Medieval 's 1365 fresco
Church Militant and Triumphant in the
Santa Maria Novella church, Florence • In 1373, a little more than half a century after Dante's death, the Florentine authorities softened their attitude to him and decided to establish a department for the study of the
Divine Comedy.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was appointed to head the department in October 1373, and he sponsored its organization. In January 1374, Boccaccio wrote and delivered a series of lectures on the
Comedy. In addition, Boccaccio is included in the work
Origine, vita e costumi di Dante Alighieri, where his treatise
Trattatello in laude di Dante provides a biography of Dante. •
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) translated, adapted, and explicitly referred to Dante's work. • "A Complaynt to His Lady," an early short poem, is written in
terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante invented for the
Comedy. •
Anelida and Arcite ends with a "" by Anelida, the lover jilted by Arcite; the begins with the phrase "So thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce" and ends with "Hath thirled with the poynt of remembraunce," copied from
Purgatory 12.32, "la punctura di la rimembranza." •
The House of Fame, a dream vision in three books in which the narrator is guided through the heavens by an otherworldly guide, has been described as a parody of the
Comedy. The narrator echoes
Inferno 2.32 in the poem (2.588–592). • ''
The Monk's Tale from The Canterbury Tales describes (in greater and more emphatic detail) the plight of Count Ugolino (Inferno'', cantos 32 and 33), referring explicitly to Dante's original text in 7.2459–2462. • The beginning of the last stanza of
Troilus and Criseyde (5.1863-65) is modelled on
Paradiso 12.28–30.
Early Modern •
John Milton finds various uses for Dante, whose work he knew well: • Milton refers to Dante's insistence on the separation of worldly and religious power in
Of Reformation, where he cites
Inferno 19.115–117. • Beatrice's condemnation of corrupt and neglectful preachers,
Paradiso 29.107–109 ("so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance, / return from pasture, having fed on wind") is translated and adapted in
Lycidas 125–126, "The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw," when Milton condemns corrupt clergy.
Nineteenth century 's 1831 novel
Les Proscrits • The title of
Honoré de Balzac's work
La Comédie humaine (the "Human Comedy," 1815–1848) is usually considered a conscious adaptation of Dante's. •
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated the
Divine Comedy into English, wrote a poem titled "Mezzo Cammin" ("Halfway," 1845), alluding to the first line of the
Comedy, and a
sonnet sequence (of six sonnets) under the title "Divina Commedia" (1867); these were published as flyleaves to his translation. •
Karl Marx uses a paraphrase of
Purgatory (V, 13) to conclude the preface to the first edition of
Das Kapital (1867), as a kind of motto: "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti" ("follow your own road, and let the people talk"). •
Lesya Ukrainka's poem "The Forgotten Shadow" (1898) is a feminist reinterpretation of Dante and Beatrice. The
forgotten shadow in the poem is Gemma Donati, Alighieri's wife.
Twentieth century • In
E. M. Forster's novel
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), the character of Gino Carella, upon first introducing himself, quotes the first lines of
Inferno (the novel includes several references to Dante's
La Vita Nuova as well). •
T. S. Eliot cites
Inferno, XXVII, 61–66, as an epigraph to "
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). Eliot cites heavily from and alludes to Dante in
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917),
Ara vus prec (1920), and
The Waste Land (1922). • Begun in 1916,
Ezra Pound's
Cantos take the
Comedy as a model. • In
Jorge Luis Borges's 1945 short story
The Aleph, the protagonist mourns the recent death of Beatriz Viterbo, whom he loved, at the beginning and meets his cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri, whose name originated from combining Dante Alighieri's name and last name. Also, the Aleph is found in the nineteenth step in the basement, which matches the XIX canto of
Paradise, which contains a description similar to that of the Aleph. •
Turkish poet Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı's famous poem "Otuz Beş Yaş" (lit. "Thirty Five Years") is beginning with the verses which contains a citation of
Inferno: "
Yaş otuz beş! Yolun yarısı eder / Dante gibi ortasındayız ömrün" ("Age thirty five! It is half of way / We are in the middle of life like Dante") won the Best Turkish Poem Prize in 1946. •
Primo Levi cites Dante's
Divine Comedy in the chapter called "Canto of Ulysses" in his novel
Se questo è un uomo (
If This Is a Man) (1947), published in the United States as
Survival in Auschwitz, and in other parts of this book; the fires of Hell are compared to the "real threat of the fires of the crematorium." •
Malcolm Lowry paralleled Dante's descent into hell with Geoffrey Firmin's descent into alcoholism in his epic novel
Under the Volcano (1947). In contrast to the original, Lowry's character explicitly refuses grace and "chooses hell," though Firmin does have a Dr. Vigil as a guide (and his brother, Hugh Firmin, quotes the
