Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno is the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, a narrative poem by Dante Alighieri. It follows a fictionalized Dante, guided by the Roman poet Virgil, through Hell and its ordered punishments.

The Divine Comedy is divided into three canticles—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—and each is composed of cantos. Inferno contains 34 cantos and, like the rest of the poem, is written in terza rima, an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme.

The ordering of the damned draws in part on Aristotle’s ethics and distinguishes among failures of self-control, violence, and deliberate fraud. Many punishments follow the principle of contrapasso, mirroring or contrasting with the sin committed.

After Limbo, the upper circles punish sins of incontinence such as lust, gluttony, avarice, and wrath. Deeper circles punish heresy, violence, fraud, and finally treachery, placing calculated abuses of reason below failures of self-control.

All the damned are separated from God, while the descent through Hell assigns increasingly grave sins to progressively deeper circles.

This digital edition of Dante’s Inferno uses the English translation by Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844).