Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy in Popular Culture - Literature

Literature

• Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) is responsible for a number of translations and adaptations of, and explicit references 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 "compleynt" by Anelida, the lover jilted by Arcite; the compleynt 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 (2.588-92).
  • 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 7.2459-62.
  • The beginning of the last stanza of Troilus and Criseyde (5.1863-65) is modelled on Paradiso 12.28-30.
• 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 29.107-9 ("so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance, / return from pasture, having fed on wind") is translated and adapted in Lycidas 125-26, "The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw," when Milton condemns corrupt clergy.
• 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., whilst Dante himself features as a character in the 1831 novel Les Proscrits from that work.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated the Divine Comedy into English, also 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), 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").
• 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).
• First begun in 1916, Ezra Pound's Cantos take the Comedy as a model.
• 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. Virgil as a guide (and his brother, Hugh Firmin, quotes the Comedy from memory in ch. 6).
• Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote extensively about 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.
• Poet Derek Walcott, in 1949, publishes Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos, which he later acknowledged as deliberately influenced by Dante.
• 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, 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 retelling of the Divine Comedy set in the utopia/dystopia of second-wave feminism.
• Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) begins with the words "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."
• The character of Beatrice in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is the deceased love of the narrator. She is an allusion to Beatrice Portinari.
• The main characters of Stephen King's Wizard and Glass (1997) have to cross a door within a building reminiscent of the palace of the Wizard from the film The Wizard of Oz: "The sign on this door wasn't from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from Dante. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, it said".
• Mark E. Rogers used the structure of Dante's hell in his 1998 comedic novel Samurai Cat Goes to Hell (the last book in the Samurai Cat series), and includes a gate to hell whose inscription reads "YOU'VE HAD YOUR FUN / YOU'VE MADE YOUR BED / YOU'RE BOUND FOR HELL / NOW THAT YOU'RE DEAD / ABANDON ALL HOPE YE THAT ENTER HERE."
• Irish poet Seamus Heaney publishes a poem on the front page of the Irish Times (18 January 2000) that begins with a translation of Paradiso 33.58-61.
• The Amber Spyglass (2000) by Philip Pullman includes several references to Dante's vision of hell, including the concept of Harpies, an ascent along the flinty steps in the Eighth Circle of Hell (Inferno, Canto XXVI); and the two main characters emerging from their experience of hell back onto the earth to look at the stars (last line of Inferno).
• 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 2004 and 2005, Giulio Leoni publishes two crime novels, I delitti del mosaico and I delitti della luce respectively, in which Dante is an investigator.
• Pope Benedict XVI has said that part of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2006), was inspired by Canto XXXIII of Paradise.
• 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.
• Robert Penn Warren references Dante's Divine Comedy on the opening page of his novel All the King's Men with a line from Purgatory, III: Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde, meaning "As long as hope still has its bit of green."
• Paul Thigpen′s novel My Visit to Hell is an “extended parable” about hell in which he borrows “the moral topography of . . . Dante′s 'Inferno.'” It is an adaptation of his earlier novel, Gehenna, published in 1992, and what Thigpen refers to as “the latest addition to a genre of such literature known as ‘tours of hell.’” His contemporary interpretation produces more impact with its explicit references to historical figures and issues reflective of today's culture.
• S.A. Alenthony's novel The Infernova is a parody of the Inferno as seen from an atheist's perspective, with Mark Twain acting as the guide.

• Wayne Barlowe's book, Barlowe's Inferno (1998), containing paintings of Hell and an accompanying narrative, is partially inspired by Dante's Inferno.