-blown tour of Hell. We repeat: a guy wandering around in the forest outside of Florence meets a dead epic poet.

Inferno dan brown sparknotes