The Divine Comedy (or Divina Commedia) is an epic-length narrative poem, written between 1308 and 1320 in the vernacular Tuscan of the era, that is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and a foundational work ...

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward",[4] and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson's Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.

In the Inferno, the spirit of the classical poet Virgil leads Dante through the nine circles of Hell on the initial stage of his journey toward Heaven.