Dante’s Inferno is the poem of interiority. It aims to crack the crusty shell of the heart and gain access to its secret, guarded places…

The Wonder of “The Comedy”: How to Read Dante


by Jason Baxter


The whole of Inferno 1 is an extraordinary poetic achievement in its ability to create the feeling of a nightmare. The reader feels the pilgrim’s irrational fear, as if both were locked in a terrible dream. And yet the poet insists that his pilgrim is not sleeping. In fact, it was sleep that got him

into the dark wood in the first place:I cannot well recall how I came there.I was so full of sleep at the time,I abandoned the true way. (Inf. 1.10–12)

How he got there, he does not know, but he can remember clearly the disoriented terror that came over him, like a child who has woken up from a bad dream and can’t remember where she is.

Dante does not just describe the wonder the pilgrim experiences on his “way”; as a poet, he also tries to produce it, in you. 

Such admiration temporarily destabilizes the mind, shakes its usual certainty, and in this moment of suspended judgment, the one caught up in wonder (the admirans) has an opportunity to take in the familiar, as if for the first time. 

The wondering “reader” becomes what I would call “affectively vulnerable,” because in a moment of suspended judgment his or her reason—that impulse to categorize, to put something in its appropriate box, without taking the time to marvel at it—has temporarily let down its guard. 

But how does the poet use his craft to make this happen? 

Among other things, he uses what scholars call “deictic rhetoric”—that is, the language of “pointing.” 

Indeed, Dante pokes and prods us with his words, frequently addressing us and telling us, “Now look here” or “Note that, over there”...

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