Who Is Dante's Inferno?

At the age of 9 he met for the first time the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari, who became in effect his Muse, and remained, after her death in 1290, the central inspiration for his major poems. Between 1285, when he married and began a family, and 1302, when he was exiled from Florence, he was active in the cultural and civic life of Florence, served as a soldier and held several political offices.

Summary

The Inferno follows the wanderings of the poet Dante as he strays off the rightful and straight path of moral truth and gets lost in a dark wood. Just as three wild animals threaten to attack him, Dante is rescued by the ghost of Virgil, a celebrated Roman poet and also Dante’s idol. When asked why in hell (pun intended) he came, Virgil answers that the head honchos of Heaven – the Virgin Mary and Santa Lucia – felt sorry for Dante and asked the deceased love-of-Dante’s-life, Beatrice, to send someone down to help him. She sent Violia and Virgil to his rescue.
This circle is separated into three parts: violence against others, violence against self, and violence against God. In the first part, the violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their punishment (4Degreez). The second part is home to the Wood of the Suicides- stunted and gnarled trees with twisting branches and poisoned fruit (4Degreez). During final judgment, their bodies will hang from these branches. In those branches the Harpies, foul birdlike creatures with human faces, make their nests (4Degreez). Beyond the wood is scorching sand is the final part where those who committed violence against God and nature are showered with flakes of fire that rain down against their naked bodies. Blasphemers and sodomites suffer in pain, accompanied by usurers, who followed neither nature nor