Week 7 Civil Discussion Dante Inferno

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course Number
Date
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course Number
Date
Dante’s Divine Comedy can be considered as a very powerful depiction of the afterlife. Evidently, his first book is The Inferno, and it is an exploration of Hell as the place where people who have been sinning go once they die. The ancestry of the Inferno can be traced to the Aeneid, which has significant influence in Dante’s poem. Also, the Inferno can be said to have its root in Augustine’s Confession which has some influence on the poem too. Therefore, the aim of this essay is to discuss how The Aeneid and Confession influence Dante’s Poem.
First, both the Inferno and the Aeneid show an ambitious journey. While the Aeneid is about the Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Italy, the inferno is about Dante’s journey through hell. It is also evident that Dante seems to have borrowed the idea of using Joseph Campbell’s model from the Aeneid. However, it is worth noting that Dante has a heroic position, unlike Aeneas, but the way it is presented is not clear. He says, “How hard it is to tell how it is like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn” (Dante, 1465). The two main characters in the Inferno and Aeneid are controlled through the underworld. Aeneid, for instance, is given power by Sybil which is a mortal superpower. Dante, on the other hand, gets his power from Virgil, the Latin Poet’s ghost. Unmistakably, the use of Virgil as a character in Inferno shows that Dante recognizes that his work is not very original.

Dante also chose to use the Aeneid to give insight to the readers about Virgil, who was a very influential and contentious character in Christian manuscripts (Alighieri &James, 140).
Dante also borrows much from Augustine’s Confession. First, the work is written in first person. Contrastingly, the two use the first person as a device that gives the readers a close familiarity with their long, laborious journeys. It is also evident that Dante used Augustine’s style of narrating which gives the audience a vibrant understanding of the things that their protagonists had to go through before they could achieve their goals. However, Confession could have another significant influence on Inferno. In the poem, he says, In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within dark woods where the straight way was lost (Dante, 1466)” When you read confession, you get a particular feeling as it were a prayer. Therefore, the two works create an understanding of man’s journey in pursuit of a spiritual connection. Also, the inferno and confession illustrate the errors that individual come across and the right path that we should all take amidst many misapprehension.
To clearly understand the influences that both Aeneid and Confession have on Dante’s Inferno, one ought to first reason why he chose a troublesome character, Virgil, and another work that is very much biblical. From many interpreters’ points of view, he decided to use Virgil because he would bring the undercut of the Latin Poetry into the inferno. For instance, he asks, “Are you then Virgil, are you then that fount from which pours so rich a stream of words?” (Dante, 1467) He understood that by using this character, Inferno would have a voice in a poem that would bring the readers closer. While using borrowing from Aeneid brought the readers emotionally to the sagacity of tragedy, using confession was contrastingly used to make the poem more biblical (Barolini, 1020). After all, Inferno was a poem describing Dante’s journey through hell, represented in the character of Virgil, to heaven described by borrowing ideas from confession.
In summary, the poem would have had a different impact on the readers if Dante had not used the influence from the Aeneid and Confession. After reading and reviewing this fact, it becomes apparent that the ancestry of the Inferno can be traced to the Aeneid, which has significant influence in Dante’s poem. Also, the Inferno can be said to have its root in Augustine’s Confession which has some influence on the poem too.
Work Cited
Alighieri, Dante, and James R. Sibbald. Inferno. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009. Print.
Ruud, Jay. Critical companion to Dante a literary reference to his life and work. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Print.
Dante’s Inferno. Mosman: iMinds, 2009. Print.
Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante’s poets : textuality and truth in the Comedy. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984. Print.