?Opening the book we stand face to face with the poet,” wrote William Dean Howells of Longfellow’s Dante, ?and when his voice ceases we may marvel if he has not sung to us in his own Tuscan.” Lyrically graceful and brimming with startlingly vivid images, Dante’s Inferno is a perpetually engrossing classic that ranks with the greatest works of Homer and Shakespeare.įeatures a map of Hell and illustrations by Gustave Doré. This edition of the Inferno revives the famous Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, which first introduced Dante’s literary genius to a broad American audience. blue manatee press books are distributed by IPG and available at most major online retail locations such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indigo (Canada). Along the way he meets the most fascinating characters known to the classical and medieval world?the silver-tongued Ulysses, lustful Francesca da Rimini, the heretical Farinata degli Uberti, and scores of other intriguing and notorious figures. In this first part of the epic The Divine Comedy, Dante is led by the poet Virgil down into the nine circles of Hell, where he travels through nightmare landscapes of fetid cesspools, viper pits, frozen lakes, and boiling rivers of blood and witnesses sinners being beaten, burned, eaten, defecated upon, and torn to pieces by demons. With these words, Dante plunges readers into the unforgettable world of the Inferno?one of the most graphic visions of Hell ever created. This is worth keeping in mind because many people who read any Dante in school only read Inferno, but that doesn’t give you the. Dante plunges readers into this unforgettable world with a deceptively simple?and now legendary?tercet:įor the straightforward pathway had been lost. The first thing you may want to know is that while we think of The Divine Comedy as three books, Dante himself thought of it as one long poem divided into three parts which he called canticles. The Inferno remains literature’s most hallowed and graphic vision of Hell.

Dante's inferno barnes and noble