Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Hozier, Unreal Unearth (2023 album)

By

Hozier’s much-anticipated album Unreal Unearth was released on August 18, 2023. The album, which is comprised of songs mostly written during and immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, is loosely constructed around Dante’s nine circles. Hozier is extremely eloquent in talking about how his songs take up Dante’s ideas, themes, and images, and his press and social media interviews are worth a listen for anyone interested in his adaptations of Dante!

“While keen to stress that the record is by no means a concept album, Hozier went on to explain how Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell had provided a handy framing device for the record. Specifically, the album reflects upon two of the nine circles of hell: gluttony and heresy.

‘There’s a subtle element and I wanted to be light and playful with it. The album can be taken as a collection of songs, but also as a little bit of a journey. It starts with a descent and I’ve arranged the songs according to their themes into nine circles, just playfully reflecting Dante’s nine circles and then an ascent at the end,’ he said.

‘Because I think everyone went on a little bit of a journey over the last two years, everybody went through something changed, something about their lives, something about their work, something about themselves and came out the other side, slightly changed in some way, shape or form and that, it was sort of, that was just, that’s just how the album is arranged.'”   –Nick Reilly, “Hozier on new EP ‘Eat Your Young’ and how Dante’s ‘Inferno’ inspired him,” RollingStone UK (March 17, 2023)

See the official videos for “Eat Your Young” (Hozier’s take on gluttony),”All Things End” (heresy), and more on Hozier’s YouTube channel.

Contributed by many friends of Dante Today, including Aspen Foulk, Alyssa Granacki, Akash Kumar, Robert Alex Lee, Caleb Taylor, and Emily Yemington. Many thanks to all the contributors!

“Reconnecting the Personal Self with the Higher Self: Journey with Dante,” Dante and Psychosynthesis

By

psychosynthesis-quarterly

“Our life’s journey is to seek, reconnect, and synthesize the consciousness and will of the Self with the consciousness and will of the ‘I’—in other words, to synthesize the transpersonal and the personal. In the Divine Comedy, the aim of Dante’s long journey is precisely this reconnection.”
“Reflection upon the rich symbolic images in every line of the poem can become a beautiful exercise of spiritual psychosynthesis. Along the way, you can deepen and expand your own consciousness and will by viewing Dante as an ideal model and calling upon him as an external unifying center to help you rebuild a new personality”

Read the journal article here.

Frank Schroeder, Dante’s Inferno (2018)

By

“Of this work, Schroeder writes: ‘After reading The Divine Comedy, I was interested in having my own version of Hell and its different circles… I wanted my version more like a play than a painting. I wanted to describe all the mixed feelings in Hell: justice, tears, cries, desperation, evil, suffering, redemption and sorrows. For me, Hell is not necessarily black and dark… The use of colors is also to illustrate the three parts of the poem: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. My Inferno becomes a ballet where souls, evils, judgments and penalties are mixed… Maybe we can be better and win our place in Heaven walking through the Good and The Bad. Our souls can be delivered from evil through this long and hard journey. My Inferno is a theatre, a global vision of Hell and its circles, but also a sacred song of redemption.'”   —Artistic Interpretations: Frank Schroeder, Cornell University Library’s Visions of Dante Exhibition, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Laurent Ferri (2021; retrieved October 26, 2022)

Mommy’s Inferno, from Scary Mommy

By

scary-mommys-inferno

“In his poem Inferno, Dante travels through nine separate circles of human suffering on his journey towards spiritual salvation. Now I’m no major Italian poet, nor am I on a quest to save my soul, allegorically or spiritually. In fact, I haven’t even read Inferno, which is part of the epic poem the Divine Comedy, since the first time I trudged through (parts of) it in college, but I am a Mommy of three little kids. I have learned that motherhood is both divine and, often, a comedy….and yes, there is suffering. Hoo-boy is there suffering. I think, had Dante been a Mommy, his Nine Circles of Hell may have looked a bit different…but no less dreadful.

[. . .]

“Dante had to figuratively travel through hell and back before enjoying the peace that came at the end of his journey. I guess that’s the point of Mommy’s Inferno….that the inescapable moments of suffering we endure as mommies makes us stronger, better equipped to handle the challenges that come next, and more ready to enjoy the light of the good days that always follow the darkest nights of motherhood.

“So don’t ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’ motherhood; for, though the hours and days of motherhood be long, the years are short…or so I hear.”   –Sarah Harris, “Mommy’s Inferno,” Scary Mommy (published May 21, 2010; updated December 2, 2020)

Read the nine circles of Scary Mommy’s Inferno here.

Kimiya Memarzadeh, “Academia’s Inferno” (April 4, 2016)

By

person-behind-books“In high school I read a book called Inferno by Dante Alighieri. [. . .] I want to take you through the nine circles of suffering every graduate student experiences on their journey to defending their thesis. I’m sure there are far more than nine forms of struggle that graduate students go through, but for the purpose of the analogy, we will stick with nine.

[. . .]

“Defeat is another circle that graduate students become quite familiar with. It happens so often that around the two-year mark of grad school, most of us seem to get desensitized to it. We learn to separate our self-worth from the worth of our work, and to focus on doing the best we can without letting defeat get in the way of our confidence. We build a thicker skin, and if nothing else, this circle of suffering will prepare us for a lifetime of rejected grants and harsh criticism from pesky ‘Reviewer Three.’

“This brings us to the last and probably most dangerous circle – doubt. Part of being a scientist is being a skeptic. However, if you constantly doubt yourself, your progress, or your ideas, you will inevitably make your graduate school experience a painful one. Go confidently in the direction you pursue, and if you fail – well then you’re just back at circle one.” –Kimiya Memarzadeh, “Academia’s Inferno,” McGovern Medical School (April 4, 2016)

Recent Dante Citings

Categories

Submit a Sighting

All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

Creative