Dante in Hell

This is the first in a trilogy written by a Florintine poet and political activist during the renaissance. The other parts are Purgatory and then Paradise. Each one of them has the protagonist, the author himself, travelling through a series of 'circles' to his ultimate goal, which in the Divine Comedy is to the top of the seventh heaven. We will only concern ourselves with this part, in which he travels into the pit of hell, to the center of the earth, so that he may reach the Antipodes where the mountain of purgatory is located.
The entire poem, and it is a very well structured and quite difficult poem (even with commentaries and maps, which are very helpful to understand what is going on) is set as a dream sequence which Dante has on his 35th Birthday (which he describes as being the middle of his life, as reckoned by the Bible being 70 years). He begins in a dark wood, and he attempts to ascend to heaven, but then meets the poet Virgil (an Ancient Roman, considered by many to be one of the greatest poets; however I do not actually consider him that highly and would give that title to either Shakespeare or Homer) who tells him that the best way to reach his goal is to travel through Hell. While he is reluctant at first, he agrees, and Virgil, as his guide, takes him into the pit.
Now the entire poem is very opinionated and contains Dante's beliefs not only on who is in hell, but where everybody is located. There is an awful lot of political commentaries in here, and the deeper one gets, the more we note that contemporaries of Dante appears, and there is also a lot of commentary on what Dante sees as the future of Florence. Dante had been caught up in the political turmoil in the city (and there was a lot of such turmoil in that city at the time, which is not surprising with a city that became the centre of the Renaissance, and also a Republic and the birthplace of the modern banking system) which resulted in him fleeing Florence to Ravenna where he spent the rest of his life and wrote the this marvellous piece of literature.
One should note that the poets that Dante admires (such as Homer) are all located on the fringes of hell, so obviously he recognised their pagan status, but did not want to acknowledge their wholesale rejection of a knowable God. However further down, we come across people that he really doesn't like. Now, Dante's hell is divided into circles, but the deeper we go, the circles themselves become divided into further circles. Eeach of these circles (both outer and inner) represents a specific sin, though with the inner circles the sins there are effectively different grades of a general sin. Even so, these circles are divided into specific areas, so at the top we have the sins of the Leopard, which includes sexual sin, gluttony, anger, and greed. The next layer down we have the sins of the Lion, which include crimes of violence, whether it be violence against another (murder) or violence against one self (suicide). Now it is interesting that Dante considers these sins in a better light than the next lot, because he places a huge barrier between these sins, and the sins of fraud. Maybe because deceit is so malicious, and maybe it is because he himself had been deceived. Therefore, after the great barrier, we have the sins of the Wolf, which include hypocrites, flatterers, panders, simoniacs, and the like. This is all one circle but are divided into a series of 10 bowges. Finally, we come to the centre of the world, which pretty much include the traitors, who are buried in ice, the depth depending on the nature of their treachery, with Judas Iscariot and Marcus Brutus considered to be the worst of the worse.
I look at this book and say that it is awesome, a work of literary art, despite its intense difficulty to understand and follow because of its complex poetic form. However, it is masterfully crafted, and Dante, despite being a bit of a depressive, love struck over a woman that he can never have (as we shall see in Paradise) has left a story, and in a sense it is a fantasy, that will be with us through the ages. Is it designed, like The Great Divorce, to challenge us and to make us rethink the way we live our lives, maybe, but to me it does not have the same power as does C.S. Lewis' masterpiece. This, instead, is a fantasy journey of discovery through Hell as the author travels to find God.