How to Read The Divine Comedy for the First Time

I highly recommend you read The Divine Comedy, though I don’t know that I would suggest you try to do so by yourself. If you start reading it, you really need to finish it. Dante himself issues this caution to readers in the middle of the poem. If you abandon the poem half way through, you will end up with a skewed image of justice and a distorted view of reality. And that distorted view of reality can be haunting.

If you can actually make it through the entire poem on your own, do it. Many first-time readers falter, though, because the Inferno is grotesque and grows tedious in the end, or because the Purgatorio seems too similar to the Inferno, or because the Paradiso lacks the drama and compelling images of the first two. I’ve lost count of the people who have told me they “didn’t finish the Comedy.”

If you’d like help reading (and finishing) the Comedy, let me help.

Starting September 3, I am teaching The Divine Comedy for Beginners through Gibbs Classical. The class runs for fourteen weeks, there’s relatively little reading to do each week, and the class is aimed at novices, not pros. Sign up for the Auditor Level of the class and you’ll received the week’s lecture via email every Wednesday and have access to two Q&A sessions that are for auditors only.

Imagine being able to tell your friends, family, and coworkers (at Christmas time) that you read the greatest poem of the last millennium this year. Or keep that information to yourself and just let everyone wonder why you seem so much deeper than you did at this time last year.