The Divine Comedy, written by Italian writer Dante Alighieri between approximately 1308 and his death in 1321, is commonly regarded as the most well-known epic poem of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature ever. The poem describes a culmination of the medieval image of life after death.
The main feature of any medieval literature creation is the high-level symbolism. Some symbols are rather obvious. The others are hidden and need to be understood.
The image of Inferno described by Dante is rather arguable. It is difficult to condense the iconic complication of Inferno to a shortlist of key symbols. Because the poem is an overall allegory, it explores its subjects using great whales of symbols, varying from the minutely particular (the blank banner chased by the Uncommitted in Canto III, which is symbolizing the meaninglessness of their activity in life) to the hugely general (the initial meaning of The Divine Comedy itself, symbolizing the spiritual quest of human life). Lots of symbols in Inferno are clear and easily understandable and interpretable, such as the beast Geryon—with the head of an innocent man and the body of a foul serpent, he signifies untruthfulness and fraud. Others are much more nuanced and difficult to identify, such as the trio of creatures that need to stops Dante from climbing the sunlit mountain in Canto I (Leopard, Lion, and She-wolf). When reading about Inferno, it is awfully important to regard each element of the poem following how it fits into Dante’s whole system of symbolism—what it says about the panorama, story, and themes of the work and about human life.
Obviously, the most important local applies of symbolism in Inferno involve the castigations of the sinners, which are always assembled so as to correspond allegorically to the sins that they perpetrated in life. The Lustful, for example, who were captured by passion in life, is now doomed to be blown about by a hellish storm for all of the time. Other kinds of symbols include characters who represent human qualities, such as Virgil, representative of rationality, and Beatrice, representative of spiritual holy and sacred love; settings that correspond to emotional states, such as the dark forest in Canto I, is the objectivity of Dante’s confusion and fear; and figures among the lost who may represent something more than merely their sins, such as Farinata, who seems to represent qualities of leadership and political assurance that transcend his identity as a Heretic in Hell.
It is necessary to admit that the work was not always so well considered. After being acknowledged as a masterpiece in the first centuries after its publication, the work was largely ignored during the Enlightenment, only to be “rediscovered” by the idealistic writers of the 19th century. Later authors as contrasting as William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce have drawn on it for encouragement, while modern poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, and William Merwin, have given translations of all or parts of the book. William Blake demonstrated the Comedy and the engravings of Gustave Doré are widely used in modern publications. Salvador Dalí also made a cycle of paintings describing scenes from each section of the Commedia.