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Divine Comedy
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The Divine Comedy is an epic poem on a vast scale, told by Dante himself in first-person point of view. The Divine Comedy is ... an allegory, a work in which characters, objects, and events have figurative as well as literal meanings. For example, in The Divine Comedy, Vergil symbolizes human reason, and Beatrice stands for faith and supernatural truth. The three beasts Dante encounters in Canto 1 represent sin, and various personages in other cantos symbolize specific types of sin, such as envy, sloth, gluttony and lust. Some allegorical characters, objects, or events symbolize several things at the same time.
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri remains today one of the pillars upon which the European literary tradition has been built. Originally titled simply Commedia, Dante's masterpiece was written at the end of his life and finished just before his death in 1321. In an era of hand-copied manuscripts, it reached a large and appreciative audience quickly. By the year 1400, no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared to support the text. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote on the poet's life and in 1373-1374 delivered the first public lectures on Dante's Commedia.
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.......The Divine Comedy has three sections: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise or Heaven). The first section has 33 cantos (chapters) and an introduction of 1 canto for a total of 34. The second and third sections each have 33 cantos. The characters include mythological and historical personages.
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If such a survey had been done about spiritual works, The Divine Comedy would have been rated equally high. Robert Royal, former Vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and currently the president of the newly formed Faith and Reason Institute, has considered it so in Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy and Divine Spirituality. (Crossroad, New York, l999) This book, the author's most important, clearly reflects the labor of years of reading Dante and ... of commitment to the interior life. It is part of the excellent Crossroad Spiritual Legacy Series, edited by John Farina. Dante fits well with other authors examined in the series, such as Benedict, Augustine, and Francis of Assisi, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Aquinas.
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In 1999, the Divine Comedy celebrated ten years; they ... ended their deal with Setanta Records. The release of A Secret History marked the occasion, but Hannon had his hand in other projects. He contributed vocals to Tom Jones' Reload as well as Ute Lemper's album Punishing Kiss. A new deal with Parlophone surfaced at the dawning of the new millennium and Hannon headed into the studio with producer Nigel Godrich. The end result was the stunning Regeneration. This particular album focused on the seven bandmembers as a whole, probably their finest effort since 1996's Casanova.
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The Divine Comedy is divided into three canticles of thirty-three cantos each, plus one extra in the first, the Inferno, making a total of one hundred cantos. Each canto is composed of three-line tercets, the first and third lines rhyme, the second line rhymes with the beginning of the next tercet, establishing a kind of overlap. Dante's realms are further subdivided: the Inferno is composed of nine levels, the vestibule makes a tenth. Purgatory has seven terraces, plus two ledges in an ante-purgatory; adding these to the Earthly Paradise yields ten zones. Paradise is composed of nine heavens; Empyrean makes the tenth.
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Divine Comedy