Comedy from memory in ch. 6). • The seventh and last chapter from
Leopoldo Marechal's first novel,
Adam Buenosayres (1948), is a parody of the Inferno, entitled "Journey To The Dark City Of Cacodelphia", wherein the titular character meets several of his literary contemporaries (including his guide). • Poet
Derek Walcott, in 1949, published
Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos, which he later acknowledged as influenced by Dante. included two short texts in his
Dreamtigers (
El Hacedor, 1960): "Paradiso, XXXI, 108" and "Inferno, I, 32," which paraphrase and comment on Dante's lines. • African-American author
LeRoi Jones, in 1965, published the novel ''
The System of Dante's Hell'', in which a young African-American man lives nomadically in the Southern United States, struggling with segregation and racism. The book correlates the man's experience with Dante's Inferno, and includes a diagram of the fictional hell described by Dante. •
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel
The First Circle (1968) takes its title from the Inferno. Set in a special Gulag for scientists, it parallels Dante's First Circle (Limbo) where virtuous philosophers of antiquity are separated from God and humanity but not punished in any other way. •
James Merrill published his
Divine Comedies, a collection of poetry, in 1976; a selection in that volume, "The Book of Ephraim", consists "of conversations held, via the Ouija board, with dead friends and spirits in 'another world.'" • Authors
Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournelle wrote a modern sequel to the
Inferno,
Inferno (1976), in which a science fiction author dies during a fan convention and finds himself in Hell, where
Benito Mussolini functions as his guide. They wrote a subsequent sequel to their own work,
Escape from Hell (2009). •
Gloria Naylor's
Linden Hills (1985) uses Dante's
Inferno as a model for the trek made by two young black poets who spend the days before Christmas doing odd jobs in an affluent African American community. The young men soon discover the price paid by the inhabitants of Linden Hills for pursuing the American dream. • Author
Monique Wittig's
Virgile, Non (published in English as
Across the Acheron, 1985) is a
lesbian–
feminist parody of the
Divine Comedy set in the utopia/dystopia of
second-wave feminism. • Steve Tidrick used the nine circles of Dante's hell as an analogy to explain the United States federal budget in his cover story in
The New Republic entitled "The Budget Inferno" (May 29, 1995), which was republished in The New Republic Guide to the Issues: the ‘96 Campaign (Basic Books, 1996). •
Mark E. Rogers used the structure of Dante's hell in his 1998
comedic novel Samurai Cat Goes to Hell (the last in the
Samurai Cat series), and includes the trope of a gate to hell with an "abandon hope" inscription.
Twenty-first century • Irish poet
Seamus Heaney published a poem, "A Dream of Solstice", on the front page of the
Irish Times (18 January 2000) that begins with a translation of
Paradiso 33.58–61 as "Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming / And after the dream lives with the aftermath / Of what he felt, no other trace remaining, / So I live now". •
Nick Tosches's
In The Hand of Dante (2002) weaves a contemporary tale about the finding of an original manuscript of the
Divine Comedy with an imagined account of Dante's years composing the work. •
Inferno by
Peter Weiss (written in 1964, published in 2003) is a play inspired by the
Comedy, the first part of a planned trilogy. •
The Dante Club is a 2003 novel by
Matthew Pearl that tells the story of various American poets translating
The Divine Comedy in post-
civil war Boston, who must also investigate murders being committed based on the punishments in the text, due to their desire to protect Dante's reputation and the fact that only they have the necessary expertise to understand the murderer's motivations. • In the novel
The Tenth Circle (2006) by
Jodi Picoult, the main character's comic strip,
The Tenth Circle, is based on the
Inferno. • Dante himself is a character in
The Master of Verona (2007), a novel by
David Blixt that combines the people of Dante's time with the characters of Shakespeare's Italian plays. • Dale E. Basye's book series
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (began in 2008) features a modified version of the nine circles of hell. • S.A. Alenthony's novel
The Infernova (2009) is a parody of the
Inferno as seen from an atheist's perspective, with
Mark Twain acting as the guide. • The title of Yann Martel's 2010 novel
Beatrice and Virgil is an allusion to two of the main characters in
The Divine Comedy. • Sylvain Reynards' 2011 novel ''
Gabriel's Inferno'' was inspired by the relationship between
Dante and
Beatrice. • Dante Quintana from
Benjamin Alire Sáenz's 2012 novel
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is named after Dante. • Laura Elizabeth Woollett's 2014 novel
The Wood of Suicides is named after the second ring of the seventh circle of hell. •
Adam Roberts'
Purgatory Mount is a 2021 science fiction novel that features a huge mountain on a distant planet resembling Dante's Mount Purgatory. == Visual arts ==