![]() Thus the three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven might be interpreted as three steps in the soul’s redemption, Hell demonstrating the recognition of sin, Purgatory the expiation of sin, and Paradise the holy living that follows. The journey is of course also an allegory of the soul’s journey to God. Since the subject matter of the poem is the journey of a lost pilgrim, who must trek through the three realms of the afterlife on a journey back to his true home, it could be argued that the state of the pilgrim Dante parallels that of the exiled poet. Most scholars believe that Dante began composing the Comedy in 1306 or 1307, a few years after his exile from Florence. Commentators in the 14th century, including Dante’s disciple Giovanni Boccaccio, began calling the Comedy “Divine” both because of its sacred subject matter and because of its literary significance. ![]() The other reason for the title has more to do with the poem’s narrative pattern: Since the poem begins in sorrow (the dark wood of sin) and ends in joy (the vision of God), one can easily argue that the poem’s movement parallels the plot of a comedy. The first, as explained by Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, one of the early Italian commentators on the poem, is that the Comedy (composed in Italian rather than Latin) is written in a vernacular language-an assertion that gains support from Dante’s own comments in Book 2 of De vulgari eloquentia, where he defines comedy in terms of style and diction. But there are two reasons Dante calls the poem a comedy. This seems an odd title for most modern readers, who see little humor in the poem. By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Februĭante’s crowning achievement, one of the most important works in Western literature and undisputedly the most important poetic text of the European Middle Ages, is the great poem he calls his Comedy, or Commedia (ca.
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