Mid-way through his life and faced with an ignominious end, Dante Alighieri wrote his greatest work, The Divine Comedy. We can understand Dante's motive in writing this epic by reading Cantos I through III of Dante's Inferno. The Divine Comedy was a self-analysis by a man who found himself spiritually lost. Immediately in Canto I we see that Dante "the character" is lost on a spiritual level. He awakens mid-way through his life in a dark woods severed from both light and human connections. Dante is in the dark because he is guilty of one of the seven deadly sins, Acedia. Some diction…
