Poet's Pen: Dante's Inferno, Canto I

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy chronicles his journey through the afterlife in three cantiche-from hell (Inferno), to purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally to heaven (Paradiso)-each comprising 33 cantos. Writing in idiomatic Tuscan rather than the more common, but less widely understood, Latin, Dante is widely credited with establishing Italian as a literary language and opening up contemporary literature to a wider, less scholarly audience. He wrote his epic during his political exile from Florence, and completed it in 1320, just a year before his death. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American to translate the Divine Comedy into English, publishing this version in 1867.